i thought Angela was handing me a flute full of bubbly champagne but it turned out to be a glass of spicy vinegar from a jar of pickled peppers & sausages. Angela, you vicious trickster. still, i found the taste to be surprisingly interesting. maybe not refreshing or pleasing to the taste buds... but interesting! i quickly finished the whole glass.Love - a title steeped in so much sick irony, given the novel's cruel narrative and its wintry themes - is about an insane young lady, her beau, his demented brother, the apartment that all three share, and how lives just go on no matter what. Ob-la-di, ob-la-da, life goes on, Hey! it is set in late 60s London (i presume - i think the city is nameless) within that special milieu that exists on the outskirts of many colleges - an artsy, ambisexual, insular, young, messy milieu. it stars: a charmless young miss who comes from money & paints surreal landscapes over all of her walls and who is clearly both bonkers and toxic (our heroine!); a perfectly nice young man who is pleasing to the eye and who just wants to be happy and who has an arsenal of disarming smiles and who ties up and beats his girlfriend when she irritates him (our hero!); an animalistic brother who has decided to continually live in his school of hard knocks and who does eventually call for an ambulance after he finds a person who has tried to commit suicide - but not until he takes a few cool snaps (our villain?). the plot is pretty much the detailing of the strange, disturbing dance between the three. what is Love and what is it saying about "love"? honestly, nothing that i want to know. i don't believe in its perspective!if you love Angela Carter as much as i do, you will find much to enjoy in this novel. her language is as brilliant as ever, full of evilly sardonic non sequitors and stylized dialogue and lots of surprising bits of characterization and of course imagery that is surreal, hyperreal, unreal, and grimily realistic. the writing is so offbeat that at first i thought all the characters and scenarios were meant to be postmodern constructs and a series of dream scenes. but nope, this was actually a "contemporary" novel dealing with actual characters and their relationships. shudder! i lived in a world like this for a few years and thank God it was nothing like Love's Inferno.i suppose i should say what i think this novel is about so that this "review" is actually a review and not a book report. but i don't wanna. i don't believe in Carter's analysis of love and relationships. too bitter, cynical, demeaning, etc. well she did write this when she was 30 or so and i was probably prey to the same feelings at that age. wasn't i? i don't remember; i probably was taking too many drugs at the time, much like the characters in this book. but even if i don't agree with Carter's vision, her phenomenal and thoroughly idiosyncratic skill at constructing berserk narratives & her use of language that is full of nuance and spikiness & her ability to tell stories that read like diabolical fairy tales are all entirely in place. and so Love is quite enjoyable. a perverse kind of enjoyable, but hey i find my enjoyment in many different kinds of places.look upon Angela Carter: she's beautiful and she looks like she could kill you just because it may be an interesting thing to do. or not, as she may have some gardening to finish up that is even more interesting. ::sigh:: my kind of gal!my 80s edition of Love contains an amusing afterward by the author. it's not really even an afterward. it is Angela Carter, many years later, showing a bit of affection towards her younger, cynical self, and imagining the eventual destinies of all the novel's surviving characters. the difference between the two Carters is profound. the author of Love wants to turn the world inside out and is high on her own cracked, brilliant malevolence. the author of the afterword is still cracked and brilliant but has replaced that malevolence with a kind of empathy, a kind of kindess, a clear-eyed and unsentimental wisdom. i want to grow up to be that kind of Angela Carter.my first review of 2013! hopefully not all of my reviews this year will be as long-winded. but the author really deserves me going on a bit. Happy New Year!
"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 and did not leave her until the night closed in catastrophe for she had no instinct for self-preservation if she was confronted by ambiguities."As LOVE suggests, madmen are the aristocracy of the working class - made independent and idle in thier madness, by their inability to function as expected. Rich folk, on the other hand, are merely crazy and indulged.The three major players in LOVE are of the "love generation", but though they cohabit together in close physical intimacy, they are all frighteningly alone, terrified that by the world outside not corresponding to the world inside their heads. This story is utterly distressing - brilliantly so, thanks to Carter's incomparable way with words - but it is also occassionally funny. The line about baroque harpsichord music, being both totally unexpected and perfectly appropriate, is one of the funniest lines I've read; and the post-script, written by the newly-humerous and bawdy Carter of the 80s (as opposed to the chilling early-70s Carter of the novel itself) rips into the characters with gleeful abandon.
What do You think about Love (1997)?
Wow. I loved this highly evocative and condensed account of a doomed lover’s triangle, where two brothers and a mentally disturbed female arts student clash in gradually more violent spirals of love and hate. She eventually marries the one brother, but then feels attracted towards the other. Uh oh.The writing is intense, as well as remarkably visual and sensual, with every word chosen for maximum impact. In a deliciously wry Afterword, Angela Carter even projects some of these damaged characters’ lives into middle age, with some very funny and unexpected results.Yes, such a slim volume seems to make up for an entire library’s worth of resolutely grim and sad reading, but there is something haunting and implacable about Carter’s account of love’s vagaries.The danger inherent in writing about despicable people such as this, not to mention the Freudian nightmare of their relationships, is that the reader can quickly become alienated from the characters. The brilliance of Carter, though, is that she allows us glimpses of indelible beauty and truth, hand in hand with all the horror and despair.
—Gerhard
So many times when reading this book--its long descriptions of mahogany furniture, creepy lighting conditions, catalogs of gross mystical objects held on shelves--I felt really uncomfortable, like my mind was being transcribed onto the pages of a book. Features real radicals, real proto-punks, real witches, real eerie magic of transformation, real suffering. So so good in a way that it's hard to articulate an hour after putting it down. I feel like I'm too close to this book to actually articulate the reasons why to a Goodreads audience, which is maybe a good enough recommendation. It's a protest book about three people who hurt each other because they don't understand anyone outside themselves. FIVE STARS
—Jeanne Thornton
“He lost his first optimism as he saw she grew no closer to the common world by mingling with it; rather, she enhanced her own awareness of her difference from it and grew proud.”Angela Carter’s writing style lures the reader into the web of her dark tale of marrieds Lee and Annabel and Lee’s brother, Buzz. Such clever language makes imbibing the intricacies of their sadistic relationship palatable; but beware: their decline is steep, and threatens to leave the reader more damaged and depressed than merely thoughtful or maudlin in that oddly gratifying way. That could just be me, though.Unofficial Angela Carter site
—Michelle
