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The Obscene Madame D is the electrifying masterpiece by one of modern Brazilian literature's most significant and controversial writers.

At sixty years old, Hillé decides to abandon conventional life and devote the rest of her days to contemplation in a recess under the stairs. There, she is haunted by her perplexed, recently deceased lover, Ehud, who cannot understand her rejection of common sense, sex and a simple life in favour of vain metaphysical speculations.

In a stream-of-consciousness monologue, Hillé speaks of her search for spiritual fulfilment from a space of dereliction. In thrilling prose that is part Joyce, part Lispector and part de Sade, Hilda Hilst takes us into the disorder and beauty of a mind restlessly testing its own limits.

79 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1982

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About the author

Hilda Hilst

84 books483 followers
Hilda de Almeida Prado Hilst, more widely known as Hilda Hilst (Jaú, April 21, 1930–Campinas, February 4, 2004) was a Brazilian poet, playwright and novelist, whose fiction and poetry were generally based upon delicate intimacy and often insanity and supernatural events. Particularly her late works belong to the tradition of magic realism.

In 1948 she enrolled the Law Course in Faculdade de Direito da Universidade de São Paulo(Largo São Francisco), finishing it in 1952. There she met her best friend, the writer Lygia Fagundes Telles. In 1966, Hilda moved to Casa do Sol (Sunhouse), a country seat next to Campinas, where she hosted a lot of writers and artists for several years. Living there, she dedicated all her time to literary creation.

Hilda Hilst wrote for almost fifty years, and granted the most important Brazilian literary prizes.

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Displaying 1 - 30 of 329 reviews
Profile Image for Paula Mota.
1,665 reviews563 followers
July 17, 2025
Por isso falo, falo, para te exorcizar, por isso trabalho com as palavras, também para me exorcizar a mim, quebram-se os duros dos abismos, um nascível irrompe nessa molhadura de fonemas, sílabas, um nascível de luz, ausente de angústia.

Gosto muito da poesia de Hilda Hilst e embora esta obra seja de prosa, para mim, só fez algum sentido porque a li como se de um longo poema se tratasse. Tive de ler cada vocábulo em voz alta na minha cabeça para me aperceber do ritmo e musicalidade das palavras que, às vezes, parecem atiradas para o papel ao acaso. É uma espiral de loucura através de um fluxo de consciência ainda mais denso do que tudo aquilo que já li até agora, devido ao seu carácter polifónico, mas que encanta e desconcerta. Terei de ler o resto da trilogia em breve.
Profile Image for Carmo.
727 reviews566 followers
July 13, 2016
A obscena senhora D é um livrinho que começa por parecer-nos meio destrambelhado mas que aos poucos vai seduzindo e tomando conta de nós.
A senhora D - de Derrelição, (bendito dicionário ) bem podia ser, Desânimo, Desamparo ou Desespero - é uma mulher de 60 anos que perdeu o amante, e decide refugiar-se no vão das escadas e dar início à sua loucura, para deleite - ou susto - da vizinhança.
Ali começa um monólogo despudorado num caótico e delicioso fluxo de pensamentos.
Escrito de forma anárquica sem respeitar regras gramaticais ou ortográficas, é um desfolhar de memórias, um pranto de velhice, pleno de dúvidas e angústia. As lembranças de um tempo impossível de recuperar, as eternas questões acerca do sentido da vida e da morte, e a pouco pacífica relação com um Deus que não lhe respondeu às inúmeras perguntas, são a matéria desta leitura, um bocado confusa, já que a maior parte do tempo não sabemos quem fala ou com quem. O que não invalida que tenha passagens de pura poesia.

"Enquanto tu morrias eu te abraçava numa fúria alagada, numa sórdida doçura, minha alma era tua!..."

E que termina com uma frase plena de sabedoria:

"Livrai-me Senhor, dos abestados e dos atoleimados."

Amém!

