The Obscene Madame D

(Paperback)

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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, Hill 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, Hill 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.

Reviews

'This brief, lyrical and scalding account of a mind unhinged recalls the passionate urgency of Artaud and de Sades waking dreams in which sex and death are forever conjoined and loves "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 youll 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, youll slap your thigh and yell at the shock of a line, youll feel drunk, ungodly and fantastically free.' - Holly Pester, author of 'The Lodgers'

'Hilst wrote with the ink of melancholy, the quill of playfulness, and, above all, a human body-a womans body' - Victor Heringer, author of 'The Love of Singular Men'

'Hilsts books were about the beauty of the unknowable - and if human reason, the great loser in this story, remains incapable of seeing it, so much the worse for it' - Daniel Galera, author of 'Blood-Drenched Beard'

Author Bio

Hilda Hilst (1930-2004) was born in Ja, a small town in the state of So Paulo. She studied law at the University of So Paulo before dedicating herself to writing from 1954. She published novels, poetry and plays and won many prestigious literary prizes, gaining recognition as one of the most significant and controversial figures in Brazilian literature. Letters from a Seducer is also forthcoming from Pushkin Press.