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The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (Penguin Modern Classics) Kindle Edition

4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 249 ratings

Desiderio, an employee of the city under a bizarre reality attack from Doctor Hoffman's mysterious machines, has fallen in love with Albertina, the Doctor's daughter. But Albertina, a beautiful woman made of glass, seems only to appear to him in his dreams. Meeting on his adventures a host of cannibals, centaurs and acrobats, Desiderio must battle against unreality and the warping of time and space to be with her, as the Doctor reduces Desiderio's city to a chaotic state of emergency - one ridden with madness, crime and sexual excess.

A satirical tale of magic and sex,
The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman is a dazzling quest for truth, love and identity.

Editorial Reviews

Review

She belonged at the centre of the literature of her time

About the Author

Angela Olive Carter-Pearce, who published under the pen name Angela Carter, was an English novelist, short story writer and journalist, known for her feminist, magical realism, and picaresque works. She is best known for her book The Bloody Chamber, which was published in 1979.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B004NNULLS
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin (February 3, 2011)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ February 3, 2011
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 4272 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 292 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 249 ratings

About the author

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Angela Carter
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Angela Carter was born in 1940. She lived in Japan, the United States and Australia. Her first novel, Shadow Dance, was published in 1965. Her next book, The Magic Toyshop, won the John Llewllyn Rhys Prize and the next, Several Perceptions, the Somerset Maugham Award. She died in February 1992.

Customer reviews

4.2 out of 5 stars
249 global ratings

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Top reviews from the United States

  • Reviewed in the United States on October 2, 2006
    My friend Susan introduced me to "Heros and Villians" by Angela Carter back when I was 17 or 18. I didn't quite know what to do it. I was still young enough that reading anything transgressive was both alluring and deeply embarrassing. The experience reminded me then of how I felt reading "Flowers in the Attic" when I was 12 -except the material was disquieting and powerful enough that I didn't rush out to read every Angela Carter book I could get my hands on. In fact, I didn't read anything by Carter till more than a decade later.

    I read "The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman" while I was traveling alone in Eastern Europe. I ended up leaving my copy with a fellow traveler I met in Budapest. I think he and his girlfriend were Australian. In any case, they were such icons of the classic eco-friendly, organic eating, and occassional pot smoking back-packers I couldn't help myself. I wanted them to experience the imagery that was rich enough, lush enough, and dizzyingly enough to force some awe into their complacency.

    Interestingly enough, when I read the Amazon reviews for "The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman," I was surprised by the comments about the book's explicit sexuality. I'm sure it's there, but I don't recall any of it other than the premise that Doctor Hoffman's machine was powered by the orgasms of coupling lovers. The artistry of Carter's language neutered the scenes of physical penetration so all that I was left with was a phantasmagorical quest fueled by love.
    12 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on November 26, 2024
    An incredible fairy tale for adults by a master of literary fiction, about a scientist who has the power to reshape people's realities. A disturbing meditation on desire and what it means. Some of the terms used were acceptable in the 70s, but are now verging on slurs.
  • Reviewed in the United States on February 1, 2018
    If you sometimes lie awake at night pondering the nature of time and being then this is the book you have been waiting to read all your life without even realizing it. It feels like a cross between Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the Marquis de Sade and the Marx Brothers, all the "M"s wrapped up like a burrito in a Grimms fairy tale.
    3 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on July 29, 2004
    This is by far the most bizarre book I have ever attempted to read. I absolutely loved the first chapter. This book does have literary merit. However, the amount of sexual content was too overwhelming for me, and I could not bring myself to finish the book. Had it not been for that, I would have been able to finish and give the book 5 stars. If you ever just want a taste of the book and avoid the sex, read the first chapter, but stop there.
    6 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on November 19, 2019
    Weird enough to slow down & read. I liked that about it honestly. Got it at a friend's recommendation for something different & it didn't disappoint.
  • Reviewed in the United States on April 28, 2018
    You are going to need to put on your thickest skin, because she definitely goes there.
  • Reviewed in the United States on July 5, 2009
    --Angela Carter has made of this novel her own infernal desire machine, assembling it from influences one can still easily recognize, including Sade's "Juliette," Lautreamont's "Maldoror," Swift's "Gulliver's Travels," and Voltaire's "Candide."

    --If those influences are to your liking, then there's a better than average chance "The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman" will work for you.

    --It worked for me more times than not, but I appreciate the richly crafted, highly metaphoric, baroque writing style Carter employs. It isn't a quick read and isn't intended to be. These are sentences that exist for their own sake, as things of beauty, and not simply to move the story along. They will seem tedious and over-written to many who are accustomed to reading novels for "what happens."

