HILDA HILST'S PAGE: #WITMonth DELIGHT THE OBSCENE MADAME D; pervy LETTERS FROM A SEDUCER

THE OBSCENE MADAME D
HILDA HILST (tr. Nathanaël, & Rachel Gontijo Araujo)
Pushkin Press Classics (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$11.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A wickedly funny work of depraved genius by one of Brazil’s most radical twentieth-century writers; imagine the Marquis de Sade as written by Clarice Lispector

An electrifying masterpiece by one of modern Brazilian literature’s most significant and controversial writers, Hilda Hilst takes us into the disorder and beauty of a mind restlessly testing its own limits.

Every month I ingested the body of God, not in the way one swallows green peas or agrostis, or swallows swords, I ingested the body of God the way people do when they know they are swallowing the More, the All, the Incommensurable, for not believing in finitude I would lose myself in absolute infinity...

The Obscene Madame D tells the story of Hillé, a sixty-year-old woman who has decided to abandon conventional life and spend the rest of her days in contemplation in a recess under the stairs. There, she is haunted by the perplexity of her recently deceased lover, Ehud, who cannot understand her rejection of common sense, sex and a simple life in favour of metaphysical speculations that he considers delusional and vain.

In a stream-of-consciousness monologue that’s part James Joyce, part Clarice Lispector, and part de Sade, Hillé speaks of her search for spiritual fulfilment from a space of dereliction, as she searches for answers to great questions of life, death and the relationship between body and soul.

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My Review: Wow. *fans self*

Horny, thy name is Hillé. No wonder poor ol' Ehud is (it would seem) grouchy about being dead and about Hillé's decision to take herself into seclusion and contemplate The Divine. Saint Teresa of Ávila got nothin' on her! Observant, intelligent, philosophical, self-reflective...all apply to both women. Such a waste for a pervy old ghost/revenant/remnant.

"You wear a mask, love , a livid and violent mask, to look at you is to penetrate into the vortex of nothingness, may your silence make itself mine and we’ll wander together in a lacunous vastitude, that’s why I speak, speak to exorcise you, that’s why I work with words, also to exorcize myself, that the bitterness of the abysses may cease, that may break in this tide of phonemes, of syllables, that a light may break, exempt of anguish it’s best to be quiet when your name is passion."

In under 100pp, Hillé does more to demonstrate the primacy of sensual awareness as a motivating factor in every mode of life than Freud's entire all-too-male œuvre. It is a work where the images, the words used in forming them, the events described by them, the colors smells sensations all evoke the kind of sexual awareness of the world that slots in with the saint's immanent experiences of her god.

I don't understand the body either, that caltrop, nor the bloody logic of days, nor the faces that stare me down in this village in which I live, nor what are a house, a concept, what legs are, what is coming and going, toward where and what, Ehud, what these old women are, the howls of childhood, these spent men, what do the fools think of themselves, the children, what is thinking, what is clarity, the sonorous, what is sound, a trill, a cry, a howl, what's a wing uhn?

What happens in these pages is alchemical, psychological simmering and then the transubstantiation of breakdown breaking fracturing into insight:

Dross, yes, the attempt to compose a speech without knowing anything of its beginning nor its end, nor why the necessity for this speech, why the necessity to try to situate oneself, which amounts to attempting to remain clutching a rope over the abyss and without even knowing how it is that one wound up there, nor whether one ought now to move to the right rather than the left, around the fog, bellow a roar, or above it? water? voices? ships? I am reconstituting sophisticated evenings, politics, duties, a sociology of future, a being here, they ask me, kindred with the world, and acting, and authors, citations, foaming verbosity, the ear hearing itself foremost but responding to the people with elegance propriety care as though in fact it had listened to people, theatre, all theatre

I know a lot of y'all don't like long quotes and/or don't see how the quotes I've selected are connected to my ideas in the review. I put them in less and less often because of that feedback.

