The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington
By Leonora Carrington. Introduction by Kathryn Davis. Dorothy, a publishing project, 2017. 215pp. $16.
However much they deserve to be carefully savored, these stories are impossible not to immediately devour. Leonora Carrington is a master of the surreal, the evocative, and the macabre. With her Complete Stories, collected in one volume for the first time, the Dorothy Project has given us all a gift.
Born in 1917 in England, Carrington is perhaps better known for her paintings, but her distinctive tone disregards medium to flavor prose that is, simply, scorching. These stories glimmer and shift across genre and time, from the fantastic to the mundane, the glittery to the gross.
Dancing with the idea of a fairy tale, flirting with surrealist archetypes, Carrington’s stories are told in a dry tone that belies the absurdity of their content. Horses prance through the work, morphing into humans and back again. Feasts are devoured, wasted, and spit out. Animals do not necessarily mean well, and mustaches are ascribed a significance edging on the disturbing. Father figures are railed against, the dead are not what they seem, and throughout a current of passion lays waste to everything standing in its way.
Most of the stories are extremely short, but packed full of emotion and vivid imagery; it seems at times that Carrington could hardly bear to work too long on one theme before rushing to the next thing. In “The Debutante,” a frustrated girl finds a way to subvert authority with the help of a hyena who is hungry and more self-interested than helpful animals in fairy tales ever are. In “As They Rode Along the Edge,” a creature-girl named Virginia Fur falls in love with a boar who is ultimately destroyed by the pious. In “Et In Bellicus Lunarum Medicalis,” a team of gift rats, trained in medicine, is shuffled from department to department in a biting satire of the bureaucracy of government. Bizarre, electric, muddy with emotion, Carrington’s prose must be encountered to be understood.
The Dorothy Project never disappoints. Each story is a small parcel of perfection.
