Fireworks

by Angela Carter

In the short fiction of Angela Carter, the landmarks of reality disappear and give way to a landscape of riotous and uncensored sensibility. The city of Tokyo turns into a mirrored chamber reflecting the impossible longings of an exiled Englishwoman abandoned by her Japanese lover. An itinerant puppet show becomes a theatre of murderous lust. A walk through the forest ends in a nightmarish encounter with a gun-toting nymph and her hermaphrodite 'aunt'. Not simply a book of tales, Fireworks is a headlong plunge into an alternate universe, the unique creation of one of the most fertile, dark, irreverent, and baroquely beautiful imaginations in contemporary fiction.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, Magical Realism, Gothic, Japan

146 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1974

About the author

Born Angela Olive Stalker in Eastbourne, in 1940, Carter was evacuated as a child to live in Yorkshire with her maternal grandmother. As a teenager she battled anorexia. She began work as a journalist on the Croydon Advertiser, following in the footsteps of her father. Carter attended the University of Bristol where she studied English literature.

She married twice, first in 1960 to Paul Carter. They divorced after twelve years. In 1969 Angela Carter used the proceeds of her Somerset Maugham Award to leave her husband and relocate for two years to Tokyo, Japan, where she claims in Nothing Sacred (1982) that she "learnt what it is to be a woman and became radicalised." She wrote about her experiences there in articles for New Society and a collection of short stories, Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces (1974), and evidence of her experiences in Japan can also be seen in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972). She was there at the same time as Roland Barthes, who published his experiences in Empire of Signs (1970).

She then explored the United States, Asia, and Europe, helped by her fluency in French and German. She spent much of the late 1970s and 1980s as a writer in residence at universities, including the University of Sheffield, Brown University, the University of Adelaide, and the University of East Anglia. In 1977 Carter married Mark Pearce, with whom she had one son.

As well as being a prolific writer of fiction, Carter contributed many articles to The Guardian, The Independent and New Statesman, collected in Shaking a Leg. She adapted a number of her short stories for radio and wrote two original radio dramas on Richard Dadd and Ronald Firbank. Two of her fictions have been adapted for the silver screen: The Company of Wolves (1984) and The Magic Toyshop (1987). She was actively involved in both film adaptations, her screenplays are published in the collected dramatic writings, The Curious Room, together with her radio scripts, a libretto for an opera of Virginia Wolf's Orlando, an unproduced screenplay entitled The Christchurch Murders (based on the same true story as Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures) and other works. These neglected works, as well as her controversial television documentary, The Holy Family Album, are discussed in Charlotte Crofts' book, Anagrams of Desire (2003).

At the time of her death, Carter was embarking on a sequel to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre based on the later life of Jane's stepdaughter, Adèle Varens. However, only a synopsis survives.

Her novel Nights at the Circus won the 1984 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for literature.

Angela Carter died aged 51 in 1992 at her home in London after developing lung cancer. Her obituary published in The Observer said, "She was the opposite of parochial. Nothing, for her, was outside the pale: she wanted to know about everything and everyone, and every place and every word. She relished life and language hugely, and reveled in the diverse."

Reviews

[emma · Rating 3 out of 5]

weird.

i am always a sucker for that Disgusting Concept Written In Beautiful Language literary gimmick, and any book that calls itself profane in the title is a book i want to read, but it's crazy how 50 years can push things that were once boundary-pushing into just straight up bigotry.

this was wildly outdated. which is, i guess, an unfair standard to hold anything from 1974 to.

bottom line: the other emma in the comments is right. this is no bloody chamber.

[mark monday · Rating 4 out of 5]

gorgeously written, mind-bending, appalling, cruel, ambiguous, stark, lush, radiant, sepulchral. all of my favorite things! in different combinations, of course. nine stories from one of my favorite writers; all of them interesting, many of them utterly brilliant.

authors can't help but put themselves into their writing, on one level or another. I can't help but wonder how much Carter put of herself into the three stories set in Japan - "A Souvenir of Japan" & "The Smile of Winter" & "Flesh and the Mirror". they detail the troubled romance of an older English woman and a younger Japanese man, the inevitable disintegration of that romance, and its bleak aftermath. there is a lived quality to her descriptions of a lovely small town, an anonymous big city, and a dire beach - as well as an understanding of Japanese culture and character that manages to have complete self-awareness of her status as an outsider who can never really understand: her thoughts on Japan are cuttingly critical, even-handed, and eventually self-abnegating in her realization that true understanding is beyond her. likewise there is an exceedingly personal feeling to the description of this ill-fated romance - the kind of "personal" that is so intimate it can be difficult to read. I'm not sure if all three stories are actually even detailing the same love affair, but there is a distinct (and tragic) continuity. of the three, "A Souvenir of Japan" is perhaps the most breathtaking in its transition from a description of pleasant country life to its bitter deconstruction of the all too fallible qualities of man and woman.

authors also can't help but put their obsessions onto the page; indeed it is often those obsessions that cause a writer to even write. Carter's obsessions are well-known: a fascination with gender and power, the subversion of both of those things, and the violence that can come when they engage with each other. both of those obsessions drive two of the strongest and strangest pieces: "Master" is the horrific tale of a cruel Great White Hunter and the native girl he enslaves - and who in turn becomes an even greater, crueler hunter; "The Loves of Lady Purple" details the horrific life of a fabled whore with a heart of utter darkness, and the literal puppet she has become. the push and pull when gender and power (or the lack of it) meet are also central to the collection's most confused and therefore weakest story - "Elegy for a Freelance" - which takes place in some bleak future London about to burn in riotous flames, and gives a snapshot of an absurd terrorist cell making its first group decision to take its first life - that of its own leader, a deranged and murderous idiot.

