{"product_id":"9781681370613","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":"New York Review Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47173210603760,"sku":"9781681370613","price":8.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781681370613_p0.jpg?v=1763692165","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781681370613","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}