quotes from The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman
by Angela Carter. ©1972. page numbers refer to the Penguin Books U.S.A. 1994 paperback edition. started in August, finished last Saturday. didn't like it much until the last 1/3 (probably a change of mindset more than any change in the story/writing). In the beginning I said it was "like a minefield with similes."
p. 195 top:
'Yes,' she said and turned her ensorcellating eyes on me so that all at once I was breathless with desire and the cabin dissolved in our kiss. Yet there was still that duplicity in my heart's core. I had been marked out at the beginning as the Minister's man, for all my apathy, for all my disaffection, for I, too, would have worshipped reason if I could ever have found her shrine. Reason was stamped into me as if it were a chromosome, even though I loved the high priestess of passion. Nevertheless, we kissed; and the crew of the helicopter shielded their eyes as though we were to bright for them to bear.
p. 201 top:
The white evening dress of a Victorian romantic heroine rustled about Albertina's feet and clung like frost to her amber breasts yet I wished she had worn the transvestite apparel of her father's ambassador or had come to the table naked, with poppies in her hair, in the style she had adopted for dinner in the land of the centaurs. My disillusionment was profound. I was not in the domain of the marvellous at all. I had gone far beyond that and at last I had reached the powerhouse of the marvellous, where all its clanking, dull, stage machinery was kept. Even if it is the dream made flesh, the real, once it becomes real, can be no more than real. While I did not know her, I thought she was sublime; when I knew her, I loved her. But, even as I pared my dessert persimmon with the silver kinfe provided, I was already wondering whether the fleshly possession of Albertina would not be the greatest disillusionment of all.
