12/365: The Skeleton’s Holiday by Leonora Carrington

The Skeleton's Holiday by Leonora Carrington Translated from: Spanish Rating: ★★½ Series: Penguin Modern #10 Publication Date: February 22, 2018 Genre: short stories Pages: 48 ReRead?: No Project: Project 365 'Ring for your maid, and when she comes in we'll pounce upon her and tear off her face. I'll wear her face tonight instead of mine.' These dreamlike, carnivalesque fables by one of the leading lights of the Surrealist movement are masterpieces of invention and Grand Guignol humour. Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

After buying my box set of 80 Little Black Classics from Penguin, a second set of small books published by Penguin made its way onto my radar. The Penguin Modern Classics Box Set is 50 books with entries from George Orwell, John Steinbeck, Italo Calvino, and many others. I decided to add it to my collection as well.

This is the first one that I have read from the set – I am very pressed for time today and wanted to make sure that I completed my reading early. I selected this small book of 7 short stories because I had heard of the author’s novel, The Hearing Trumpet, which is published by NYRB classics and which I was interested in reading. Before I read this. I’m now not at all sure that I want to read anything by her ever again.

She is described as a surrealist, which is a movement I know almost nothing about, beyond Dada and Magritte, with his weird paintings. I goggled surrealism, and Wikipedia tells me that:

Surrealism is an art and cultural movement that developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I in which artists aimed to allow the unconscious mind to express itself, often resulting in the depiction of illogical or dreamlike scenes and ideas. Its intention was, according to leader André Breton, to “resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality”, or surreality. It produced works of painting, writing, photography, theatre, filmmaking, music, comedy and other media as well.

I still don’t really get what that means, and I didn’t like the stories enough to pursue it further.

Because they are super weird. Carnivorous rabbits and possible vampires, hyenas who dress up to attend a ball in the place of the young girl in whose honor the ball is being held, a woman who is ten feet tall, a different woman who lives on a traffic island and who knits her face from cosmic wool, and a skeleton who sets off to see a fortune teller all make an appearance.

They were like a fever dream, without the fever or the dream. Surrealism apparently just isn’t my jam.