Carter is perhaps best known for bizarre, mordant, lusciously written, postmodern fantasias The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, The Passion of New Eve, Nights at the Circus, and The Bloody Chamber (as well as Heroes and Villains, a grim post-apocalyptic anti-romance that deconstructs, wait for it, power and gender). I think fantasia is what she does best and it is certainly what made her one of my favorites. in addition to the previously mentioned "Lady Purple", the collection includes three more and each one provoked very strong reactions from me. I was revolted and depressed by "The Executioner's Beautiful Daughter", which despite being brilliantly written, had an analysis of certain elements of human nature that was so dark (and literally disgusting) that my mind rejected what it was reading and I had to take a long break from the book before moving on. I was wonderfully perplexed and fascinated by the hallucinatory "Reflections", which features a man being forced through a looking-glass into a sort of Reverse World by a villainous, violent young woman and her hermaphrodite guardian; it soon becomes clear that he is perfectly willing to be just as villainous and violent in his attempt to escape. I was enchanted by "Penetrating to the Heart of the Forest", a spellbinding story about an Eden in the heart of a jungle, the darkness that lies beyond a village of happy naturals, a journey into that darkness, and um twincest. because hey, why not? things like a positive depiction of two siblings making love under the Tree of Good and Evil are just par for the course to Carter.

do people really need trigger warnings? if you do, most definitely avoid Angela Carter: you will no doubt be triggered, again and again and again.

[Jean-Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nine profane pieces full of linguistic pyrotechnics; lewd, lascivious, and absolutely-fucking-lovely. What more needs to be said? But Angie deserves more than that.

lascivious: (of a person, manner, or gesture) feeling or revealing an overt and often offensive sexual desire i.e. a lascivious wink.

In the afterword Carter defines the pieces in this collection as tales rather than as short stories, and I do think the distinction is important. Alice Munro vs. Edgar Allan Poe.

"The tale does not log everyday experience, as the short story does; it interprets everyday experience through a system of imagery derived from subterranean areas behind everyday experience, and therefore the tale cannot betray its readers into a false knowledge of everyday experience."

These tales all take place in settings that are familiar yet remote, and each is tethered more tenuously to reality than the last. Several meditations on Japan—where Carter spent three years living—are dispersed throughout, and these are probably the most grounded of the bunch. Plenty of rape and incest to go around, with some Adam and Eve/Alice in Wonderland thrown in for good measure.

A Souvenir of Japan - 4
The Executioner's Beautiful Daughter - 5
The Loves of Lady Purple - 5
The Smile of Winter - 4
Penetrating to the Heart of the Forest - 5
Flesh and the Mirror - 5
Master - 4
Reflections - 4
Elegy for a Freelance - 4

[Nate D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Angela Carter is great, and I think I'm getting more and more of what she's about. This is something of a transitional collection written across the late 60s and early 70s post-Magic Toyshop, half observation pieces with an appearance of autobiographical relevance to Carter's time in Japan (after using her book award money to exit an unsatisfactory marriage and move far far away), the other half reconfigured myths and legends.

The observation pieces are often great -- evocative, moody images of life in land not really her own that remind me of those of Anais Nin's stories that seem wholly concerned with providing a complete description of some person or place. These culminate in the theoretical density of Flesh and the Mirror, which despite its confessional tone has the crisp conceptual delineation of a fairy tale. And around that, the actual fairy tales, which begin as almost just sketches of stories in the earlier entries, before becoming fully-formed and often fantastic. Carter offers some insight into what exactly these "sub-literary" forms mean to her in the afterword, but it's clear just from reading them: these simple short forms allow a clarity of discussion far more piercing than can be reached in the ambiguities of reality. Not that these are unambiguous, as Carter fluidly manipulates her alternate worlds, still-falling edens, and revolutionary fugues with a refreshing blend passion and amorality. I'll have to get around to The Bloody Chamber soon for her full development of this narrative tangent.

[Ian "Marvin" Graye · Rating 5 out of 5]

Flower Fire

In 1969, Angela Carter left her first husband and moved to Japan for three years. Her move triggered an amazingly fertile period of writing, which resulted in the novel "The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman" (to date, my favourite of her novels) and this collection of short stories. The combined impression is one of the sudden release of an explosive talent, much like "fireworks".

The significance of the title is suggested in the first story, "A Souvenir of Japan". Some children pestered their father until he bought them fireworks, the Japanese word for which means "flower fire".

Later, a fireworks display occurs in an area "like a fairground - but such an ordered fair!...Everything was altogether quietly festive."

Watching the fireworks sparkle, "the smiling children cooed softly; their pleasure was very pure because it was so restrained...These children were all on their best behaviour because they were staying up late and held their parents' hands with a charming propriety."

There is a sense of excitement about some kind of behaviour that is normally forbidden. Yet the excitement is restrained, respectful or considerate, even if the subject matter is profane.

Carter's stories are neither didactic nor prurient, yet they investigate the nature of behaviour that is either tolerated or taboo in a considered or studious manner, in a manner of restrained propriety.

In the Afterword, Carter describes her stories as tales rather than short stories:

"Formally the tale differs from the short story in that it makes few pretences to the imitation of life. The tale does not log everyday experience, as the short story does; it interprets everyday experience through a system of imagery derived from subterranean areas behind everyday experience, and therefore the tale cannot betray its readers into a false knowledge of everyday experience."

In this review, I'll discuss aspects of Carter's system of imagery by highlighting significant parts of her text. Hopefully, this will lead to some understanding of her goals and achievements as a feminist writer.

The Double-Somersault of Love

Ironically, the female narrator and her partner grow bored and become restive, leading them to question their happiness and the pleasure they get from their relationship:

"We fought a battle of self-abnegation and I won it, for I had the stronger character."

