{"product_id":"down-below","title":"Down Below","description":"\u003cb\u003eA stunning work of memoir and a\u003cb\u003en unforgettable depiction of the brilliance and madness by\u003c\/b\u003e one of Surrealism's most compelling figures\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eIn 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. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e 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 \u003ci\u003emirror\u003c\/i\u003e 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 \u003ci\u003eRevelation\u003c\/i\u003e. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e 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 \u003ci\u003eDown Below\u003c\/i\u003e 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 \u003ci\u003eMemoirs of My Nervous Illness\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eDown Below\u003c\/i\u003e brings the hallucinatory logic of madness home.","brand":"New York Review of Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51947875729639,"sku":"9781681370606","price":16.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0449\/4075\/5096\/files\/imageloader_0c5f37a0-76d7-4ed2-befd-4f5fbae36b06.jpg?v=1775502721","url":"https:\/\/arvidabookco.com\/products\/down-below","provider":"Arvida Book Co.","version":"1.0","type":"link"}