Olga Tokarczuk on the Coherent Cosmos of Leonora Carrington

February 1, 2021 | 2 books mentioned

At the Paris Review, Olga Tokarczuk reflects on the “wild metaphysics” of Leonora Carrington’s 1974 surrealist novel, The Hearing Trumpet. “The non-genre novel aims to establish its own rules for the created universe, sketching its own epistemological maps,” Tokarczuk writes. “And this is the case whether the book is a love story, a murder mystery, or the tale of an expedition to another galaxy. The Hearing Trumpet eludes all categorization. From its first sentence on, it presents an internally coherent cosmos governed by self-generated laws. In doing so it passes disturbing comment on things we never stop to question.”

is a writer and illustrator. She is the author of two illustrated books, Last Night's Reading (Penguin Books, 2015) and Sanpaku (Archaia 2018).