    --"What happens" here is that an old man is recounting his picaresque odyssey as a young man in a long-ago war: a war to defend reality as we know it from the onslaught of villain who wanted to liberate it from all limitations, a.k.a., Dr. Hoffman.

    --Basically, we follow our hero (Desiderio) as he makes his way through increasingly bizarre manifestations of "reality," warped in great part, by his own unleashed unconscious, as well as the unconscious of the woman he pursues, desires, and must ultimately confront in an erotic showdown--the beautiful, ever-changeable Albertina, who happens to be Dr. Hoffman's devoted daughter.

    --The novel takes the form of Desiderio's adventures among one society of people (and creatures) after another, each living a different version of reality, as he gets closer to the source of the chaos: the castle in which Dr. Hoffman's infernal desire machines produce waves of disruptive energy generated by the most basic drive of all...human copulation.

    --Aside from the dense and elliptical style, the deliberate and sardonic obfuscations, the allusions and philosophical asides, this is not a novel for prudes, the faint of heart (or stomach), or for the politically correct. If you are uptight about anything, this is a novel you need but probably shouldn't read. Carter has a tendency not only to slay sacred cows but to grind them up for use in comic meatball fights.

    --There are times when the narrative sags, the invention flags, and it all seems rather tiresome and arbitrary, but there's always something just around the bend that lures you back inside this phantasmagoric novel. This is definitely one of those novels that you read for the journey more than for the destination, where the whole may be less than the sum of its parts. In that way, among others, the novel may be like desire itself.

    --As a breed, this novel is a relatively rare creature: a book that actually has something important to say by an author with the artistry to say it. Carter was a thinker as well as a writer with a fierce and fearless imagination. "The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman" might be read as a fable of her own search for the wellsprings of creativity, love, and the imagination.
    19 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on October 17, 2013
    Really weird at the begging but great!!! You should read it if you like weird stuff and cool and creepy histories
    2 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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  • V. G. Harwood
    5.0 out of 5 stars This book will seize you by your vitals...
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 11, 2014
    This book is strange, unnerving in places, and sometimes a bit "out there" but I cannot emphasise enough how much I loved, loved, LOVED this book. Angela Carter's prose is like ice water tinkling over a crystal stream - it is sharp and enervating and makes you question everything you thought you ever knew about humanity.

    There is so much going on in this book - at face value it is a series of picaresque incidents which lead the hero, Desiderio "The Desired One", a man of lowly social status to save society from Dr Hoffman's infernal desire making machines. Of course, the machines only produce what men desire themselves - and they have some very strange desires - which almost leads to the annihiliation of the "city" from which Desiderio emerges. Just bubbling beneath the surface of the story is a palimpsest of so many texts from which Carter has obviously taken her inspiration - right from Chaucer through Swift (and a very racy interpretation of the Houhynhms), Pope, Milton, Bronte and beyond. Because it has its roots in 18th century literature, it does that thing that 18th Century literature does, which provides space within the fiction to question the nature of the society we as the readers are situated within. I had a moment of epiphany whilst reading the following: "...our very spirits were tormented without cease by deceiful images springing from that dark part of ourselves humanity must always consent to ignore if we are to live in peace together;..." p. 251 - when I realised that as people it is impossible to achieve all of our desires and live in peace together. Living in society necessitates a sacrifice at at least some levels for every single person who participates within it.

    Carter is such an inspirational writer - this book will seize you by your vitals and drag you on a rollercoaster ride of enlightenment. Don't miss it.
  • blabla
    4.0 out of 5 stars univers univers
    Reviewed in France on August 27, 2012
    effetivement l'univers d'angela carter est tout à fait particulier oscillant dans un monde à part, à la frontière parfois entre le fantastique et un quotidien
  • Gatsby C..
    4.0 out of 5 stars Surreal
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 10, 2025
    This is an amazing work of surrealism that combines fantasy, theory, and sensuality. Its story is full of vivid imagination and challenges readers' ideas about the line between truth and desire with beautiful writing. A thought-provoking trip through illusion and identity, this book is a modern gem that everyone should read.
  • ANV
    3.0 out of 5 stars Not what I expected
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 12, 2011
    I'm a massive Angela Carter fan and anything she's written is worth reading. However the plot here was rather erratic, and while i felt she was trying to make some kind of philosophical point, I didn't quite grasp it. Frankly based on the description I was expecting some more fanciful and enjoyable smut, but found it lacked Carter's usual sensuality. Having said that I'd urge you to ignore any reviews claiming it is disgusting and offensive etc.
  • lost in nebulous time
    5.0 out of 5 stars love this book
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 10, 2019
    It's like an pair of shoes.I never tried from reading this book it 's become part of me well worth anyone's time five in and enjoy

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