Down below

A stunning work of memoir and a n unforgettable depiction of the brilliance and madness by one of Surrealisms most compelling figures In 1937 Leonora Carrington--later to become one of the twentieth centurys 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 doctors 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 Schrebers Memoirs of My Nervous Illness , Down Below brings the hallucinatory logic of madness home.