Resta dizer que este livro é o primeiro da trilogia erótica-pornográfica de Hilda Hilst. Podem pôr os pruridos de lado que isto de pornográfico não tem nada. Dois ou três palavrões e até esses, levezinhos.
Profile Image for Justin Evans.
1,716 reviews1,134 followers
June 2, 2015
Holy Mary, yes. A long story about a woman who, for fairly obscure reasons, hides under the stairs and wears crazy masks? Whose husband is disturbed by this, but stays by her? It sounds ridiculous, but is in fact heartbreaking, fascinating, and hilarious, kind of like Thomas Bernhard if he was more imaginative (i.e., if he had any imagination at all). Hilst takes on small issues like, you know, god and existence and evil and madness and love, without ever seeming like she's avoiding more concrete concerns--rather, the concrete concerns are tied up in all of these others. Nathanael's translation is beautiful reading, far less difficult than I had expected.

"
where does Evil come from, Father?
misterium iniquitatis, Madame D, we have been struggling for millenia to find the answer, good and evil, all coexist, the body of Evil is separate from the divine
who created the body of Evil?
Madame D, Evil was not created, it took place, burns like the red poker, and when it wants it cools, turn to frost, turns to snow, it has many masks, and speaking of masks, would you mind getting rid of yours and bringing peace back to the neighborhood?
"

My only complain is with the introduction, which somewhat predictably turns this remarkable piece into post-structuralist fable. But it takes seriously the problems that post-structuralist thinkers too often want to dismiss, and as such is much, much more than a rehash of that roughly contemporaneous school of thought.
Profile Image for Ga.selle (Semi-hiatus) Jones.
341 reviews4 followers
December 9, 2024
"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✨
Profile Image for Alma.
751 reviews
November 29, 2020
"(...) por favor, queria te falar, te falar da morte de Ivan Ilitch, da solidão desse homem, desses nadas do dia a dia que vão consumindo a melhor parte de nós, queria te falar do fardo quando envelhecemos, do desaparecimento, dessa coisa que não existe mas é crua, é viva, o Tempo."

"Quem foi, Ehud, que apagou meu envoltório de luz, quem em mim pergunta o irrespondível, quem não ouve, quem envelhece tanto, quem desgasta a ponta dos meus dedos tateando tudo, quem em mim não sente?"

"(...) e o que foi a vida? uma aventura obscena, de tão lúcida.
Me deitei ao teu lado na tua agonia, escutei verdades e vazios.
Inutilidades. Caminho com pés inchados, Édipo-mulher, e encontro o quê? Memórias, velhice, tateio nadas, amizades que se foram, objetos que foram acariciados, pequenas luzes sobre eles nesta tarde, neste agora, cerco-os com minha pequena luz, uma que me resta, ínfima, amarela, e eles continuam estáticos e ocos, sobre as grandes mesas, sobre as arcas, sobre a estante escura, sonâmbula vou indo, meu passo pobre, meu olho morrendo antes de mim, a pálpebra descida, crestada, os ralos cabelos, os dentes que parecem agrandados, as gengivas subindo, procuro um naco de espelho e olho para Hillé sessenta, Hillé e emoções desmedidas, fogo e sepultura, e falas falas, desperdícios a vida foi, Hillé, como se eu tocasse sozinho um instrumento, qualquer um, baixo, flautim, pistão, oboé, como se eu tocasse sozinho apenas um momento da partitura, mas o concerto todo onde está?"

"(...) quando eu não estiver mais evita o silêncio, a sombra, procura o gesto, a carícia, um outro, procura um outro"
Profile Image for diario_de_um_leitor_pjv .
781 reviews142 followers
February 12, 2024
(RELEITURA 2024)

Reler este livro foi um processo que reforçou a estranheza que a ficção de Hilda Hist me tem provocado. Lido para o Clube de Leitura da Livraria Buchholz, dinamizado pela Tânia Ganho.

(AGOSTO 2022)
Da solidão e das vivências que nos enquadram na vida. No olhar que a morte e o apartar dos outros nos leva ao fechamento e a procura ativa dessa solidão. É sobre esse processo que este livro nos balança, resumindo a vida à procura de um sentido outro para a vida que se segue à dor.

Este primeiro livro de ficção de Hilda Hilst foi uma acaso de aprendizagem e de descoberta num estilo e numa escrita que me hipnotizou. Uma aprendizagem de leitura, de um estilo/texto compacto que apesar da densidade nem sempre fácil, me prendeu como leitor. Em alguns momentos no processo de leitura voltei atrás e recomecei a leitura em voz alta.