She recalls going to a love hotel early in their relationship, and reading a children's book about a boy who who was born inside a peach ("there was the baby, where the stone should have been"). The boy, Tomotaro, and the narrator's partner, "had the inhuman sweetness of a child born from something other than a mother, a passive, cruel sweetness I did not immediately understand, for it was that of the repressed masochism, which, in my country, is usually confined to women."

The narrator describes her partner's "curious, androgynous grace with its svelte, elongated spine, wide shoulders and unusually well-developed pectorals, almost like the breasts of a girl approaching puberty."

"Sometimes, it was possible for me to believe he had practised an enchantment upon me, as foxes in this country may, for, here, a fox can masquerade as human and at the best of times the high cheekbones gave to his face the aspect of a mask."

Just like a fox, the object of love can disguise their true feelings and the subject can be deceived (or deceive themselves). Love can affect us like an enchantment or a spell.

The narrator's experience is particularly poignant, because she recognises that "as they say, Japan is a man's country...In a society where men dominate, they value women only as the object of men's passions."

Away from home, the narrator is an alien in a foreign country, which forces her to probe "the death-defying double-somersault of love", as it exists in both England and Japan:

"I had never been so absolutely the mysterious other. I had become a kind of phoenix, a fabulous beast; I was an outlandish jewel. He found me, I think, inexpressibly exotic. But I often felt like a female impersonator."

Woman as a Fabulous Beast

Ironically, the narrator becomes a vehicle of and for fantasy, while she learns to comprehend the real or normal world outside, even if it is Japan.

In a department store, she encounters a rack of dresses labelled "For Young and Cute Girls Only", which alienate her even more, making her feel like Glumdalclitch. Her partner tells her that "when he was in bed with me, he felt like a small boat upon a wide, stormy sea." He is tossed around by the tempestuous nature of a womanhood he doesn't completely understand. He affects the "radiant aimlessness of the pure existential hero."

Women can't be understood solely in terms of beauty versus man's beast. Women might be part beast as well.

Mirror Images of the Self

In return, the narrator realises that "I was suffering from love and I knew him as intimately as I knew my own image in a mirror. In other words, I knew him only in relation to myself. Yet, on those terms, I knew him perfectly."

Love is complicated by the dual/rival perspectives of the subject and the object.

Carter discusses the knowledge of the lovers in terms that seem to apply to the creative writing process she has embarked on:

"At times, I thought I was inventing him as I went along, however, so you will have to take my word for it that we existed. But I do not want to paint our circumstantial portraits so that we both emerge with enough well-rounded, spuriously detailed actuality that you are forced to believe in us. I do not want to practise such sleight of hand. You must be content only with glimpses of our outlines, as if you had caught sight of our reflections in the looking-glass of somebody else's house as you passed by the window."

She asks herself: "How far does a pretence of feeling, maintained with absolute conviction, become authentic?"

Relationships must be understood in terms of both pretence and authenticity, even if it's fleeting.

The narrator recounts the moving images of evanescence, fireworks, morning glories, the old, children, from which she has composed her story.

She concludes that "the most moving of these images were the intangible reflections of ourselves we saw in one another's eyes, reflections of nothing but appearances, in a city dedicated to seeming, and, try as we might to possess the essence of each other's otherness, we would inevitably fail."

Brief Imitations of Women and Men

In "The Loves of Lady Purple", we see life through the prism of love again. A character called the Asiatic Professor is a puppet master. His reality is different from those around him: "The puppeteer speculates in a no-man's limbo between the real and that which, although we know very well it is not, nevertheless seems to be real."

His pretence has succeeded in becoming authentic, at least in the eyes of his audience: "The master of marionettes vitalises inert stuff with the dynamics of his self...the dolls project those signals of signification we instantly recognise as language...they once again offer their brief imitations of men and women with an exquisite precision which is all the more disturbing because we know it to be false..."

Like the narrator of the first story, the puppeteer has the air of a "visitant from another world where the mode of being was conducted in nuances rather than affirmatives." He is like a foreigner, whereas his assistants are all "natives of the fairground and, after all, all fairs are the same...perhaps, dissociated fragments of one single, great, original fair which was inexplicably scattered long ago in a diaspora of the amazing...here, the grotesque is the order of the day."

Reality and Otherness

The puppeteer reveals his passions through the medium of his heroine, the puppet, Lady Purple ("the Shameless Oriental Venus") who "did not seem so much a cunningly simulated woman as a monstrous goddess, at once preposterous and magnificent, who transcended the notion she was dependent on his hands and appeared wholly real and yet entirely other."

"Her actions were not so much an imitation as a distillation and intensification of those of a born woman and so she could become the quintessence of eroticism, for no woman born would have dared to be so blatantly seductive."

The Magic Alternative

In performance, "the incantatory ritual of the drama instantly annihilated the rational and imposed upon the audience a magic alternative in which nothing was in the least familiar."

Soon after, Carter refers to "the rapt intensity of ritual". Carter also describes Lady Purple as a "corrupt phoenix who rose again as a 'mannequin of desire' who expressed the nameless essence of the idea of woman, a metaphysical abstraction of the female",..."the sole perpetrator of desire...who proliferated malign fantasies all around her and used her lovers as the canvas on which she executed bourdoir masterpieces of destruction."

"Her kiss emanated from the dark country where desire is objectified and lives. She gained entry into the world by a mysterious loophole in its metaphysics and, during her kiss, she sucked his breath from his lungs so that her own bosom heaved with it."

Interestingly, Lady Purple's career ended "as if it had been indeed a firework display, in ashes, desolation and silence."

