Hilda Hilst (1930–2004)

Sensuality as an answer to grief, in this book, functions as the affirmation of life before death. It is the acceptance of life in its primal states, the ugliest that man has to offer, that becomes the coping mechanism through which D faces the most absolute isolation. It's only natural, this story does not accept metaphysics if not coming from inside the body, as does the mind and its madness. It's this sort of solipsism that gives birth to the narrative, a constant dialogue between the present and the future, the present and the past, the living and the dead.… (meer)

Someone I follow on Instagram posted about one of the books in this trilogy, calling it "horny chaotic homosexual amoral mayhem" and I was on the publisher's website putting together an order minutes later. That description did a lot of the work, but also I'd been meaning to read more Hilda Hilst since I read and loved With My Dog Eyes.

Like With My Dog Eyes, reading this book is bewildering, but it is intentionally bewildering. If you don't read this, thinking, "I, too, don't understand the eye, the body, the bloody logic of days, what are a house..." then you may be a little too well adjusted and this book is probably not for you.

Listen. There are plenty of books out there featuring "what even is life?" kinds of crises. But this is a crisis that is embodied. A crisis of sex, of blood, of excrement. It is also in community -- with a husband, with neighbors, with an entire community. Which is so much more interesting to me than the young man abroad with no tangible roots or serious responsibilities or meaningful ties pondering existence.

Reading this is bit like a fear dream -- it has a propulsive pace and a non-standard structure that will sometimes make you back up to try to parse out who is "speaking" and entangled strands of imagery and abrupt shifts in timeline and it is impossible to put down.

Absolutely captivating.… (meer)

Alex Estes has written a really wonderful review of Hilst's novel for Full Stop, one in which he views this first publication of her work in English as "the literary miracle of 2012."

Estes's positioning of Hilst's work in the context of Hélène Cixous's notion of l'écriture féminine is spot-on. In Hilst's prose, reality is blurred with madness; the pious is conflated with the impious; and love, grief, and mourning are emotional states that cause profound meditations on individuality—as well as how one can subsume one's identity beneath another's without wholly realizing it.

It makes sense that Hilst was friends with, as well as greatly admired by, Clarice Lispector. Both women share similar themes and, again in line with Estes's review of Madame D, their writing can be said to embody a frenetic, nonlinear l'écriture féminine which allows for these liminal, transient states to be explored in more depth and with more freedom. With that said, Hilst's work is definitely more scatological than Lispector's, and there is a great emphasis on the body and its functions in Madame D, almost reminiscent of Julia Kristeva's and Luce Irigaray's work. (In fact, throughout, I wondered if Hilst and her circle had been reading Lacan's work which would make a lot of sense given her use of the Other, her narrator calling herself "Oedipus-woman," and the stress on self-analysis as a kind of descent into a pre-linguistic realm ungoverned by laws of syntax, meaning, and representation.)

This is a fine book, and one that should be read in one sitting in order to enter into the mind of—or, rather, the chorus that is the mind of—a woman who poses the major philosophical and metaphysical questions of our time and all times. As this is the first Hilst to be translated into English this year, I look forward to reading more by this unclassifiable Brazilian author who manages to cover every human experience, dream, fantasy, despair, nightmare, and desire (both sacred and profound) in a mere fifty-odd pages.… (meer)