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.

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

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.

"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✨

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.