The Desolate Smile

In "The Smile of Winter", Carter again lists the ingredients she used for her composition:

"Do not think I do not realise what I am doing. I am making a composition using the following elements: the winter beach; the winter moon; the ocean; the women; the pine trees; the riders; the driftwood; the shells; the shapes of darkness and the shapes of water; and the refuse. These are all inimical to my loneliness because of their indifference to it. Out of these pieces of inimical indifference, I intend to represent the desolate smile of winter which, as you might have gathered, is the smile I wear."

The narrator is afraid of being both alone and lonely.

Inexpressible Vistas of Love

In "Penetrating to the Heart of the Forest", two twins "could not help but feel a faint contempt, for their world, though beautiful, seemed to them, in a sense, incomplete - as though it lacked the knowledge of some mystery they might find, might they not? in the forest, on their own." The heart of the forest, like Eden, contains secrets which are and must be concealed. Confronted with ripe fruit, Madeline "extended a long, crimson, newly sensual tongue to lick her lips, laughing [like Eve]. 'It tastes so good!' she said. 'Here! Eat!' " After Emile took the apple and ate, they kissed, in "the hitherto unguessed at, unknowable, inexpressible vistas of love."

The Real Conditions of Living

In "Flesh and the Mirror", the narrator moves through "these expressionist perspectives in my black dress as though I was creator of all and of myself, too, in a black dress, in love, crying, walking through the city [of Tokyo] in the third person singular, my own heroine, as though the world stretched out from my eye like spokes from a sensitised hub that galvanised all to life when I looked at it...I think I know, now, what I was trying to do. I was trying to subdue the city by turning it into a projection of my own growing pains. What solipsistic arrogance!...The stranger, the foreigner, thinks he is in control; but he has been precipitated into somebody else's dream. You never know what will happen in Tokyo. Anything can happen."

"So I attempted to rebuild the city according to the blueprint in my imagination as a backdrop to the plays in my puppet theatre, but it sternly refused to be so rebuilt; I was only imagining it had been so rebuilt...None of the lyrical eroticism of this sweet, sad, moon night of summer rain had been within my expectations...My sensibility foundered under the assault on my senses...My imagination had been pre-empted."

"The mirror distilled the essence of all the encounters of strangers whose perceptions of one another existed only in the medium of the chance embrace, the accidental...The magic mirror presented me with a hitherto unconsidered notion of myself as I...I had been precipitated into knowledge of the real conditions of living..."<

Breaking Out of the Mirror

Just as the mirror informs the self, it deludes the self, and must be escaped:

"Women and mirrors are in complicity with one another to evade the action I/she performs that she/I cannot watch, the action with which I break out of the mirror, with which I assume my appearance...

"The most difficult performance in the world is acting naturally, isn't it? Everything else is artful."

Outside and Inside

The mirror theme is continued in "Reflections": "Embrace yourself in the mirror. You must go, now. Now!...Kiss yourself in the mirror, the symbolic matrix of this and that, hither and thither, outside and inside."

"When my eyes opened, I had become my own reflection. I had passed through the mirror...I gave birth to my mirror self through the mediation of the looking-glass, yet my sensibility remained as it had been...The world was the same; yet absolutely altered...The effect was as of the reflection of a reflection, like an example of perpetual regression, the perfect, self-sufficient nirvana of the hermaphrodite...

"Proud as a man, I once again advanced to meet my image in the mirror. Full of self-confidence, I held out my hands to embrace my self, my antiself, my self not-self, my assassin, my death, the world's death."

Living and Dying in Parentheses

"Elegy for a Freelance" describes life in a revolutionary cell in a futuristic London. The narrator and X have been in love, until X murders their landlord as practice for the planned assassination of a senior politician:

"You made assassination sound as enticing as pornography...

"We had purposely exiled ourselves from the course of everyday events and were proud to live in parentheses."

From Pussycat to Tiger Lady

They live like exiles or aliens "amongst the architecture of desolation" and decay. "This abyss was that of my own emptiness."

Still, they share some kind of love:

"I was always a little afraid of you because you clung to me far too tightly and made me come with the barbarous dexterity of a huntsman eviscerating a stag...

"Your kisses along my arms were like tracer bullets. I am lost. I flow. Your flesh defines me. I become your creation. I am your fleshly reflection."

While the relationship ends with X's revolutionary trial and hanging, one of the narrator's fellow cell members observes that "you are turning into a tiger lady when I always thought you were such a pussycat."

The assertiveness and strength of the tiger lady might be what is needed to overcome the loneliness of the female pussycat.

I wonder whether Carter is a feminist, precisely because she examines the nature of relationships, love, desire and longing, as well as questioning what role one, a woman might play inside or outside such relationships. Her solution isn't necessarily separatist (it's relationships that must be repaired and bettered - both subject and object perform a somersault in the double-somersault of love), although she seems to acknowledge the attraction of multiple forms of gender and sexuality, including androgyny. It seems that her (and her narrators') ultimate erotic quest was for someone who appreciated that she was a tiger lady. She was no mere passive object of men's desire or passions, something she learned in Japan, both as person and writer.


SOUNDTRACK:

Siouxsie & The Banshees - "Fireworks"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtGkw...

Siouxsie & The Banshees - Spellbound

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVTtF...

