Leonora Carrington (1917-2011), the distinguished British-born Surrealist painter who made her home in Mexico City, was also a writer of extraordinary imagination and charm, and The Hearing Trumpet is perhaps her best loved book. It tells the story of 92-year-old Marian Leatherby, who is given the gift of a hearing trumpet only to discover that her family has been plotting to have her committed to an institution. But this is an institution where the buildings are shaped like birthday cakes and igloos, where the Winking Abbess and the Queen Bee reign, and where the gateway to the underworld is wide open. It is also the scene of a mysterious murder. Occult twin to Alice in Wonderland, The Hearing Trumpet is a classic of fantastic literature that has been translated and celebrated throughout the world.

This book had me both enthralled and confused. I love an excentric old woman character so this was right up my alley. Marion loves her cats, refuses to wear dentures and regularly visits her friend Carmella, who is always plotting crazy adventures for them both. Carmella's creative meanderings, to me, speak of the elderly's struggle for freedom and autonomy, although one could say it is just a senile woman's funny diatribe. I enjoyed that the narrator, Marion, is a somewhat unreliable one, or at least it left me wondering (although eventually you do stop wondering and just enjoy the ride). Carrington takes it to a surrealist (duh) level when the old lady gets into what seems at first like a simple (however weirdly religious/cult vibes) hospice, but quickly turns into some kind of circus. I thoroughly enjoyed the uprising of the elderly women against the institution, but the end section was cuckoo bananas and I had a truly hard time adhering to it. It is nevertheless a beautiful tale about aging, independance, and how the elderly still have an imagination of their own.

Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common. Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties - successful, competent and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father's death, he's medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women - his enduring first love Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke. Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined. For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude - a period of desire, despair and possibility - a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.

My memory of this book is starting to fizzle out but I'll give it a try. I initially had a hard time getting into this book because of how unlikeable the characters were to me, and because of the writing, mainly because it sounded to me like something Taylor Swift might write (sorryyyy I hate her writing and that's genuinely how I'd describe it). But surprisingly it grew on me, and I found myself enjoying the stream of consciousness, navigating each character's every conflicting thought, flashback, self-esteem crisis. The characters themselves did not grow on me and I didn't really get too invested in their individual stories. What I liked was seeing how every character relates to the others. I could not for the life of me empathise with the main characters, but the relationships were complex enough to keep me entertained. Two out of three of the female characters were a little flat and lacking character in my opinion, but I was drawn to Sylvia's story nevertheless, for the complexity portrayed in her relationship to her own disability, and whether or not she can be with someone. I wish she had more going for her than this lame ass man but anyway. I liked this book but I don't have a strong reason why I did!