The Passion of New Eve

December 12, 2014 by Webmaster

But oh, how beautiful she had been and was, Tristessa de St Ange, billed (do you remember?) as The most beautiful woman in the world’, who executed her symbolic autobiography in arabesques of kitsch and hyperbole yet transcended the rhetoric of vulgarity by exemplifying it with a heroic lack of compromise.

I think it was Rilke who so lamented the inadequacy of our symbolism -regretted so bitterly we cannot, unlike the (was it?) Ancient Greeks, find adequate external symbols for the life within us – yes, that’s the quotation. But, no. He was wrong. Our external symbols must always express the life within us with absolute precision; how could they do otherwise, since that life has generated them? Therefore we must not blame our poor symbols if they take forms that seem trivial to us, or absurd, for the symbols themselves have no control over their own fleshly manifestations, however paltry they may be; the nature of our life alone has determined their forms.

A critique of these symbols is a critique of our lives.

The Passion of New Eve, follows Evelyn, a young Englishman, along a journey through mythology and sexuality. It is a story of how he learns to be a woman, first in the brutal hands of Zero, the ragtime Nietzsche, then through the ancient Tristessa, the beautiful ghost of Hollywood past.

1977

Love

December 12, 2014 by Webmaster

“One day, Annabel saw the sun and moon in the sky at the same time. The sight filled her with a terror which entirely consumed her … for she had no instinct for self-preservation if she was confronted by ambiguities.”

Annabel and Lee are married; Lee and Buzz are brothers. A quirky threesome, they have set up a household on the fringes on university life in the late sixties. Their hermetic existence is filled with drugs, sex, alchohol, intensity, and madness; their relationships with one another are haunting and complex.

Carter’s compelling tale carries echoes of Poe and Bronte into the very modern world of artists’ flats, psychiatrists’ offices, and generational conflicts. It is ultimately a tale of the search for loyalty and love in the midst of emotional starvation.

1971

Several Perceptions

December 12, 2014 by Webmaster

Centre stage in Angela Carter’s unruly tale of the Flower Power Generation is Joseph – a decadent, disorientated rebel without a cause. A self-styled nihilist whose girlfriend has abandoned him, Joseph has decided to give up existing. But his concerned friends and neighbours have other plans. In an effort to join in the spirit of protest which motivates his contemporaries, Joseph frees a badger from the local zoo; sends a turd airmail to the President of the United States; falls in love with the mother of his best friend; and, accompanied by the strains of an old man’s violin, celebrates Christmas Eve in a bewildering state of sexual discovery. But has he found the Meaning of Life?

1968

Shadow Dance

December 12, 2014 by Webmaster

Carter’s heady first novel introduces one of her most enigmatic characters. Honeybuzzard spends his nights scavenging the contents of abandoned buildings and his days seducing and tormenting lovers, enemies, and friends. He and his best friend Morris scoour the backstreets of London, leaving behind a trail of detruction in the broken hearts and dashed hopes of those they love, manipulate, and ultimately discard.

1966

Wise Children

May 21, 2014 by Webmaster

In their heyday on the vaudeville stages of the early twentieth century, Dora Chance and her twin sister, Nora–unacknowledged daughters of Sir Melchior Hazard, the greatest Shakespearean actor of his day–were known as the Lucky Chances, with private lives as colorful and erratic as their careers. But now, at age 75, Dora is typing up their life story, and it is a tale indeed that Angela Carter tells. A writer known for the richness of her imagination and wit as well as her feminist insights into matters large and small, she created in Wise Children an effervescent family saga that manages to celebrate the lore and magic of show business while also exploring the connections between parent and child, the transitory and the immortal, authenticity and falsehood.

1991

The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

May 21, 2014 by Webmaster

The transformation of Desiderio’s city into a mysterious kingdom is instantaneous: Hallucination flows with magical speed in every brain; avenues and plazas are suddenly as fertile as fairy-book forests. And the evil comes, too, as imaginary massacres fill the streets with blood, the dead return to question the living, and profound anxiety drives hundreds to suicide.

Behind it all stands Doctor Hoffman, whose gigantic generators crack the immutable surfaces of time and space and plunge civilization into a world without the chains – or structures – of reason. Only Desiderio, immune to mirages and fantasy, can defeat him. But Desiderio’s battle will take him to the very brink of undeniable, irresistible desire.

1972

Heroes & Villains

May 21, 2014 by Webmaster

A modern fable, a post-apocalyptic romance, a gothic horror story; Angela Carter’s genre-defying fantasia “Heroes and Villains” includes an introduction by Robert Coover in “Penguin Modern Classics”. Sharp-eyed Marianne lives in a white tower made of steel and concrete with her father and the other Professors. Outside, where the land is thickly wooded and wild beasts roam, live the Barbarians, who raid and pillage in order to survive. Marianne is strictly forbidden to leave her civilized world but, fascinated by these savage outsiders, decides to escape. There, beyond the wire fences, she will discover a decaying paradise, encounter the tattooed Barbarian boy Jewel and go beyond the darkest limits of her imagination. Playful, sensuous, violent and gripping, “Heroes and Villains” is an ambiguous and deliriously rich blend of post-apocalyptic fiction, gothic fantasy, literary allusion and twisted romance.

1969

The Magic Toyshop

May 21, 2014 by Webmaster

One night Melanie walks through the garden in her mother’s wedding dress. The next morning her world is shattered. Forced to leave the comfortable home of her childhood, she is sent to London to live with relatives she has never met: Aunt Margaret, beautiful and speechless, and her brothers, Francie, whose graceful music belies his clumsy nature, and the volatile Finn, who kisses Melanie in the ruins of the pleasure gardens. And brooding Unlce Philip loves only the life-sized wooden puppets he creates in his toyshop. This classic gothic novel established Angela Carter as one of our most imaginative writers and augurs the themes of her later creative work.

1967

Nights at the Circus

May 20, 2014 by Webmaster

Sophi Fevvers—the toast of Europe’s capitals, courted by the Prince of Wales, painted by Toulouse-Lautrec—is an aerialiste extraordinaire, star of Colonel Kearney’s circus. She is also part woman, part swan. Jack Walser, an American journalist, is on a quest to discover Fevvers’s true identity: Is she part swan or all fake?

Dazzled by his love for Fevvers, and desperate for the scoop of a lifetime, Walser joins the circus on its tour. The journey takes him—and the reader—on an intoxicating trip through turn-of-the-century London, St. Petersburg, and Siberia—a tour so magical that only Angela Carter could have created it.

First published: 1984