Following the footsteps
Of a rag doll dance
We are entranced
Spellbound.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

A set of short stories by Angela Carter from the early 1970s; some are based on Carter’s time in Japan from 1969 to 1971. She describes that time as one of change, transition and radicalisation and the stories reflect this. Carter says that the position of women in Japan and their repression drew her towards feminism. The stories cover awakening, abuse and the dynamics of relationships. One of the stories is an experiment with magic realism and there is a touch of the fairy tale about a number of them.
There is a Garden of Eden story (Penetrating to the Heart of the Forest) relating to a brother and sister brought up by their father in a village on the edge of a forest. The village culture says there is an evil tree at the centre of the unexplored forest. The children, who have always done things together, set off to explore and find it. Things begin to change and after a carnivorous plant bites the sister;
“Her words fell heavy with a strange weight, as heavy as her own gravity, as if she might have received some mysterious communication from the perfidious mouth that wounded her. At once, listening to her, Emile thought of that legendary tree; and then he realised that, for the first time in his life, that he did not understand her, for, of course, they had heard of the tree. Looking at her in a new puzzlement, he sensed the ultimate difference of a femininity he had never before known or any need or desire to acknowledge and this difference might give her the key to some order of knowledge to which he might not yet aspire, himself, for all at once she seemed far older than he. She raised her eyes and fixed on him a long, solemn regard which chained him in a conspiracy of secrecy, so that, henceforth, they would share only with one another the treacherous marvels round them.”
It is of course The Fall, with a new and sacred Eve (a theme Carter will return to).
These stories aren’t consistently as good as her later work, but you can sense her finding her feet. The Loves of Lady Purple is about a life size puppet, whose puppeteer creates a story for her which involves poverty, abuse and a life in a brothel as a dominatrix and then an old age of poverty. When, of course, the puppet comes to life, she does and becomes the only thing she is able to do. A fable about the narrowness of the roles women are forced into.
Reflections is also about gender roles; a gothic tale with a mirror into another (reversed) world, a hermaphrodite who knits to keep the world in place, penises as guns and guns as penises with some analysis of rape in this world and the reversed world.
Some of the stories are about cityscapes and being in an alien city, or in the underbelly of the city; usually with gender relations as part of the backdrop. The prose is lush and heavy at times and there is great intensity in the writing. This isn’t Carter at her very best, but these stories are still better than most.

[Olivia-Savannah · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a short story collection recommended to me by my older sister. I decided to read it without quite knowing what I was getting into, and I quite enjoyed the short stories here. Angela Carter is an author new to me, but she certainly does know how to vividly paint pictures in the reader’s mind and bring across subtle messages with her words.

All of Angela Carter’s stories were so beautifully written. I can’t say it any better than my sister did when she described it to me – the author uses very purple writing. Occasionally, I must admit, it made it a little difficult to understand some of the stories or what I was supposed to be thinking about when reading them. However, in some stories it perfectly worked with the voice and the message to make a mini masterpiece in itself. I don’t think her writing will cater to everyone’s taste, but if you generally enjoy classics then I am sure it can be something for you.

I also really liked that all of the stories were set in Tokyo. If you know me, you know I am someone who is big on culture and having stories set in different countries than the usual Britain or USA that I always seem to be reading about, makes me incredibly happy. Some of the stories were also set in alternate worlds that weren’t exactly Tokyo as well. But I was happy.

Of course, with every collection, there were some stories I liked more than others. I’m going to discuss some of my favourites here in this review.

A Souvenir of Japan: I really liked this story because of the message behind it. I found it to be about the difference between appearances vs reality, and you can think of this best when it comes to first impressions, which almost never really add up to who you really are. This message was described through a romance in the short story, and I really liked how it was done.

The Executioner’s Beautiful Daughter: This one I understood to be about humanity and what that word itself entails. Right about the same time as reading this collection I was also reading The Summer That Melted Everything by Tiffany McDaniel, and I was so intrigued in this topic. It was interesting to see how Carter handled that.

The Lovers of Lady Purple: Now this was a story I had a mix of emotions about. It said something about language and communication, both in verbal terms and those of the body. It said something about seductiveness. It said something about your own creation occasionally growing bigger than you and how it can overwhelm you if you are not careful. The ending was twisted and I’m still not sure what to quite make of it yet. But this one definitely held my interesting.

Penetrating to the Heart of the Forest: Again, this one seemed to be dealing with humanity. How it is best when at one with nature. I also got quite a few Adam and Eve like vibes from this story, and yet it was twisted away from that too. Almost like a sinister version of a retelling.

Elegy for a Freelance: As the last of these stories this one was almost a bittersweet ending to a collection I didn’t want to leave. It was also the most interesting of them all. It dealt with murder, death and idolization of someone close to you. Love can be blinding and Carter played on that common saying.

All in all, these short stories were a quick read, but left me thinking about them between reading story to story. I especially loved the meanings of the novel and Carter manages to add sinister or dark twists to almost all of them. Definitely thought provoking and worthwhile reading.

This review and others can be found on Olivia's Catastrophe: http://oliviascatastrophe.com/2017/06...

[JimZ]

I (tried to) read four of the 9 short stories [A Souvenir of Japan; The Executioner’s Beautiful Daughter; The Loves of Lady Purple; The Smile of Winter and I gave up after reading four of them. One story was gross and the others I did not understand one scintilla of what was written. I think this was high-brow writing...on back cover of the Virago paperback was a blurb from the (UK) Daily Telegraph:
• ‘Angela Carter is the Salvador Dali of English letters.’

I have not delved too deeply into Angela Carter’s oeuvre. I hope this was a one-off and that I like the rest of her writing because I ordered a boatload of books by her since 1) I liked the first book I read by her, ‘The Magic Toyshop’, and 2) they are all Virago Modern Classics, and I am a big fan of their re-issues. So there! 🙃

Reviews (they all liked the collection):
• https://vocal.media/geeks/book-review...
• https://www.jeffvandermeer.com/2010/0...
• https://biblioklept.org/2022/10/04/oc...

[Jess · Rating 3 out of 5]

'Living never lived up to the expectations I had of it - the Bovary syndrome. I was always imagining other things that could have been happening, instead, and so I always felt cheated, always dissatisfied.'

