A wickedly funny work of depraved genius by one of Brazil's most radical twentieth-century writers - part Clarice Lispector, part Marquis de Sade
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'This brief, lyrical and scalding account of a mind unhinged recalls the passionate urgency of Artaud and de Sade's waking dreams in which sex and death are forever conjoined and love's "vivid time" irretrievably lost' Rikki Ducornet
'Like her friend and admirer Clarice Lispector, Hilda Hilst was a passionate explorer of the sacred and the profane, the pure and the obscene, and shows, in this discomfiting, hypnotic work, just how rarely those categories are what they seem' Benjamin Moser
'Consider this your personal message of recommendation from me to you to read Hilda Hilst, as much as you can. The Obscene Madame D is the most striking account of aging, grieving and dwelling you'll read. More honest for its strangeness than any conventional text. . . After reading any Hilst your body and mind will make more and less sense to each other. Your verbal and sensorial understandings will alter, you'll slap your thigh and yell at the shock of a line, you'll feel drunk, ungodly and fantastically free.' Holly Pester, author of 'The Lodgers'
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The Obscene Madame D is the electrifying masterpiece by one of modern Brazilian literature's most significant and controversial writers.
At sixty years old, Hillé decides to abandon conventional life and devote the rest of her days to contemplation in a recess under the stairs. There, she is haunted by her perplexed, recently deceased lover, Ehud, who cannot understand her rejection of common sense, sex and a simple life in favour of vain metaphysical speculations.
In a stream-of-consciousness monologue, Hillé speaks of her search for spiritual fulfilment from a space of dereliction. In thrilling prose that is part Joyce, part Lispector and part de Sade, Hilda Hilst takes us into the disorder and beauty of a mind restlessly testing its own limits.
