CW:

Sexual violence, racism, paedophillia, gore inc cannibalism

Be warned: this review contains spoilers and mention of some truly horrific things. Please read with caution.

At which questionable scene does it becomes apparent that this book is simply not for you? Is it the two instances of gratuitous paedophillia (inc sonophilipa)? How about the cannibal natives? This book has native American ("river Indians") AND African varieties. Maybe, it's the graphic gang rape, or the prostitutes turned into animals and flayed? Or maybe it's the continued use of seriously racist stereotypes about black people in description and action?

The thing is, each instance I get. I understand the depiction of power, the consequences of the unbridled passions at the heart of humanity and the selfish, wanton destruction created via passion, though what a bleak picture!

And in the end, the relentless depiction of the grotesque became too much. At which questionable scene did I realise this book isn't for me? African "Amazonian warriors" with a cannibalistic appetite.

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 was a big disappointment and I really didn't like it much at all. I'm not saying it was unreadable or completely bad, but I found it tedious and wordy. The descriptions of the surreal scenes often felt sterile and each paragraph of description had at least one or two sentences more than they should have. I'd also like to think that I'd have found the metaphysical musings that defined the world this was set in to be trite and half-baked even if I hadn't studied the transcendental phenomenologists so heavily in college. And, of course, this was written during that period of time that English-language literary criticism loved sex described in the most crude fashion possible, so that's a major focus of the book. Most of the sex is rape with limited consequences for either the perpetrator or the victim. There's a ton of stereotypes of minorities and everyone who isn't of European Christendom is identified through their race or ethnicity, even if they're historical figures. Aboriginal peoples are cannibalistic, of course. But, hey, this was the 70's and we have to accept it because of the times or something, right? Honestly, it wasn't even like it was offensive so much as tedious as hell. The racism and the crude use of sex to describe nearly all relationship dynamics seemed mostly to be laziness to me, honestly. With all that said, there were a few parts where I found myself somewhat drawn into the story and I'm pretty sure that I could have read through all of the stuff I complained about above if it actually said anything meaningful to me, but it really didn't.