Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #293721 in Books
• Published on: 1982-04-29
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Customer Reviews

Dark journey
This is a great read, but not for the faint-hearted. In the bizarre journey of Carter's narrator through an unnamed South American country, there are scenes that may cause revulsion as well as huge stocks of humour and poetry.

The premise is a battle against the forces of reason, fought by an inventor mastermind, Dr Hoffman, using metaphysical machines that turn the mundane objects into semi-illusory projections of fantasy and desire.

It is also a love story, but one in which Carter is able to explore her fascination with blurring the boundaries between things, people, and both as monstrous and fantastical amalgams of the two materialise throughout the work.

What makes this an important work, I think, is the way Carter achieves a freedom from any one "position". One side does win the final battle, it is true. But the author's greatness surpasses any attempt to pigeonhole her as, in this context, either simply in favour of rationalism or, indeed, the living Freudian nightmare in which her hero subsists so painfully. It is a fable in which Carter's dark humour makes mischief, playing practical jokes on the reader and characters alike.

Angela Carter is a great mind, an extraordinary thinker, with an almost incomparable ability to weave her visions into a literary cloak of glittering baroque invention whose extent seems unbounded, and unboundable.

Surreal!
A very interesting read. Set in a unnamed South American country which implies this is magical realism. Dreamlike and distorted. What is real and what is imagined? I enjoyed reading this and couldn't put the book down... let Angela Carter take you on a surreal journey.

A dizzying journey: love, hate and the destruction of desire
Usually, Carter's novels and stories enmesh the reader and make sense in their intricate descriptions of complicated relationships and turbulent emotions. This book got me completely lost. But read it anyway if you're a fan of Angela Carter --it makes you appreciate her wild imagination and sense of beauty.