Modern Classics the Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

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.

As an Englsih major with a facination with cyberpunk, I think that this novel is fabulous!! In many ways the situations that Deserdio gets into remind me of the pratfalls and accidents of William Burrough's finest. Both share a vague sense of cause and effect--the reader in never sure how the character got into his situation or what he will have to do in order to get out of it. In many ways, I think Dr. Hoffman is a mix of ETA Hoffman and William Burroughs. Hoffman contributes the gothic surreality and Burroughs contributes the theme of escaping. Good luck! This is great. I love it so much I have two copies of it...one is sort of beat up.

Angela Carter's neo-Swiftian tale of Desiderio and his search for Doctor Hoffman is oftentimes so brilliant that it is mind numbing. Through a surrealistic swirling pattern of images, illusions, allusions and memories, Desiderio, the narrator of the journey, travels through a wild range of cultures and attitudes on his philsophical journey to find Dr. Hoffman, the brilliant scientist whose mental images are slowly destroying any reality of the world. On his journey. Desiderio meets carnival folks, gentle river-dwelling natives, an animalistic whorehouse, a tribe of cannibals (or two), and in the best Swiftian fashion, a tribe of religious centaurs before finally reaching the Doctor's compound.Through a skillful use of the erotic as philosophy, Carter takes us on a journey that makes us reconsider what our own views of the erotic, the realistic, the profane and the profound are, and how we justify them with every day life.

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.