Description
Carrington, Leonora. THE STONE DOOR. 1st UK edition/1st English edition.London: RKP, 1978. 1st UK edition/1st English edition. Originally published in French translation as LA PORTE DE PIERRE.
A fine copy in black boards with gilt-stamped spine. Lightest traces of edgewear to non-priceclipped dustjacket. Bookplate of noted Australian collector Leigh Blackmore to f.f.e.
After the enthusiastic reception accorded The Hearing Trumpet (“This is the best book I’ve ever read.” – Los Angeles Free Times), Leonora Carrington released for publication an even more intense tale of fantasy and love. Written at the end of World War II and unpublished in its original English edition until 1978, The Stone Door is an inspired, phantasmagoric journey into a wildly surreal world. The novel is an omen, an incantation, and an adventure story rolled into one. Built in layers like a Chinese puzzle, it is the tale of two people, of love and the Zodiac and the Cabbalah, of Transylvania and Mesopotamia converging at the Caucasus, of a mad Hungarian King named Böles Kilary and of a woman’s discovery of an initiatory code that leads to a Cyclopean obstacle, to love, self and awareness, to the great stone door of Kescke and beyond… As impossible to describe as it is to put down, The Stone Door establishes once and for all that the author has no peer in the realms of fantasy or black humor.
