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Leonora Carrington: Stone Door (2024, New York Review of Books, Incorporated, The) No rating

Ancient Mesopotamia, the Zodiac, and the land of the dead feature in this wildly surrealistic …

Review of The Stone Door

No rating

In this surrealist novel, full of images from alchemy and astrology and occult lore, two people try to find each other, but sometimes they can’t even find themselves. The stone door of the title is both a barrier and an opening. Very different in tone from Carrington’s novel The Hearing Trumpet, and not a light read. Stories within dreams within manuscripts within stories, with characters slipping across boundaries and transforming into others. Carrington challenges conventional notions of narrative, language, gender, and the self. This is a book I could read many times and get something new from it each time. It has a werewolf, which is always a plus.