I loved this book. At moments, it's a very typical novel, and at others it's as if David Lynch took the wheel. The NYT review says it well:

"“Ah, a nice old-fashioned novel,” the reader thinks, gliding through the opening pages of “Carnality.” The author, Lina Wolff, begins in a conventional close third-person perspective and quickly dispatches with the W questions. Who is the main character? A 45-year-old Swedish writer. What is she doing? Traveling on a writer’s grant. When? Present day, more or less. Where? Madrid. Why? To upend the tedium of her life.

Premise established, we are safely buckled in for the ride, which rumbles along a scenic track for roughly five minutes before a crazed carnival operator assumes the controls and we take off at warp speed through loops, inversions and spins."

I am definitely going to read Wolff's earlier books, especially Bret Easton Ellis and Other Dogs.

And because I'm a sucker for any moment in a book that talks about the torture of writing...

"It occurs to her that everything gets easier when she makes no attempt to write. Her should no longer aches and she no longer has to come up with topics for her columns. Somewhere deep inside her she knows she has never been a good columnist...In any case, she thinks, when you are writing you have to create the situations and the links between them yourself, but when you are living you get them for free. She says this to Mercuro, which is when he says that writing is the kind of occupation that consumes you. You pay for it with your soul, and one fine day your soul has been used up." (134-135)