3 stars

**Thank you to NetGalley for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.**

Basics

Author: she/her (Brazil, Portuguese)
Genre: erotic fiction
Themes: sex, temptation, grossness of life/living
Vibes: blasphemous, hilarious, visceral

Quotes - Bizarre & Blasphemous & Grotesquely Beautiful

"What a butt! I laid my face there and sometimes half tearful, half silly, said to those stuffed meats, if I had had a little pillow like yours, Lutecia, when I was a filthy, shabby kid, I would have been a poet."

"I come thick thinking: I am a Brazilian writer, something of a macho, baby. Let's go."

"...your v*gina was a mixture of yellow star apples and loquats."

"But the phallus in the pink, in women, only in extremis."

"A woman's a** should serve as good steaks in case of an avalanche. Did you read about such people who ate their favorite frozen guyfriends or girlfriends? Do you remember that other guy, a Japanese man, who literally ate his little Dutch lover? Only there was no avalanche. He even ate her at home, and after having spent some time in the asylum when he got out (not sure why he got out) said: I was misunderstood. And how can you understand someone who literally eats someone, without either avalanche or snow?"

"Does he cut your tress with the ax or power saw? If it's the ax you are lying when you say you are not f*cking that guy."

"Reportedly Kraus protected his rim, literally dying of laughter. Do you believe it? He died. Tom wants to prove homicide...but who is going to believe that a guy died from laughing just from the threat of having his button licked?"

"Do you remember the whole Mishima story? The one who did seppuku... There were the details: he ate cabbage and thinly sliced raw chicken at dinner the night before. After he stuffed his orifices with cotton rolls so that his feces would not come out at zero hour. I have a horror of writers. The list of perverts is enormous. Rimbaud, the so-called genius: he would pluck lice off himself and throw them on the public. He urinated in people's glasses in bars...Then Proust: he tells how he stuck needles in the tiny eyes of mice. He beat the poor things. Genet: he would eat the crabs he found in his lover's crotch. Foucault: he'd go out at night, dressed completely in black leather, maybe sado, or maso, giving up and feasting on *ssholes. Mishima himself, crazy for sweaty soldiers and blood. He got off the first time he saw a picture of St. Sebastian pierced with arrows."

"And the otolaryngologist said: ma'am, there are basically three holes made for what the lady allowed to be done in her ear and there is no need to cite the three, but ears and nostrils are unfit to receive semen, do you understand?"

"But cheer up: yesterday I dreamed that I was sucking your p*ssy and you were ascending into the heavens with a harp between your thighs... Then two angels rolled me over like an o and licked me with silver tongues... Then, God himself... put a tire around my neck that looked like a collar, and was displaying a I know not what (how to name the ostentatiousness of God?), a pink and kitsch enough giant chorizo, decorated with tiny stars. I was completely shattered inside. I saw stars..."

"Think of all the innards. In the sewer of this package that is the body. Beautiful machine, say the fantasists. And then you remember the package of sh*t that is your body. Of a heap of debris. Of the foulness of being alive."

"A writer isn't a saint, my man. The thing is inventing ballsy stuff, things to turn people on, p*ssies in hand, the guys want to read something that makes them forget they're mortal and sh*t."

"I will never forget that providential prolonged and silent fart of age 14."

"He was telluric and unique. He was dreaming. He dreamt of goodbyes and shadows. He dreamt of gods. He was cruel because he had always been desperate. He encountered a human-angel. So that they might live together, on Earth, forever, he cut off his wings. The other killed himself, plunging into the waters. I am still alive today. I'm old. At night I drink a lot and look at the stars. Often, I write. Then I reconsider that one, the snowy breath, the desperation. I lie down. Austerely, I dream that I sow black beans and wings across a dark, sometimes mother-of-pearl, earth."

Pros

+ this is heinous, blasphemous, and erotic/gross and I had a blast reading it
+ HAHAHAHAHAHA for real
+ visceral, gross writing I love
+ stream of consciousness writing style DOES mostly work for me here (especially in the first part)
+ the absolute absurdist quotes made me literally laugh out loud (a woman writing a man writing to a woman (his sister/lover) about his conquests (men & women))
+ pan/bisexual opportunist lover (women & men)
+ absolutely WILD shit he's writing in these letters
+ laughing to death from protecting your butthole virginity
+ angelic orgy with God and his star-studded salami
+ some content is surprisingly modern (if you're not sleeping with the gardener who cuts wood with an ax, you're a liar)
+ another reviewer (Kev Nickells) said "you probably drift 10ft further from God every time this book makes you laugh" and I 100000% AGREE. It's blasphemous and hilarious and really, truly f*cked up

Neutral

/ Let's pour one out for the translator, John Keene, who must've had a helluva time translating this
/ Some glimmers of truly beautiful writing and hilariously dark prose but mixed with inane ramblings that don't make much sense. Mixed feelings about the writing style.

