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35 of 35 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Out-Swifts Jonathan Swift, May 14, 2000
This review is from: The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (Paperback)
This is one of Angela Carter's wildest and best novels, a verbal feast served up by the late writer's seemingly inexhaustible imagination. Erotic, picaresque, complex, surreal, and humorous only begin to describe the pleasures contained herein. The story revolves around Desiderio, who as a young man sets out to assassinate Dr. Hoffman, a genius waging war against an unnamed city by means of hallucinations or dreams produced with the "eroto-energy" of 50 copulating couples in his Wagnerian mountain castle. In his very Swiftian travels, Desiderio encounters a deserted seaside town, is arrested for a murder he didn't commit, and escapes with a bullet wound; is taken in by the river people with their strange, seductive ways who eventually try to sacrifice him; escapes again to sojourn with a traveling circus where he is raped by nine Moroccan acrobats who later fall off a cliff with the rest of the circus and a town of puritans (imagine that conflict); meets a megalomaniacal Count whose travels take him and Desiderio to Africa where the Count is boiled in a pot by a cannibal chieftain; spends time in a curious, religiously rigid culture of centaurs (Carter's most obvious homage to Swift). The novel is a satire of sexual mores, restrictions, fetishes, and hang-ups that only a writer as gutsy and opulently talented as Angela Carter could have attempted. As a work of art, it's all over the place, and you might not enjoy it unless you let it take you along for the ride. It makes a very suitable companion to her later, more disciplined novel, The Passion of New Eve.
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Recommended, with discretion., March 20, 1998
By A Customer
This review is from: The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (Paperback)
Having been introduced to Angela Carter through her short stories, I was curious to see what she would accomplish throughout a novel. The result was dizzying, disturbing, and compelling all the same. 'Infernal Desire Machines..' reads like a perverse Gulliver's Travels, moving from one hallucinatory terrain to the next. Potentially very disturbing to sensitive readers, I recommend this book cautiously. The book is aptly titled, and Carter delivers all the dark sexuality that it implies. Hint: Don't let your senator read this. Otherwise it is an engrossing novel, proving that Fairy Tales aren't all that Ms. Carter was about...
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fantastic trip through possible realms of psyche, February 24, 2003
This review is from: The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (Paperback)
This novel was my introduction to Angela Carter, and what an introduction it was! The novel was originally published (I believe) in the early 80's, and smacks of magical realism as well as profound dollops of surrealism and eroto-psychedelia. Carter's prose is dense and precise, intensive rather than expansive, but the images keep coming, and if anything, one can feel swamped in the flood of dreams, but in a satisfying way. Really, to say Carter evokes Burroughs or any other author may convey a reader's subjective impression, but Carter is on her own trip, a protracted journey through history and psyche, and an examination of the sensual magic of words and imagination made manifest in miraculous ambiguity and ambivalent sexuality. Her highly original prose style often feels like a good translation from another language - most of the action takes place in Latin America, and at times I was hard pressed to remember that I was not reading a Latin American author. This book is recommended, though not an easy read due to the density of Carter's prose and the depth of her philosophical examination of the roots of dream and imagination. But she takes you on a journey that within a few pages becomes irresistible, and takes you to places that surprise, delight, and disturb, and that you will not soon forget.
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