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 "Maybe all women wonder what men would
be like without their posturing but it seems to me Hilst had more than an inkling..." - Dodie
Bellamy 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.
