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 Lespecter 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.