Uma escrita interrogativa que nos questiona sem cessar. O uso desse interrogativo, do ponto de interrogação é uma contínua presença no texto.

Um texto que abre mais hipóteses de reflexão do que apresente teses para vida. Um texto que me fez parar, sonhar, reflectir… Um texto sobre o Humano, mas também sobre Deus. Um texto sobre a loucura e a busca de humanidade, a desordem , a liberdade, a anarquia. Um texto que nos obriga ao desconforto. E isso, na literatura e no processo de leitura é tão BOM!

E sim, quero continuar a ler e a trabalhar com a escrita de Hilst.

Leitura realizada no âmbito da iniciativa #eternasescritoras promovida pela @cat.classics cujo mês de Julho é dedicada à América Latina.
Profile Image for Carla.
285 reviews85 followers
September 20, 2017
Uma leitura rápida, mas nem por isso cativante o suficiente.
O texto fragmentário torna-se por vezes impeditivo de sentirmos a proximidade das vozes da narrativa, embora os apontamentos poéticos acabem por equilibrar essa dança entre a proximidade e a distância.
A desconexão das "cenas" contrapõe-se à crueza da linguagem utilizada que convoca a conexão do todo, um todo composto de perplexidades e angústia.
Apesar de não ter "encaixado" completamente nesta leitura, compreendo a importância da obra e da autora no panorama da literatura Brasileira contemporânea.
Profile Image for Luke.
1,627 reviews1,197 followers
June 26, 2017
I don't understand the body either, that caltrop, nor the bloody logic of days, nor the faces that stare me down in this village in which I live, nor what are a house, a concept, what legs are, what is coming and going, toward where and what, Ehud, what these old women are, the howls of childhood, these spent men, what do the fools think of themselves, the children, what is thinking, what is clarity, the sonorous, what is sound, a trill, a cry, a howl, what's a wing uhn?
People who talk of the 'mad' in lit crit and leave it at that are about as useful to me as the people who talk of the 'prose'. The what, pray tell? The mood swings? The sensitivity to certain textures? The brain that's been telling me to kill myself since I was eleven years old? If you can talk succinctly and specifically about the various ideologies of the Bolsheviks and their resulting splinter parties, you can Wiki the current definition of schizophrenia and spare me your mysticisms spewed from the same level that bred the hypothesis of the wandering womb. If you're going to use your crazy aunt as an excuse, newsflash: I am crazy. Your defensive posturing shows the limit of your biologically guaranteed empathy all too clearly, and if you're going to take your remarkable stable biochemistry for granted that ineptly, you don't in any way deserve it.

When I look at this, I think of Lear, but not the king. I think in matters of Cordelia and Goneril and Regan, the blistering diseases wished upon them by their father who demanded from each of them the discourse of incest, the housemaid mother who's worth as much for her willingness to make coffee as her resignation to being commodified as fuckable, the ungrateful, the infertile, the witch. However much Lear wandered, he'd never be thought a prostitute. However much his pagan deities ignored his cries, they could never be coded with jealous eyes, monstrous voices, or virginal martyrdom. This is another text whose surrounding critical gaze uses far too often the lazy slogans of madness and insanity, but it is also another text whose fundament is of too grotesque a shade of truth and power and pain to be completely waved off by the neurotypicals as very tantalizing, very chique, but ultimately of little sound and paler fury. Evil is the sort that finds comfort in the idea that van Gogh didn't have access to medication cause God for bid the world lost such a host of what he left behind. The ones of his type that don't do a lick of painting and hide under stairwells instead, though. They all can go hang.
Dross, yes, the attempt to compose a speech without knowing anything of its beginning nor its end, nor why the necessity for this speech, why the necessity to try to situate oneself, which amounts to attempting to remain clutching a rope over the abyss and without even knowing how it is that one wound up there, nor whether one ought now to move to the right rather than the left, around the fog, bellow a roar, or above it? water? voices? ships? I am reconstituting sophisticated evenings, politics, duties, a sociology of future, a being here, they ask me, kindred with the world, and acting, and authors, citations, foaming verbosity, the ear hearing itself foremost but responding to the people with elegance propriety care as though in fact it had listened to people, theatre, all theatre
It doesn't surprise me with Hilst that poetry and playwright came before prose. I don't care about the facts of her institutionalized father. This author and her creative fount are dead and gone. It's her critics that are so hung up on ideological quarantine that insist on fucking with my reasons to be. You'd think intentional fallacy would have taught them a thing or two, but alas. Fear of the different's only good when it's been put to work.
Profile Image for Proustitute (on hiatus).
264 reviews
November 28, 2014
Alex Estes has written a really wonderful review of Hilst's novel for Full Stop, one in which he views this first publication of her work in English as "the literary miracle of 2012."