For all that I love Carter’s dark and deeply disturbing stories, I found this collection mildly disappointing. For me, this didn’t stand up to the glory of some of her other works; The Bloody Chamber and Black Venus were both far stronger collections. These stories are more repulsive than they are compelling or sensual and in many cases, far more preachy and convoluted than lyrical. The instalments become increasingly outlandish, cryptic (Reflections, I’m looking at you) and downright psychedelic. The majority are unsatisfying and don't seem to achieve anything. My impression was that the stories were bizarre just for the sake of being bizarre - perhaps even just for shits and giggles.

Most stories were too indistinguishable to be memorable; A Souvenir of Japan, The Smile of Winter and Flesh and the Mirror told more or less the exact same story. Granted, others weren't entirely forgettable - but completely for the wrong reasons. I did however enjoy The Executioner’s Beautiful Daughter and Penetrating to the Heart of the Forest, mainly because the ambience evoked was magical and utterly tangible, incest and rape aside.

One of Carter’s more disquieting works and in my opinion not anywhere near her best.

[Karl]

Note: contents differ from other editions.

Contents:

001 - "A Souvenir of Japan" (1974)
013 - "The Executioner's Beautiful Daughter" (1974)
023 - "The Loves of Lady Purple " (1974)
039 - "The Smile of Winter" (1974)
047 - "Penetrating to the Heart of the Forest" (1974)
061 - "Flesh and the Mirror" (1974)
071 - "Master" (1974)
081 - "Reflections" (1974)
103 - "Elegy for a Freelance" (1974)

[Ailsa]

Angela Carter is an author I feel I should like more than I actually do.
I really enjoy her "tales" which make "pretences at the imitation of life" which she scorns in the afterword of this collection. The stories 'A Souvenir of Japan' and 'Flesh and the Mirror' seem more naturalistic and drawn from her observations from her two years spent in Japan (I could be wrong) and I admired these a great deal.
The other stories seem more like the usual Carter fare (incest, demonic sex puppets, gender dynamics) that I feel that I've read already from her and ~personally~ don't find very interesting.


.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

" 'Are you happy?' he asked. 'Are you sure you're happy?' I was watching the fireworks and did not reply at first although I knew how bored he was and, if he was himself enjoying anything, it was only the idea of my pleasure - or, rather, the idea that he enjoyed my pleasure, since this would be a proof of love." 2-3

"At the corner shop, they put an old lady outside on an upturned beer crate each morning, to air. I think she must have been the household grandmother. She was so old she had lapsed almost entirely into a somnolent plant life." 4

"He and his friends spent their nights in desultory progression from coffee shop to bar to pachinko parlour to coffee shop, again, with the radiant aimlessness of the pure existential hero. They were connoisseurs of boredom." 8

"But it was impossible to mistake him when the professor spoke in the character of Lady Purple herself for then his voice modulated to a thick, lascivious murmur like fur soaked in honey which sent unwilling shudders of pleasure down the spines of the watchers." 27

"Living never lived up to the expectations I had of it - the Bovary syndrome. I was always imagining other things that could have been happening, instead, and so I always felt cheated, always dissatisfied." 63

[Phil · Rating 3 out of 5]

I do have a massive liking for Angela Carter - to coin a sexist phrase, she's so fucking ballsy. Even when her writing lapses into its most purple and florid, it's still fascinating. This early collection of 9 short stories, originally published in 1974, is a bit of a mixed bag. At its best, it's an incredible walk on a tightrope of sexual debauchery and social extremes - at its worst it feels like an unrevised first draft written as an exercise. Be aware that this is most definitely the unfettered sexually dangerous Carter of The Sadeian Woman and The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, rather than the equally interesting but more mannered and drawing room friendly Wise Children and Nights at the Circus. Carter's writing style has always been one that I need to sink into, read slowly, chew over - hers are never books to rush through, because the plots are always secondary to the luscious description and ideas.

The best stories, for me, were "The Executioner's Beautiful Daughter", "The Loves of Lady Purple", "Penetrating to the Heart of the Forest" and "Master", whereas the least satisfactory was "Reflections" - also three of the stories are essentially at heart the same tale (A Souvenir of Japan, The Smile of Winter, and Flesh and the Mirror) about a British woman in Japan with a japanese boyfriend, ruminating about how we don't know the true essence of people and things, nor they ours. Had these been stitched into one story, I'd have definitely given this book a 4 star review - as it is, I could only stretch to 3. However, that is in no way a reflection on the quality of the best stories in this slim book.

Another reviewer has pointed out that Carter's style in this collection owes a debt to that of Anais Nin, as a criticism, but as a massive fan of Nin (her writing and her life - which was lived almost as a work of art) this can only be a bonus. So, read and enjoy, but don't expect a comfortable time.

(#4 in my Year of Reading Women)

[Paul Dembina · Rating 4 out of 5]

As Carter clarifies in her Afterword these aren't short stories as such but "tales".

The pieces are either lightly fictionalised versions of Carter's own experiences during her stay in Japan or else have characters as archetypes in phantasmagorical scenarios.

[Jeanne Thornton · Rating 4 out of 5]

This Angela Carter is the goods. The chronological organization is in many ways its best strength, since the book, by Carter's assertion, is an account of her evolution from the author of the Bristol trilogy & early works to something altogether new. So it's fitting I guess that I find a couple of the early stories--A Souvenir of Japan and The Smile of Winter--really distinctly no great shakes, and the latter kind of racially uncomfortable (the description of Japanese skin, the bikers.) But these are skins shed, and the third I assume autobio piece--Flesh and the Mirror--is astonishing, almost a hinge for the whole collection. The back half is terrific, culminating in Elegy for a Freelance, where the weirdly empty, isolated worlds of the earlier stories--the desolation of Smile of Winter, the nearly unpopulated village of The Executioner's Lovely Daughter, the pre- or postlapsarian world of Penetrating to the Heart of the Forest--suddenly transform, as if they've passed through the mirror in Reflections, into worlds suffering from the opposite problem: people crushed together, trying to find ways to exist with one another, doing terrible things to one another in order to survive. The crowded social conditions of stuff like Shadow Madness and Love return, but suddenly seem to have a new, weirdly visionary perspective, and a much deeper register of sadness and, um, "having a problem being alive"ness, to which I relate, maybe?

