{"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\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\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. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\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":"MediaPlace","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57367488659838,"sku":"NW9781681370606","price":9.4,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0817\/1379\/1261\/files\/9781681370606.jpg?v=1778646568","url":"https:\/\/mediaplace.com\/products\/down-below","provider":"MediaPlace","version":"1.0","type":"link"}