The first thing that I read by Elena Poniatowska was The Heart of the Artichoke, a collection of her short stories, and I loved them. I immediately set out to find more of her writing, and quickly discovered that my entry point was not particularly representative of her work: most of it is in a much more journalistic vein. As her wiki page will tell you, one of her most important works is La noche de Tlatelolco, Massacre in Mexico, about the murder of student protestors by police in 1968. She is known for writing narratives that are based on people’s accounts — similar, I think, to Svetlana Alexievich.
Leonora is sort of an interesting in-between (it’s like I’m baby-stepping my way into Poniatowska’s more serious work, which I am absolutely going to read). It’s a novel, definitely (she says: “I call it a novel, for it has no pretensions whatsover to being a biography, but is instead a free approximation to the life of an exceptional artist.” (456-57). Yet as the Afterword makes clear, it is also very well researched, and drawn from hours, years really, of conversation and acquaintance with Carrington herself.
I should say up front that I am not all that well acquainted with Carrington’s work. I bought the novel because I was planning a trip to Venice to the Biennale, and the theme this year was The Milk of Dreams, which is the title of an illustrated story book of Carrington’s (it’s delightful, I recommend it. My 5yr old also enjoyed it). I did learn a bit about Carrington at the show; seeing her work, and works by others in her milieu. But I haven’t read The Hearing Trumpet (I’m sorry!). Or Down Below, her account of her time in a mental institution, an episode which looms large in accounts of her life. So really, most of what I know about Carrington comes from reading Leonora.
Actually, I would not call this book a novel, exactly, or at least, not in its typical sense (I know, I know, a novel can be anything), but rather, to borrow Poniatowska’s own words, it is a “free approximation.” It hovers near Leonora, centering her experiences, but is resistant to creating a plot around her life, especially once she arrives in Mexico City. Although the first half or so seems like a biography, moving at a regular pace as the years of her life pass, then zooming in close on a period of particular import (her affair with Ernst and time in the institution), later, time moves irregularly, and events are described more freely (the birth of her second child is announced in a single sentence). The second half is far more loose, impressionistic. Events flicker briefly, and pass. You get, instead, a series of conversations, moments, encounters. It’s a mood, a temperament. Even in the earlier segments, though, you notice how the book is far more interested in capturing how Carrington feels, how she perceives her experiences, than chronicling the experiences themselves, formative or no. Throughout her childhood, she insists repeatedly that she is a horse, and you sense this insistence in her early adult life as well. And the narrator takes it seriously. What is it like to be a horse, and an artist, in the middle of the twentieth century?
It’s a long book (~450 pages) but it reads quickly (aided by the skillful translation of Amanda Hopkinson). And there is something really fascinating about its hybrid form. It’s hard to imagine reading such a book if it wasn’t about an actual living person, yet if someone picked it up wanting a biography, they’d probably be disappointed. It’s more like an evocation. Like, I want to learn something about a person, but also read a novel, and not dutifully plod through Most Important Moments. The end result, of course, feels much more like the representation of a life as it is truly lived.
Kasia Reads 