Leonora Carrington, _The Stone Door_

 I HAVE READ Carrington’s short fiction (thanks to The Dorothy Project) but not her other and more widely read novel, The Hearing Trumpet. I am certainly eager to read The Hearing Trumpet, though, after reading this.

Anna Watz’s helpful afterword tells us that Carrington wrote The Stone Door “ostensibly to celebrate her recent marriage to her second husband, Emérico “Chiki” Weisz, in Mexico City in 1946.” It has a loosely articulated plot about the opening of the titular door to allow freer circulation between and among the sexes, but the plot is really the least interesting thing about the novel—it’s not what pulled me in, at least. What I most relished was the atmosphere of the fictional world and the texture of the prose, an adventure and a delight from sentence to sentence. 

So yes, there were characters, and yes, they were in pursuit of something and encountering obstacles, but what kept me reading was something else. Imagine a collection of tales by the Brothers Grimm interleaved with a Victorian translation of The 1001 Nights, and further imagine that this volume has ingested a non-trivial amount of LSD. That’s what this book is like.

For instance:

“On a sunless Wednesday morning Zacharias began to work in O Ucca. Furnished with a small black book and a pencil he set about sorting the varied, dust-ridden possessions of Ming Lo.While groveling in an ornate tin trunk, he came upon a triangular box covered in black feathers fixed one upon the other as cunningly as if they grew on a bird. With some difficulty he opened the box and saw that it contained a stone key of Mexican workmanship.”

It’s the key to the titular door, as you may have guessed, but what I loved was the feathered triangular box. And in what world but this so cunningly imagined one does a Ming Lo, living in a city named O Ucca, hire a Zacharias, who comes across a Mexican-made key? And I love “sunless,” which takes us right back to Coleridge’s “Kublai Khan.”

Huzzahs to New York Review Books for bringing this back into print.