Down Below -

Leonora Carrington, Marina Warner (Introduction)

NYRB Classics

2017

113 páginas

3h 46m

ISBN-10: B01I85OMQ6

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.

Resenhas (10)

5 (Perfeito)

Incrível

Esse relato autobiográfico surreal (do movimento surrealismo mesmo) não poderia vir de outra pessoa. Leonora Carrington é a "bruxa" que todos amamos. A partir de uma experiência traumática (o período em que escreve internada em um hospital psiquiátrico) temos uma escrita sem interferência cética de como ela simbolizou tudo o que viveu Lá Embaixo.

O que se espera de um texto autobiográfico ganha tons de fantasia que dificilmente se encontra por aí.

O texto final (posfácio) do Marcus Rogério Salgado tbm soma maravilhosamente com a experiência.

Livro curto que dá pra reler várias vezes.