70s erotic fiction. Surreal porn with plot told through the lens of an unreliable narrator. Characters are diverse but subject to heavy fetishization.

Despite almost putting down the book halfway through, I’m glad I read it; it was an adventure. The multiple gratuitous, graphic, and nonconsensual sex/rape scenes made much of the book difficult to stomach and are a large thing to overlook, but if one is capable of doing so, Carter’s writing is captivating and the vignettes of Desiderio’s journey surreal. 

Just a very strange book overall with some heavy topics and hard to read.

This is a picaresque, grotesque, burlesque, carnivalesque, Kafkaesque adventure New Wave science-fiction satirical philosophical work of fiction, one which to a Classicist evokes Petronius and Lucian, to others might evoke anything from Philip K. Dick to Wells to innumerable other writers whose work I have not yet read, among whom are philosophers like Wittgenstein and Freud, thinkers clearly capable of inspiring science fiction with a degree of originality rarely seen.

That was one sentence, and one of my primary issues with this book was the author's tendency to use long, convoluted sentences for absolutely no reason. Yet at times the prose was masterful; certain characters were drawn as well as any I have come across, while certain philosophical or satirical observations were made with a combination of academic rationality and wonder-inducing profundity. It was this prose which carried me headlong through the narrative's twists and turns, and it really does twist and turn. On several occasions I had persuaded myself to immediately remove this book from my possession and gift it to a charity shop having finished reading it, such were the graphic scenes described... But soon enough I was on board again, reading with relish, delighting at the ridiculous marvels of this Odyssean journey. In the end, I can assertively say I enjoyed it, and that this novel can stand alongside not just New Wave works but New Weird works as a piece of startling and unsurpassable originality.

This book is similar to the following books I have read:
The San Veneficio Canon by Michael Cisco
Celebrant by Michael Cisco
Satyricon by Petronius
The Island of Dr Moreau by H.G. Wells
Palimpsest by Catherynne M. Valente
Titus Alone by Mervyn Peake