Down Below by Leonora Carrington

New York Review of Books, 2017

(originally published by Dutton in 1988 as The House of Fear)

 

In 1940, Leonara Carrington was living with her lover, Max Ernst, in Provence.  When the Nazis invaded France, Ernst was sent to a concentration camp and Carrington "suffered a psychotic break."

This memoir is a riveting and hallucinatory account of that breakdown, and her often barbaric treatment in a private asylum in Spain.  Carrington, who was also a talented and original painter, writes with passionate energy, and the reader begins to feel trapped inside the book's nightmarish world.  A unique book.