WHILE LEONORA CARRINGTON is best known for her gothic Surrealist paintings, her writing is no less enchanting and luminous. Each story is a small parcel of perfection.The Strange, Irreverent Worlds of “Down Below” and “The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington” Bizarre, electric, muddy with emotion, Carrington’s prose must be encountered to be understood. In “Et In Bellicus Lunarum Medicalis,” a team of gift rats, trained in medicine, is shuffled from department to department in a biting satire of the bureaucracy of government. In “As They Rode Along the Edge,” a creature-girl named Virginia Fur falls in love with a boar who is ultimately destroyed by the pious. In “The Debutante,” a frustrated girl finds a way to subvert authority with the help of a hyena who is hungry and more self-interested than helpful animals in fairy tales ever are. Most of the stories are extremely short, but packed full of emotion and vivid imagery it seems at times that Carrington could hardly bear to work too long on one theme before rushing to the next thing. Father figures are railed against, the dead are not what they seem, and throughout a current of passion lays waste to everything standing in its way. Animals do not necessarily mean well, and mustaches are ascribed a significance edging on the disturbing. Feasts are devoured, wasted, and spit out. Horses prance through the work, morphing into humans and back again. These stories glimmer and shift across genre and time, from the fantastic to the mundane, the glittery to the gross.ĭancing with the idea of a fairy tale, flirting with surrealist archetypes, Carrington’s stories are told in a dry tone that belies the absurdity of their content. With her Complete Stories, collected in one volume for the first time, the Dorothy Project has given us all a gift.īorn in 1917 in England, Carrington is perhaps better known for her paintings, but her distinctive tone disregards medium to flavor prose that is, simply, scorching. Leonora Carrington is a master of the surreal, the evocative, and the macabre. However much they deserve to be carefully savored, these stories are impossible not to immediately devour.
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