Estes's positioning of Hilst's work in the context of Hélène Cixous's notion of l'écriture féminine is spot-on. In Hilst's prose, reality is blurred with madness; the pious is conflated with the impious; and love, grief, and mourning are emotional states that cause profound meditations on individuality—as well as how one can subsume one's identity beneath another's without wholly realizing it.

It makes sense that Hilst was friends with, as well as greatly admired by, Clarice Lispector. Both women share similar themes and, again in line with Estes's review of Madame D, their writing can be said to embody a frenetic, nonlinear l'écriture féminine which allows for these liminal, transient states to be explored in more depth and with more freedom. With that said, Hilst's work is definitely more scatological than Lispector's, and there is a great emphasis on the body and its functions in Madame D, almost reminiscent of Julia Kristeva's and Luce Irigaray's work. (In fact, throughout, I wondered if Hilst and her circle had been reading Lacan's work which would make a lot of sense given her use of the Other, her narrator calling herself "Oedipus-woman," and the stress on self-analysis as a kind of descent into a pre-linguistic realm ungoverned by laws of syntax, meaning, and representation.)

This is a fine book, and one that should be read in one sitting in order to enter into the mind of—or, rather, the chorus that is the mind of—a woman who poses the major philosophical and metaphysical questions of our time and all times. As this is the first Hilst to be translated into English this year, I look forward to reading more by this unclassifiable Brazilian author who manages to cover every human experience, dream, fantasy, despair, nightmare, and desire (both sacred and profound) in a mere fifty-odd pages.
Profile Image for Arthur Dal Ponte Santana.
117 reviews14 followers
August 10, 2020
Se alguém te pede "o que é literatura?", pegue esse livro e use-o para dar um tapa na cara da pessoa

Se eu disse que "A Paixão Segundo G.H." foi um livro que eu li muito tarde, esse foi um livro que eu li na hora certa. Palavra por palavra, o texto entrou na minha cabeça e engoliu o que tinha.
Profile Image for Leah Horlick.
Author 4 books118 followers
Read
April 14, 2023
This was both weird and wild. Like if Charlotte Perkins Gilman possessed James Joyce, read "Wetlands," and then re-wrote "The Yellow Wallpaper" but set in Brazil. Whoa.
Profile Image for B..
165 reviews79 followers
July 9, 2024
There are so many layers to this that it’s difficult to know where to begin, but it’s basically a feminist account of a woman seeking the eternal through metaphysical abstractions and not being able to do that, not just because of its impossibility, but because it’s a social faux pas if you’re a woman. Here the wife “Madame D” has been reduced to an animal in the eyes of her husband and neighbours, when really she is going so far into herself, seeking god/truth, exploring identity and memory, and yet having this part of herself rejected by others because she’s female.

As a result of this, Hillé/Madame D/Name of No One has the essential philosophical nature of her self denied and her husband tries to bring her out of the darkness by grounding herself, but only via patriarchal suggestions of sex and domesticity, which makes her shrink back into her darkness without being understood. Here, sex has been reduced to a ploy by men to drown out metaphysical dead ends and forget about death: “take my cock, good god, and forget, I love you, crazy woman”, and “life is so full of obstacles… that if we don’t stuff ourselves full of it, if we don’t take the necessary plunges into women’s holes… life remains sad.”



Hillé is searching for an existence beyond physicality, without being trapped by expectations based on previous experiences as a wife or lover. She says to her husband Ehud, “you see me as I could never see myself”, and so is diminished by everyone's self-created images of her without ever feeling seen, but also by society's gendered expectations about what a woman's role should be.