It's just really neat stuff and I look forward to reading the late Carter books (even, now, yeah yeah Passion of New Eve :( )

[Adhoc · Rating 3 out of 5]

Angela Carter is bent on transmogrifying the mundane with her wet rotting prose. Her words are issued out as eloquent, elongated moans. This makes it very difficult to register her descriptions as literal images; one reads them as if they were currents of inner sensation like sickness or sexual pleasure. A pervasive theme in this collection is the double-sided elusiveness and ambiguity of mirrors. What better way to distort this typically transparent medium than to inhabit the boundary of the mirror glass itself, where your body becomes your mirror, and you know you're there being emanated but blind to everything except the feeling of your own emanation.

[Mizuki · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fireworks is a strange read, it isn't my favorite Angela Carter's book and the stories are...well weird and I can tell some of them are vaguely based on folklore and goth tales (and I think the last story has a bit of...Crime and Punishment in it?)

Ms. Carter wrote this short stories collection when she was visiting Japan and the influence of Japan and its culture does show in a few of her stories.

I can't say I love this book, but some of the stories are highly sedative with their dreamlike, creative and sensual quality, lacing with a sweet taste of madness and absurdity.

[Nathanial · Rating 4 out of 5]

Angela Carter writes ghost stories. She doesn't settle for spooks, spirits, and apparitions, though, unless you consider those terms by their etymological roots. She chooses to consider how we appear to each other; lest that seem to simple, however, she uses only the most spooky, the most spirited appearances: these ghosts consist of the illusions that her narrators invoke when encountering another character. Her tragedy is not necessarily of the bloody demise or the rotting terrain (although she does evince both, with terrifying detail and nuance): it lies more in the incapacity of one person to recognize and respond to the humanity of another.

Her narrator in the title piece evokes this most clearly. This short story sets a first-person narrator, reflecting back on a recent relationship in a distant land, and moves from intimate recounts of trysts and features into a direct, confiding address to the readers:

"I speak as if he had no secrets from me. Well, then, you must realize that I was suffering from love and I knew him as intimately as I knew my own image in a mirror. In other words, I knew him only in relation to myself. Yet, on those terms, I knew him perfectly. At times, I thought I was inventing him as I went along, however, so you will have to take my word for it that we existed. But I do not want to paint our circumstantial portraits so that we both emerge with enough well-rounded, spuriously detailed actuality that you are forced to believe in us. I do not want to practice such sleight of hand. You must be content only with glimpses of our outlines, as if you had caught sight of our reflections in the looking-glass of somebody else's house as you passed by the window."

She uses that disassociated sensibility - of encountering a person, a scene, a world through reflections (off a strange surface, no less) - without naming it so directly in most of her vignettes...for they are vignettes, mostly, figured on the turns of setting and mood more than the twists of plot or character. Still, the word 'vignette' seems fabulously inadequate in her case, as it tends to minimize, disregard, or off-set - and it is here, on the edges of our vision, that her art flourishes.

Rather than returning to the blurred borders of her own awareness, as Lydia Davis does in The End of the Story, and structuring her progress that way, Carter conceives of the method at the start and lets us divine it throughout the rest of the book. The remaining eight pieces are variously more gruesome, fraught, and brutal than the first, which remains the most shimmeringly frangible bit of the lot, filled with gaps and ellisions, circumnavigations and lacunae that give it significance. It reads almost as if the rest of the stories suffer under the weight of over-determined meaning, that the settings and sequences of events in the rest of the book have swallowed up all the elusive incriminations of the opener (which is only fit).

{continued under the heading of The Bloody Chamber", due to space limitations}

[Nicky Neko · Rating 3 out of 5]

I can't admit that I read every word in this collection. I mostly skimmed it for the sections that were set in Tokyo, and I did find the two stories A Souvenir of Japan and Flesh and the Mirror very good. Her descriptions of a Japanese summer festival were brilliant, and the idea of Tokyo as a mirror in Flesh and the Mirror was excellent.

The other stories in between these two didn't really do much for me, and I still think I like Angela Carter the most when she's not showing off. Nights at the Circus still remains my favourite thing I've read by her to date, mostly because she adheres to plot and character instead of just writing earth-shatteringly good sentences, which is what I see from her short fiction in general.

[Berna Labourdette · Rating 3 out of 5]

Publicada por Minotauro en 1990. Angela Carter vivió un tiempo en Japón, país al que viajó por primera vez sola luego de ganar el Somerset Maugham Award por su novela Varias Percepciones. Esta primera antología de relatos recopila dos de sus cuentos inspirados en esta experiencia (Un recuerdo de Japón y Carne y el espejo), además de otros que son el reflejo de las ya mencionadas obsesiones de Carter (los cuentos de hadas, la fantasía medieval de aldeas asediadas por lobos y las mujeres independientes y seguras de su sexualidad, como en "Los amoríos de Lady Púrpura").

[Patrik Sampler · Rating 5 out of 5]

These are indeed profane pieces, courageously surreal and pointed. They are also frequently depressive, or "fuscus" -- a word that appears in them more than once. The vocabulary is ornate but never ostentatious, and creates the strange feeling of coming across an animal declared extinct merely years ago. (See: baiji.) I thought to include a quotation from the book, but I'd have to "excerpt" most of it. Almost the entire thing rings clearly. My only complaint is the hackneyed trajectory of "Penetrating to the Heart of the Forest". Otherwise, Fireworks is a surprise.

