This is the sort of book not meant for light reading or even necessarily for enjoyment, and therefore VERY difficult to assign a numerical star-rating to. I also took an insanely long time to read it - more than a year - so clearly on some level I wasn't finding it that compelling.

The introduction in my edition by Ali Smith makes a convincing argument for the story's continued (or even growing) relevance today. According to Smith, "It leaves its readers questioning and asks them to be wise - both to the structures which work to categorize or limit who and what we are, and to the ways and potentials of the imagination."

But often, the ways it asks reader to be aware of those categorizations and limitations are by engaging in/depicting racially charged Orientalist stereotyping and misogynist objectification of women. The narrator is hardly reliable and not meant to be met with sympathy always, but having him uphold and perpetuate these problematic structures as a mechanism for making the reader question their current forms is, well, icky. The title establishes a work about "infernal desire," but this is a text that's concerned with race even more than desire.

This isn't necessarily to accuse Carter herself, because as I've said it's all delivered through Desiderio, but Ali notes that she wrote this "in three months, in a Japanese fishing village on an island where she seems to have been the only European." For me, at least, this is an uncomfortable situation for a white woman to write a work which dwells over and over again on the color of the people it observes, their innate "other"ness, and their tribal stereotypical behaviors (which are depicted as dangerous but easily always easily escaped, often by virtue of superior colonial-style technology). A few examples of this uncomfortable focus: "They came from every race in the world, brown, black, white and yellow, and were paired, as far as I could see, according to colour differences." Now, the disclaimer, "as far as I could see," allows a reading of this as a reflection of Desiderio's limited sight rather than the world Carter has created as a whole - but that doesn't exculpate it from unpleasantness entirely. And while Carter is acclaimed as a feminist writer, reading this requires you to share headspace with Desiderio, who's always grasping at women and describing them in objectifying ways and experiencing pedophilic desire.

So while the work is incredibly thought-provoking and many-layered, and may invite the reader to question the pedophilic and objectifying and orientalizing elements of our own social structures, like I said, it's also requires you to expose yourself to those things in concentrate. Kind of icky. Worth analyzing for a paper, but not for reading in your free time. As for the number of stars, I'm going to leave it at a neutral-ish three, since I normally consider Goodreads to evaluate reading as a leisure activity, rather than reading as an act of analysis (a binary that doesn't exist, I know-but still. Is it an incredible work of... something? Yes. Did I enjoy it? Eh. Three stars.).