Here is my last quote from this remarkable fever-dream of a story. It is a summation of life as lived inside a human body. It looks at the processes proceeding all unseen, invisible, hidden and covered up because they're ugly, because to be ugly is terrible and shameful and not to be shared:

Animals, say, why do we kill them? To eat. But eating is abominable, no? All that stuff going down the tube and later becoming mass and even later shit. Close your eyes and try to imagine your body inside. Wriggling, blood. Take the microscope. Ah, not me. What a thing, flesh, nails, hair, and such colors in there, purplish-red. Look at yourself. Where are you now? I'm looking at my stomach. It's horrible Ehud. And you? I'm looking at my lungs. They dilate, compress. Everything enters into me, everything goes out. There's nothing that only goes in? No. And God? God enters and goes out, Ehud? I don't know about that. The priest says that God is inside the heart. So, look at yours, see if it's there, inside. I'm lookin'. Is it? No. Let me listen to your heart. Lord, how it beats!

...and realize Ehud is not alive, a woman in psychological distress is sharing these gobbets of thought and powerfully phrasing the offal in her mind to address it to a man who was but is not.

A deeply, enfoldingly, humanely beautiful story of life and need and longing and love. Profound. Moving. So short it's one long sitting of a Sunday afternoon read. I've left Madame D and her Ehud a warmer, more accepting soul.

Also horny.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


LETTERS FROM A SEDUCER
HILDA HILST (tr. John Keene)
Pushkin Press Classics (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A grand, perturbing erotic novel in which the wealthy, amoral Karl records his sexual life and search for meaning in letters with a surprising legacy

This epistolary novel tells the story of Karl, a wealthy, amoral and erudite man who records his daily life in a series of 20 letters to his sister Cordelia. She is cloistered and chaste, but the letters are wildly promiscuous—not just in their explicit sexual content, which have earned the novel the epithet ‘pornographic’, but in their form. Ranging in style and register from modernist fragments worthy of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, to letters that could have been penned by Enlightenment libertines like Choderlos de Laclos and the Marquis de Sade, the letters make up a polyphonic text that pushes the boundaries both of fiction and of decency.

The novel—a standalone masterpiece which originally appeared as part of a Brazilian tetralogy—changes form again partway through, when the indigent poet Stamatius finds Karl’s record of his erotic adventures in a trash can, and begins to write stories based on what he reads, and then to break down those stories into even briefer fragments. Karl’s letters inspire Stamatius’ writing, and their narratives and identities become ever more fragmented, until we begin to doubt whether they are truly separate people. What unites them is an abundantly lewd imagination and a fantastically creative relationship to the greatest seducer of all: language.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Straight-people sex *shudder* in astoundingly intense, deeply evocative flashes, fragments, and impressionistic sweeps of imagery. Lovely writing, the imagination behind these pieces is one that gets far, far too little attention in Anglophone readership.

It is going to offend prudes. It will genuinely repulse people who do not like the bodyness of sex. For the rest of us, it's aspirational; it proves the largest human sex organ is the brain. It is also the most important sex organ. The way these bits and moments work is in a frame that might make some unwilling to read the work at all: Karl, a rich, bored jerk writes to his sister about his bedroom gymnastics in detail. It kept me away from the read until, for #WITMonth, I had to become Stamatius...the starving artist whose sections of narrative are no less erotically charged but because he's impoverished it's okay (?...no more sense made here than Karl's wealth TBH), and he's, um, not quite so...he's free-form let's say.

Highly literary porn. It's the kind of "story" one associates with those old-timey one-handed reading letters from "real readers" magazines (do those still exist, or is the advent of streaming porn to blame for another cultural shift?) that kinda petered out when the writer'd uhh finished their thought.

No-plot all-vibes readers will love this little novella-length piece. Those who need an actual crafted narrative aren't really likely to enjoy it. And if reading about the juice and friction of the body in congress with others bothers you, click away, turn the corner, go wash something.