An old woman in Mexico City is gifted a hearing trumpet, and for the first time can hear her children and relatives talk about her with loathing and disgust as they plan to get rid of her by sending her to an assisted living facility, which is quite cheap because it is run by a bizarre new age cult. (Blissfully, we do not have to endure any kind of reunion or redemption of her shitty kids, and they are never mentioned again.)
The surreal institution where Marian has been sent to die is filled with strange buildings (a giant mushroom, a lighthouse, a giant corpse) and the portrait of a winking, cross-dressing Abbess, whose quest for the Holy Grail is revealed through letters Marian reads. Marian and her friends adopt the quest with freaky little cast of characters, amidst a new ice age brought about by the patriarchal blasphemies committed by everyone who has found/stolen the grail in the past.
I think I liked this one in theory more than in reality--Carrington is best known as a visual artist, and the story has some absolutely incredible illustrations, but the pacing is also a little jarring: All of the world-saving action that expands the mythos behind the world of the Hearing Trumpet, world-building which feels like the heart of the book and what it wants to say, is packed into about 25 pages near the end. Also, for a book that's trying to give old women a turn as heroines, all of the old ladies have pretty much the same voice and similar personalities.
There was plenty of cool stuff to think about in this one, though, and the NYRB edition has an excellent essay by Olga Tokarczuk at the end which gives a little more context to where feminism was in novels at the time, and gave me some more appreciation for the book.
