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Synopsis:

Surrealist writer and painter Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) was a master of the macabre, of gorgeous tableaus, biting satire, roguish comedy, and brilliant, effortless flights of the imagination. Nowhere are these qualities more ingeniously brought together than in the works of short fiction she wrote throughout her life.

Published to coincide with the centennial of her birth, The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington collects for the first time all of her stories, including several never before seen in print. With a startling range of styles, subjects, and even languages (several of the stories are translated from French or Spanish), The Complete Stories captures the genius and irrepressible spirit of an amazing artist’s life.

Review:

Leonora Carrington lived an interesting life, not in a sense that she lived 94 years, was a founder of the women’s liberation movement in Mexico and the lover of painter Max Ernst. Her life was interesting because of the way that she saw things, the way that she painted and the way that she wrote fiction. Her sensibility and style had to seep into every part of her life, and she was probably one of the most interesting people in the neighborhood. 

In a surrealistic style that was dominated by male writers, Carrington wrote some of the greatest weird short stories and was mostly ignored. Dorothy, a Publishing Project, has compiled all of her short stories, including three that are previously unpublished, and the collection is a little over 200 pages. The early stories seem to be more sketches and ideas than the later stories. Carrington writes about all sorts of things in nature. She makes them do things, particularly stories involving talking horses and cats, and stories like “Uncle Sam Carrington”, she writes of vegetables fighting one another in the garden. The early stories are filled with whimsy and charm whereas the later stories, like “The Seventh Horse” and “My Mother is a Cow” start to really fall into the deep end of the weird. I finished a few of these final stories wondering what it was that I just read. Carrington writes these stories in a way that make them easy to read, but if you are not paying attention, you can get lost quickly. There were a few times I had to reread paragraphs because my mind wandered away, and she places so much within each sentence that you can make it half way down a page and realize you have wandered completely off of the path. 

Leonora Carrington died in May 2011. When Jeff Vandermeer wrote about her on his website, he said this: 

“Carrington is an under-appreciated writer. In genre circles, it’s in part because she wrote most of her fiction decades ago but also in part because she’s not identifiably a genre writer.” 

I agree with this statement because even though these stories have talking animals and weird plots, I do not see this particularly fitting into any sort of genre. These are good stories that came from the mind of someone who saw the world in a much more fascinating way than I do.