Name: rory's review of Down Below by Leonora Carrington
Item: Down Below
Rating: 3.5
Author: rory

Leonora Carrington

Leonora Carrington is perhaps the most enchanting of the women Surrealists. Theadaughter of Anglo Irish privilege, she broke free of her manor-house upbringingaand fled, first to art school, and then to the Continent. Though she is best knownaas a painter of the gothic fantastic, with a cult following and one-woman shows atamuseums around the world, her writing is no less striking. Down Belowadescribesathe events of 1940, when, after her longtime lover, artist Max Ernst was sent toaa concentration camp, Carrington was oled across the border of Knowledgeo andaimprisoned in a sanatorium for the insane. This powerful testament, reminiscent ofaCarrington's great novel The Hearing Trumpet, ranks with the work of Sylvia Plathaand Janet Frame in its raw evocation of madness.

Down Below

Nica

A stunning work of memoir and an unforgettable depiction of the brilliance and madness by one of Surrealism's most compelling figures In 1937 Leonora Carrington—later to become one of the twentieth century’s great painters of the weird, the alarming, and the wild—was a nineteen-year-old art student in London, beautiful and unapologetically rebellious. At a dinner party, she met the artist Max Ernst. The two fell in love and soon departed to live and paint together in a farmhouse in Provence. In 1940, the invading German army arrested Ernst and sent him to a concentration camp. Carrington suffered a psychotic break. She wept for hours. Her stomach became “the mirror of the earth”—of all worlds in a hostile universe—and she tried to purify the evil by compulsively vomiting. As the Germans neared the south of France, a friend persuaded Carrington to flee to Spain. Facing the approach “of robots, of thoughtless, fleshless beings,” she packed a suitcase that bore on a brass plate the word Revelation. This was only the beginning of a journey into madness that was to end with Carrington confined in a mental institution, overwhelmed not only by her own terrible imaginings but by her doctor’s sadistic course of treatment. In Down Below she describes her ordeal—in which the agonizing and the marvelous were equally combined—with a startling, almost impersonal precision and without a trace of self-pity. Like Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, Down Below brings the hallucinatory logic of madness home.

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Down Below by Leonora Carrington

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