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    Down Below
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    Down Below
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    Down Below
    Ebook96 pages1 hour

    Down Below

    By Leonora Carrington and Marina Warner

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    A stunning work of memoir and an unforgettable depiction of the brilliance and madness by one of Surrealism's most compelling figures

    In 1937 Leonora Carrington—later to become one of the twentieth century’s great painters of the weird, the alarming, and the wild—was a nineteen-year-old art student in London, beautiful and unapologetically rebellious. At a dinner party, she met the artist Max Ernst. The two fell in love and soon departed to live and paint together in a farmhouse in Provence. 

    In 1940, the invading German army arrested Ernst and sent him to a concentration camp. Carrington suffered a psychotic break. She wept for hours. Her stomach became “the mirror of the earth”—of all worlds in a hostile universe—and she tried to purify the evil by compulsively vomiting. As the Germans neared the south of France, a friend persuaded Carrington to flee to Spain. Facing the approach “of robots, of thoughtless, fleshless beings,” she packed a suitcase that bore on a brass plate the word Revelation.

    This was only the beginning of a journey into madness that was to end with Carrington confined in a mental institution, overwhelmed not only by her own terrible imaginings but by her doctor’s sadistic course of treatment. In Down Below she describes her ordeal—in which the agonizing and the marvelous were equally combined—with a startling, almost impersonal precision and without a trace of self-pity. Like Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, Down Below brings the hallucinatory logic of madness home.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNYRB Classics
    Release dateApr 18, 2017
    ISBN9781681370613
    Unavailable
    Down Below

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    Reviews for Down Below

    4/5

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    • 4/5
      Down Below🍒🍒🍒🍒
      By Leonora Carrington
      1944

      Incredibly strange. ...unexpectedly absorbing...

      Leonora Carrington was a British born Surrealist painter, and a writer while living in Mexico. This takes place just as WW II is starting, and her lifetime partner, Max Ernst, is sent to a concentration camp. Or so she is told. It spurs her into fits of madness, and she begins performing rituals and talking to inanimate objects, making odd connections between them and herself.....

      She is eventually labelled " incurably insane" and institutionalized in Spain. Leonora believes she has been captured and is being held in a concentration camp and is abused, mistreated and over medicated.

      p.44 "I believe that I was being put through purifying tortures so that I might attain Absolute Knowledge, at which point I could live down below.....Later, with full lucidity, I would go down under, as the third person of the Trinity."

      This is her account of her experiences, as told to a third party. I enjoyed this detailed, raw and lucid account of her long assent into madness....provocative and unforgettable.
      This short novel is a must read!!
    • 4/5
      After seeing Carrington's artwork and reading some biographical information about her, I became fascinated with her life. This slim volume is her firsthand account of her time spent in a Spanish insane asylum during WWII. She was deemed incurable, but she did actually recover from what sounds like a mental breakdown with psychosis. This book is long out of print, but worth finding in a library, if you are interested to learn some personal history about a prominent 20th century surrealist woman painter.