Beyond this, however, there’s also the questionable nature of Hillé’s descent into “madness” (quotations because of relativity) because she has become addicted to the searching of metaphysical truths that have no end and are mostly empty—for within these pearls, once found, “there’s nothing inside”—and yet the true metaphysician realises the pointlessness of metaphysics but continues anyway, even if there’s no god or ultimate meaning to be found, and so the framing of her metaphysical lifestyle as mad is only true if you consider abstractly reflecting in solitude mad, which is relative and debatable.

In the end, Madame D(ereliction) has been reduced further to Madame P(ig) the sow all because she’s doing what intellectual men do but is instead misunderstood as crazy because she’s a woman who should clean the house and fuck her husband, which ultimately reveals the true madness as being life under patriarchal control. And so in reality, Madame P(ig) is really Madame P(erson)—you just have to stop thinking like a stupid sexist.
Profile Image for Denisa Ballová.
429 reviews323 followers
November 10, 2022
O ako Osamelosť, Opustenosť, Obscénnosť. Pani O po smrti svojho muža hľadá novú tvár, strháva si masku, už konečne môže robiť to, čo skutočne chce. A tak kričí, aby následne v tichosti prosila. Jej ticho sa potom mení na výkriky. Uzatvára sa pred svetom, izoluje sa. Medzi múrmi svojej kutice sa jej svet rozpadá a ona stráca rozum. Blázni? Blúzni?

Hilda Hilst napísala fantastickú knihu, ktorá obsahuje prúdy myšlienok, často bez bodky sa ponáhľajúce do všetkých strán. Zlievajú sa a potom oddeľujú. V texte znejú viaceré hlasy a riešia sa témy života, smrti, túžby, lásky, vzťah človeka s Bohom, otázky telesnosti. Obscénna pani O v sebe ukrýva toľko právd, že ceruzku som ani neodkladala. Niet strany, na ktorej by som si nepodčiarkla pár slov. Útla a zároveň šokujúca, strhujúca a zvláštna kniha.

“toľko kníh, a v mojej hrudi prázdnota, toľko pravdy, a vo mne ničota, kde si, zlatá pravda? (…) aká je to láska, čo vám strčí hlavu do záchoda, ale tú svoju si naveky drží v bezpečí? (…) buď rada, Hillé, tvoj boh je v bezpečí; no nie je to úžasné milovať ho tam v diaľave a tu dole sa utápať? (…) mužské a ženské telo v hebkom rozrušení, len ja a ty a zložité uzly a rozuzlenia, svetlo v nás, chodidlá, prstoklady, gejzíry.”
Profile Image for ipsit.
85 reviews116 followers
December 31, 2013
A close friend of one of my favorites, Clarice Lispector, Hilst isn’t a far cry from the fragmentary, mutative mindset of that relation. This brief 57-page meta-monologue is stuffed to the gills with ideas of madness from a mind you actually want to see run rampant. It gushes in a somehow more intimate and raving Beckett-ian mode. I wish there were a shitload of little shattering novellas like this everywhere, available in gas stations, as a drug.
Profile Image for Andre Odysseus.
69 reviews
December 30, 2015
This is the 1st book read for the latin-american literature month... Though it only starts in March, there are many books that I want to read in March that are big and complex (like Rayuela) which will take quite a bit of my time... So I am starting to read some of the books, and this is one of them.

I won't promise I'll review all the books of March, but I'll try.


THE OBSCENE MADAME D, by HILDA HILST

The reason why I recommend for readers and lovers of Joyce it is because of the writing techniques... Though we do not have the mastery of James Joyce (he was one great genius in the start of the 20th century, and his most famous book Ulysses is ranked by Modern Library the best book of the 20th century) we have a great use of stream of consciousness, a really different one, that I would describe as frenetic. At first sight it might seem challenging, but the way Hilst writes it is really fluid and addicting (at least to me, but I do love stream of consciousness). And the reason I do not recommend for readers of Woolf and not of Joyce, it is because, probably, the reason you don't like Joyce is because of the raw descriptions of private parts, swearing e.tc., as Virginia Woolf stated, upon reading Ulysses, Joyce had a "cloacal obsession"... And so many believe MRS DALLOWAY is an answer to ULYSSES ... But before we get into THE OBSCENE MADAME D I'll talk about the author.

