The Hearing Trumpet

WHAT A NOVEL to go into completely blind. Picked it up because the title intrigued me (turns out a hearing trumpet is an old-timey hearing aid) and the book turned out to be a TOTAL mind-bender. My reading experience went roughly: LOL... WTF?!... hmm... WHOA... WHAT did I just read????

Marian is 92 and deaf, and her family decides she'd be better off in an institution. She gets obsessed with a painting of a winking abbess, and we go on a major tangent containing the nun's whole story. Then, no big deal, Marian goes to HELL. And from there it only gets stranger...MUCH stranger.

Not gonna lie, I was lost for much of this book, but Marian's voice carried me through. She's quirky and funny and completely unbothered, and her observations about the people around her had me laughing out loud well before I got confused about what was happening and why.

Underneath all the chaos there's something serious. This is a book about what happens when everyone decides an old woman is useless, inconvenient and not worth listening to. Even the title is doing more work than I realized at first: the hearing trumpet lets Marian hear exactly what people say about her when they think she can't.

Carrington was a Surrealist painter, and it shows. Look up her paintings. They're gorgeous, and they feel like they come from the same world as this book. It reads like she set no limits on herself, as if she followed whatever came into her head. I love that, and it's also the warning. You have to go in with a genuinely open mind.

My one real complaint: I got bored during the nun's story in the middle. It felt random, like a separate story Carrington couldn't fit anywhere else, so she jammed it in. Afterward I learned it holds the mythology that drives the rest of the book and sets up the ending. I get what it's doing now, but while I was listening, I didn't understand it and it felt like she'd wandered into a different novel.

The blurb calls The Hearing Trumpet the "occult twin to Alice in Wonderland," which is the best one-line warning you'll get. In my opinion, it's not weird in the exact same way Alice is, though. There's more symbolism here and more holding it together. (Not that that's a high bar, LOL.)

It says a lot that even though plenty of The Hearing Trumpet went over my head, I'll definitely read more Carrington because I'm looking forward to exploring more of what a mind this fascinating produced. In the meantime, I don't see this reading experience leaving my head any time soon, because there's SO MUCH to unpack.

3.5/5 stars. I appreciated it more than I enjoyed it. There were parts I loved, but it was uneven for me.