I understand the appeal of this but I really was not the right audience for this book unfortunately. the premise seemed so interesting but the prose and just the way the story is told was confusing and it was kinda just sexual musings over and over and it got dull quickly. it’s a pretty short novella but it took me awhile to get through it just because of the writing style

This strange novella features a lot of stream-of-consciousness exchanges between the lead and her common-law spouse / lover. Hille, the protagonist, is a woman who's decided to withdraw from her normal life and live a celibate, hermetic existence in a recess under the stairs of the home she shares with Ehud (her lover / long-time partner.)

It is a thought-provoking and philosophical work and will be most of interest to readers who like such books. On the other hand, it isn't likely to have much appeal for readers of commercial fiction. It's not story-driven and isn't even deeply character-driven. [Except in the sense of showing thought processes that encourage the reader to drill down into the character's psyche.] This book has been placed in the genre of (and titled as) erotica (or even pornography,) but I would say that it is much less accurately defined as such than other works of that category, including Hilst's "Letters from a Seducer." This isn't to say the book doesn't use graphic language or mention past sexual activity, but it's not erotic at the core. It's not shy about sex or "vulgar language" by any means, but it is a book about a woman who has given up sex along with other activities of ordinary life.

Ultimately, I'd recommend this book for readers of psychological and philosophical literary fiction. It is not intensely readable as a story and is not intensely erotic as erotica, but it does keep a curious person wondering about the motives and future of Hille.

"How possible is it to know the self when the self is seemingly unknowable?"

"You wear a mask, love , a livid and violent mask, to look at you is to penetrate into the vortex of nothingness, may your silence make itself mine and we’ll wander together in a lacunous vastitude, that’s why I speak, speak to exorcise you, that’s why I work with words, also to exorcize myself, that the bitterness of the abysses may cease, that may break in this tide of phonemes, of syllables, that a light may break, exempt of anguish it’s best to be quiet when your name is passion."

"remember that I asked you what becomes of the soul in madness? when you go answer me from over there. squeeze my hand. remember you promised to keep me so I wouldn’t go mad and now alone, your place empty, hold me the way you would a very small child."


💭 A delirious, grotesque and bizarre depiction of a woman's madness. Takes us into the 'decrepit or derelict' and vulgar mind of the sixty years old protagonist narrator Hillé, or Madame D (D for derelict), as she's going through an existential crisis. She's delirious and has these conversations with her husband in her mind. Just one of the closest things I've read to being inside the mind of a person who is going insane or has schizophrenia. Voices and phrases appear unannounced, just dropping in randomly as if I am inhabiting the mind of a schizophrenic. This book reads like an existential nightmare.
💭 Ka palingin sa tuod Lang. foaming verbosity...frenetic stream of consciousness...leaves a lot to decipher ..so convoluted, somewhat disorienting and challenging to read...propulsive pace...full of abrupt thematic and narrative shifts...the narrator being so utterly unreliable and ostensibly mad...
I find some phrases amusing like "from the pee to the peepee to the pipits" 😹 and "Who am I to forget you Precious Child, Glistening Divinoid Head" 😹
Overall, it is a unique and thrilling read yet sometimes hard to 'make it make sense' due to such a complex, experimental and challenging narrative.


3.5✨

Hilst is a master at talking about both difficult and heavy topics and not at any point overdoing it. Surprisingly readable for a quite densely packed book, where there’s a fine balance of philosophy and deep thought intermingled with a very raw and grounded feeling to the narrative.

I would recommend for the right reader. I'm in general a lover of translated female fiction. But I think this was just a bit too classic/lyrical for me to connect to and get meaning out of. I enjoyed reading it, but the only reason I had a clue what was going on was due to the introduction.

The Obscene Madame D is one of those books that hits you in the gut and never really lets go. It’s a wild, intoxicating ride through the fragmented mind of its narrator, Hille (possibly the alter-ego of the author, Hilst), whose introspective reflections on her life, marriage, and existence twist in unexpected ways. This novel is raw, seductive, and startlingly intelligent, and it drips with a kind of chaotic beauty that can only be found in the works of those who dare to stretch the limits of storytelling.