[Danni Jervis · Rating 3 out of 5]

A stunning little collection of stories from Carter's time in Japan.

They will draw you in and end suddenly, leaving you with a endless sensation of wanting more. Dark, disturbing and cryptic much like Japanese folk lore you can see the influence the country has had on her writing style.

[Alexandra Daw · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was not really my cup of tea and thankfully was a slim volume. These short stories are the stuff of nightmares which I guess is what makes the ideas and the writing so admirable.

[Sheryl · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a perfect little book.
It's kind of like Anais Nin and Edgar Allen Poe had a literary baby.
Alternating confessional, diary like sections about Angela's life in Japan with florid, dream like, often risqué horror fairytales.
Standouts for me were The Executioner's Beautiful Daughter, Flesh and the Mirror, and Master---but every one of these stories is a jewel.

[Katie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fireworks is a very apt name for this collection of stories: like fireworks, they are short, sharp bursts of concentrated but brief beauty, all with an underlying element of danger. However, while Angela Carter always writes excellently and has an amazing way with words, this was definitely not my favourite of her short story collections. Although her prose is rich and full it sometimes feels a little stifling in this book and I often caught myself committing the sacrilege of wishing for fewer words and more plot.

In the story ‘A Souvenier of Japan’ Angela Carter’s fictional self says: "But I do not want to paint our circumstantial portraits so that we emerge with enough well-rounded, spuriously detailed actuality that you are forced to believe in us. I do not want to practise such sleight of hand. You must be content only with glimpses of our outlines, as if you had caught sight of our reflections in the looking-glass of somebody else’s house as you passed by the window." (p. 10) This is a fair illustration of how these stories work: they don’t provide full narratives with fleshed out characters, but give tantalising glimpses into worlds where you can never be quite certain of anything. There is a dream-like quality to the stories which makes them feel uncanny and remote and just a little bit too odd for me, I think. Carter’s epilogue explains exactly what she was doing in this collection and I found that very helpful, illuminating some of the more bizarre elements of these madcap stories (particularly the incest; I swear incest has been a theme in almost everything I’ve read by Carter now). I always enjoy it when an author decides to let their readers in on their thought processes, particularly when they are as patently oddball as Carter’s, so this provided a welcome opportunity to help untangle some of my thoughts on the book.

[Spencer Fancutt · Rating 2 out of 5]

You can read a lot of potential here for her later successes, especially in her imaginative breadth and attraction to the macabre, but this volume reads like someone trying really hard to be an author, and the effort is distracting and tests the patience. Every page is saturated with metaphors and similes which seem to have been shoehorned from her notebooks as if she had promised herself not to leave a single one out. Some of them are brilliant, but the overall impression is not cohesive and obstructs a clear voice coming through. Her vocabulary is similarly strained to show her (impressive) range, at the expense of the flow of narrative, appearing like she felt the lowest frequency word was always the best choice. It's like the antithesis of Carver. The same goes for her references to classical characters or texts. It seems there has been no restraint exercised.
The Japanese stories read like the author's diary entries, and her descriptions of Japan and its people are colonial, one-dimensional and occasionally alarming: "...their heads are perfectly round. Their faces are perfectly bland... I am white and pink while they themselves are such a serviceable, unanimous beige.""In this country you do not need to think, but only to look, and soon you think you understand everything." "The word for wife, okusan, means the person who occupies the inner room and rarely, if ever, comes out of it.""This country has elevated hypocrisy to the level of the highest style." These may be forgiven as a fictional narrator's opinions were their stories not so clearly autobiographical in nature.
I look forward to reading her later works again, like Wise Children, Nights at the Circus, and The Bloody Chamber to see her mature style, but I think I'll give it a while to forget Fireworks first.

[Priya Sharma · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very different beast from "The Bloody Chamber & Other Stories". A woman takes a lover in Tokyo. A rapacious hunter journey takes him from Africa to the heart of the Amazon. A puppet acts out her desires. Innocent children are lost In Eden.

Angela Carter's prose here is heady, sometimes florid, but always beautiful.

The room was a box of oiled paper full of the echoes of the rain.

***

I wanted to see him far more naked than he was with his clothes off.

***

... his rifle's particular argument was lay with the silken indifference of the great cats, and, finally he developed a speciality in the extermination of the printed beasts, leopards and lynxes, who carry ideograms of death in the clotted language pressed in brown ink upon their pelts by the fingertips of mute gods who failed to acknowledge any divinity in humanity.

[Emma · Rating 2 out of 5]

I love The Bloody Chamber, but I just could not connect to most of these pieces. Although many were interesting - "Master," about the quite literal transformation of a half-Indian woman who marries an Englishman, was the one I found most compelling - they're all the same in a way: hopeless and characterless. I think part of Carter's success with retelling fairy tales, as she did in Bloody Chamber, is that character and plot, not her strong suits, are provided for her, and she can focus on her writing, which is always breathtaking. I don't like her built-from-scratch stuff as much, as it gets to be very one-note and dreary. Might be your thing, but it isn't mine. 2 completely subjective stars.

[Chris Herdt · Rating 4 out of 5]

My favorite stories in this collection are "The Loves of Lady Purple," which feels very like a prologue to The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, and "Elegy for a Freelance."

But even the lackluster stories such as "Reflections" -- a tale found in H.P. Lovecraft's dustbin, presumably -- have the most meticulous and amazingly constructed sentences.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a wonderful surprise this book was. The prose was breathtaking, the stories often terrifying and her voice is so unique, so exciting - I can't believe I haven't lumbered upon Carter before in my quest for beautifully wrought stories. And, her vocabulary - wow - it is astounding ...

[M · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think there's only one thing you need to know.

Angela Carter is brilliant.