Cons

- something about "c*nt" being written so many times in so many pages makes me cringe 😬 it's definitely my American curse-word preferences because I never use it (Aussies love using it)
- Sadly, the work splits into another narrative half way through. I was SO confused. I went back to the synopsis and found this: "The letters' text becomes intertwined with the life of the poet Stamatius, who finds Karl's letters in the trash. It quickly dawns upon the reader that both men are in fact the same person albeit at different points of time and circumstance." I'm going to keep reading, but that switch up was really disorienting and almost made me DNF the book.
- The last half of the book (the 2nd and 3rd sections) is rambly, incoherent, and less incisively sharp and witty than the first part. Bummer.

Similar Recs

In Praise of the Stepmother by Mario Vargas Llosa (incest vibes in weird format) × Little Birds by Anais Nin (grossly erotic themes/tone)

TW

explicit sexual content, cheating, incest, an abundance of curse words, sex with a minor (referenced), f-slur, sexualization/fantasies about himself/his sister in their childhood, murder, disposal of a corpse, blood, cutting off body parts, farts, suicide, hanging

A literary classic translated from Brazilian Portuguese to English, Hilst tells the story of Karl, a wealthy amoral man who seeks an answer to his incomprehension of life through sex.

When reading this I am reminded that just because a book is classed as a literary classic it does not make it a good book.

Letters from a seducer explores themes of sexuality, gender, incest and literary creation. It is evident that this book was written to shock and outrage and disturb the reader, which whilst it does so somewhat successfully, there is nothing of substance here.

The book has it's amusing moments, however I am not sure whether that is a failing in the translation, a failing in the writing or whether it is genuinely mean to amuse. The plot is bare bones and honestly just boring.

Thank you to NetGalley and Pushkin press for providing an ARC copy in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

An appeal of the writing of this translated work is that the central concept of this work is that the subject matter is sex, but that does not necessarily translate to being erotic. These are not scenes written to arouse or appeal to the reader in a romantic sense, but it is a man describing his experiences in a letter written to his sister, Cordelia, while also trying to get her to confess her own. We, as the reader, only read from his perspective as we have no insights to her answering letters, which Hilst uses this one sided conversation expertly as a tool of storytelling.

The result is the story feels somewhat meandering and chaotic, but I do believe this is an intentional layout. If someone wants a crisp, tight story, then Letters from a Seducer is probably not a work for you. That being said, it was easy to get lost in the rambling of the arranged letters to tell a story that, without the layers of pornographic and sexual content, really does not have much. The presence of sex is vital, but also with its copious nature is able to exhibit that there is not a message or moral stance within. Definitely one of those books where the reading experience is the most important thing to consider, and not every novel needs to be focused on the content of the story being told. If you would like to let your mind wander and ride the waves of prose, pick up this translation!

Still reading but I will come back over time to adjust the feedback .. once you get over the incest, it’s not a bad book, it’s very erotic and I’m very heavy on the very. i took a chance on the book on the book and I’m really hoping that they just move away from that

UPDATE: Yeah, that incest theme went throughout the book, there were parts of it where I'm sure if I wasn't so taken up with the incest part, would have been a decent read, this is on me. Incest aside, I found it very difficult to read the book like the writing in my head was just all over the place and I had to reread it a couple times to try to understand what was even happening

Overall not as exciting and interesting as I was hoping.
It had a few good parts, but failed to keep my attention.
Maybe my brain isn't cut out for this?

The Literary Review used to give an annual award for the worst sex scene in a fictional book. Letter from a Seducer is one long series of bad sex scenes trying to outdo each other. The basis of what passes for the plot is the rich and amoral Karl writing a series of letters to his sister in a manner that suggests some interesting family dynamics as well as an odd mindset that thinks telling smutty stories to a sibling is the thing to do.
Initially the book is quite funny,I'm not sure whether that's deliberate but the words used to describe various reproductive bodily parts are so ludicrous as to be literally laughable.
I recently read a book by the Marquis De Sade whose story was equally outrageous but for all his manifold faults the infamous Marquis can actually write, this felt like a very bad parody of his writing style.
I rarely fail to finish a book but this was a real struggle, it appears to be written purely to outrage. Maybe it would outrage plenty of people, personally I was quickly bored and if there was a point to it I missed it.

Unfortunately, the download for this book did not work properly and the text on a page was not in the right place, making it totally unredable.

Okay this could have been my fault but I had a hard time reading this one. Based on the description I was aware of the content I’d be reading but the formatting and the writing wasn’t for me. That took me out of the reading experience. I’m not sure if it’s the translation to English that also made some of it confusing but some of that also made the content hard to digest.

3.5/5 stars

You have to take this book for what it is. It’s hideously dark in light tones. Hilst rivals, or perhaps surpasses, Anaïs Nin in her treatment of the taboo; sodomy, cannibalism. Incest, a predominant topic of this book, especially the epistolary section, is not shied away from. The biting, witty jabs of a jealous brother writing his sister erotically can only be written in such a way: Hilst achieves this.

There is something to be said for the strength of Karl’s epistolary section as opposed to Tiu’s writings: I wished that the letters had taken up more of the book.

Thank you NetGalley and Pushkin Press Classics for the ARC.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for this ARC.

Unfortunately I was unable to finish this. This wasn’t for me in the slightest, I didn’t like the writing and couldn’t really get passed the first few pages.