The Seventh Horse - a collection of sixteen short stories where Leonoara Carrington lets it rip.
As part of her incisive essay on a key autobiographical tale, My Mother Is a Cow,, critic Anna Hundert wrote: “In this dream world, where the nonbinary divine is also a “cow-faced fan,” divinity cannot be about enforcing any kind of perceived normality. Instead, divinity is about opening up to the world’s delightful queerness, and naming it all as sacred.”
How true! If you're looking for normality, for stories where the world keeps to its predictable, socially constipated, sickening order, don't even think of coming near this book.
Leonora fell in love with Surrealist painting at age ten and fell in love with Surrealist artist Max Ernst at age twenty. She ran away with older, married Max and the couple lived and created art in southern France for two years before the Nazis crushed their idyll. They took Max away to a concentration camp and some time thereafter Leonora was taken away and held captive in a Spanish mental hospital where she was subjected to powerful drugs, electroshock, cruelty and torture.
The Seventh Horse is very autobiographical. I enjoyed each story for its play of images and happenings; in my mind's eye, I could imagine a sequence of vivid surreal paintings very much like the many surreal paintings Leonora created in her long life (she lived to age 92). On another level, I appreciated Leonora's symbolism and scathing attack on a society and culture she found positively suffocating and spiritually deadening. Many critics cite her mythmaking, her openness to magic, her participation as a founding member of the women's liberation movement in Mexico during the 1970s.
Frequently when writing a review of short stories, as a way of sharing the author's vision, I'll do a compressed retelling of one, two or three of the stories. Such a retelling of a Leonora Carrington story is impossible. Thus, no better way than simply including direct quotes from several of the tales - as you read, imagine a surreal painting.
AS THEY RODE ALONG THE EDGE
She was afraid of Iganme's beauty. then she spat into the stewpot and put her lips into the boiling liquid and swallowed a big mouthful. With a savage cry she brought her head back out of the pot; she jumped around Igname, tearing her hair out by the roots; Igname stood up, and together they danced a dance of ecstasy. The cats caterwauled and stuck their claws into one another's necks, and then threw themselves in a mass onto Igname and Virginia, who disappeared under a mountain of cats. Where they made love.
PIGEON, FLY!
I couldn't believe my eyes. Yet as I looked from the model to the portrait there was no denying the truth. The more I looked at the corpse, the more striking became the resemblance of these pale features. On canvas, the face was unquestionably mine.
THE THREE HUNTERS
I was having a rest in a deep forest. The trees and wild fruit were ripe. It was autumn. I was beginning to fall asleep when a heavy object fell on my stomach. It was a dead rabbit, blood running from its mouth. It was dead of fatigue. I'd hardly freed myself of the rabbit when, with a leap more agile than a stag's, a man landed beside me. He was of medium height, had a red face, and a long, white moustache. From his face, I'd have guessed him to be about ninety.
THE SISTERS
Drusille lit the candle, illuminating a dirty little attic without windows. Perched on a rod near the ceiling, an extraordinary creature looked at the light with blinded eyes. Her body was white and naked; feathers grew from her shoulders and round her breasts. Her white arms were neither wings nor arms. A mass of white hair fell around her face, whose flesh was like marble.
CAST DOWN BY SADNESS
Dominique gave a cry and fell to the ground. Arabelle began to undress. Quickly there was a heap of dirty clothes beside her, but she kept on taking off more with a sort of rage. At last she was completely undressed, and her body was nothing but a skeleton. The girl, arms crossed on her chest, waited.
THE SEVENTH HORSE
A strange-looking creature was hopping about in the midst of a bramble bush. She was caught by her long hair, which was so closely entwined in the brambles that she could move neither backwards nor forwards, She was cursing and hopping till the blood flowed down her body.
THE NEUTRAL MAN
I found it difficult to suppress a little smile, since for a long time I had been living with a Transylvanian vampire, and my mother-in-law had taught me all the necessary culinary secrets to satisfy the most voracious of such creatures.
ET IN BELLICUS LUNARUM MEDICALIS
At this point the Soviet Rats themselves appeared on the scene, trying out a new dance step., the Paso Doble Pancreas, a new therapy based on manipulating the digestive system by eating bricks instead of meat (thus also saving money).
THE HAPPY CORPSE STORY
Thorns grabbed at the pair as they hurried through the wood. Great Scott, a nasty black-and-white terrier, ran constantly at the corpse's heels, snapping. The mangy creature lurked the haunts where the Happy Corpses abide, since one can hardly stay live in this case. The dog smelled as bad as the corpse; it was practically impossible to tell one from the other. They just looked different.
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