Reading this felt like revisiting the awe I first experienced with Clarice Lispector and Marguerite Duras—two literary icons who, like Hilst, completely revolutionize how we understand narrative. These writers take the boundaries of literature and pull them apart, leaving us with something far more intimate, fragmented, and profoundly human. And just like Lispector and Duras, Hilst’s work makes you reconsider everything you thought you knew about narrative structure, about language, and about the deep, often contradictory complexities of being human.

The Obscene Madame D is not for the faint of heart. It’s a dizzying stream-of-consciousness journey where the text twists and drifts, like a river of thought that refuses to stay in one place. The punctuation is erratic, the capitalization sometimes nonsensical, and the sentences often drift off into nothingness—much like the narrator’s mind. But it’s this very dissonance that brings the story to life. The words are alive, like fragments of memory, emotions, and fleeting moments that the narrator can’t quite capture or contain.

The novel is filled with conversations—often passionate and sometimes troubling—between Hille and her husband, Ehud, but also with villagers, with the space around them, and with her own inner world. Themes of God, sex, death, and fatherhood ripple through the text, giving us glimpses into a deeper, darker landscape of thought. There are moments of stunning clarity, where life and love appear as "splendor and marvel," and then there are the darker, more unsettling moments, full of "sinister" silence and aching absence. It’s a deeply emotional and surreal experience, yet it’s also undeniably beautiful in its way.

One thing that struck me about this book is the incredible effort of the translator, who took on the challenge of rendering such a complex, unruly work into another language. The original’s structure and fragmented syntax must have been a nightmare to translate, but the result is an astonishingly powerful piece of writing. The translator has done the book justice, capturing the raw, chaotic beauty of the original in a way that makes you feel every shift in the narrator’s thoughts.

If you’re someone who loves to lose yourself in the intricacies of language and emotion, who enjoys books that demand your full attention and don’t make it easy to follow, then The Obscene Madame D is a must-read. It is profound, moving, and strange in the most remarkable ways.

Hilda Hilst’s ‘The Obscene Madame D’ is if Georges Bataille was a woman and Sylvia Plath was Hilda Hilst.

If I had read this in Portuguese I would have DNF it after 10 pages due to the writing and the fact that Portuguese is a very "raw" language and it would be hard for me to read certain parts considering the language used and the violence portrayed. That was also why I thought this short but impactful book read like the offspring of Fernanda Melchor and Clarice Lispector. Don't ask me why. It's not an easy read, but the subjects discussed made it interesting and kept me going.

Loved the concept but the writing style got in the way for me. No speech marks so it was hard to tell when/if people were speaking, but also it’s written in the style of word vomit so it’s quite suffocating for a book so short,

If you get along with stream of consciousness or writing that challenges grammatical norms, then this might work for you.

Wow! This is my first Latin Lit book I have read. I struggle with understanding translated literature at times. It was a raw depiction of women’s inner instability and sexual desires. To me, it was jaw dropping and poetic. It was challenging at times to read but definitely worth the push.

This was such a weird read and I'm not quite sure how I feel about it. In this book, a sixty-year-old woman hides under the stairs and becomes increasingly ostracised by a community which believes she has gone mad as she reflects on sex, god, and the metaphysical. It's a strange premise definitely, and the execution, with an almost stream-of-consciousness narrative style and lyrical prose, made it feel all the more bizarre and oddly hypnotic.

If you want a short, weird read that is probably unlike anything else you've previously read, and enjoy slightly unhinged or nonsensical narrative styles, I'm sure you'd enjoy this. For me, however, I think it was just a bit too out there and even though I enjoyed the themes and ideas I don't think I connected with the book enough for it to make a huge impact.

3.75/5

Although a short read, it was a bit of a difficult read. There are no chapters to break up this monolog; there are also no quotations around what the people are saying. It was a bit difficult to figure out who was saying what. However, once I got used to the writing and figured out who was saying what, this was an interesting story. A little eccentric, but interesting.

Thank you NetGalley and Pushkin Press for sending this book for review consideration. All opinions are my own.

I really enjoyed reading this, it had that concept that I was looking for and enjoyed the way this was told. It had that element that was promised in the description. I though the story worked overall and had that adult feel that I was expecting. Hilda Hilst wrote a great book in this and was excited to read more.