HILDA HILST was born on April 30th of 1930 and died on February 4th of 2004. Hilst was a brazilian poet, author and playwright, and she is considered by critics one of the best writers of the portugue language of the 20th century. She started her writing career by poetry, and only then she started writing prose. Her books were not sold, and she knew that her books were of good quality. The society even saw her as a freak when she and her husband went to a house in the middle of nowhere, where she did several attempts to record voices of the dead. She was even seen as "slut", because she believed that you could talk whatever you wanted in the way you wanted (in OBSCENE MADAME D Hilst swears quite a bit) and she thought you should not be ashamed of sex, which is a continuous motif on her works. Because her works were not selling, she said she was giving the good literature to God and she got into her shocking period, where she wrote erotica, and books about shocking themes (like paedophilia). I have not read books from that period, but it is said that even though, they are meant to be shocking, she still adds a lot of meaning to those books, and important themes. Those books helped HILDA HILST to be known, and the books that she considered good literature were recognized by critics and she was consecrated as one of the best writers of the 20th century.

Now about the book.

THE OBSCENE MADAME D is about a woman in her sixties, and she is at the corner of the stairs (like Harry Potter [I don't know the name of the thing]) and it is 90 pages in her thoughts. We know that her husband has died, we don't know when, and that had a great impact on her sanity and mental stability. We understand that because of the frenetic stream of consciousness, and by the stream of consciousness we know, by her neighbours, that she has some strange actions, like scaring kids and other things. There are many themes in the book. Helié (Madame D's real name) talks about the decaying of flesh. We understand she atributes intelect to flesh, and sentimental to the soul. The flesh also represents the way you show yourself to other people, and because her flesh is decaying, she does not care how she presents to other people. We also understand the flesh is decaying, because she does not have a lover by her side. We have wives, husbands, girlfriends, boyfriends so we can undress our flesh and be only soul. We can stop being false and be true to our lover. And with her lover, Madame D could strip her flesh and be only soul, but because he is not here anymore her flesh is decaying. Madame D is thinks a lot about the decaying of flesh which parallels to her sanity (or insanity). There is a lot of questions about God. Helié thinks about what is God, where is God, and other things. There is lot of thinking about sex, so if you are disgusted by that, I think you should not read this book.
The writing technique is phenomenal. She was a reader of Joyce, so I believe this frenetic stream of consciousness writing is in part inspired by him, but this is not a copy because it is really different and really mesmerizing. It is fluid, it is raw, it is lyrical, it is beautiful.
In conclusion this is a great underated book (only 128 ratings on Goodreads) which I think everyone should read because of the great themes it carries and the spectacular writing of Ms. Hilst. Do yourself a favor and read this book. You will not regret it.

18-02-2015
Profile Image for Rosa Ramôa.
1,570 reviews85 followers
December 8, 2014

http://youtu.be/LCkORttbGvU

Para (não) compreender a confusa condição humana...LEITURA OBRIGATÓRIA!!!

"Vi-me afastada do centro de alguma coisa que não sei dar nome, nem porisso irei à sacristia, teófaga incestuosa, isso não, eu Hillé também chamada por Ehud A Senhora D, eu Nada, eu Nome de Ninguém, eu a procura da luz numa cegueira silenciosa, sessenta anos à procura do sentido das coisas. Derrelição Ehud me dizia, Derrelição – pela última vez Hillé, Derrelição quer dizer desamparo, abandono, e porque me perguntas a cada dia e não reténs, daqui por diante te chamo A Senhora D. D de Derrelição, ouviu? Desamparo, Abandono, desde sempre a alma em vaziez, buscava nomes, tateava cantos, vincos, acariciava dobras, quem sabe se nos frisos, nos fios, nas torçuras, no fundo das calças, nos nós, nos visíveis cotidianos, no ínfimo absurdo, nos mínimos, um dia a luz, o entender de nós todos o destino, um dia vou compreender, Ehud
compreender o quê?
isso de vida e morte, esses porquês
escute, Senhora D, se ao invés desses tratos com o divino, desses luxos do pensamento, tu me fizesses um café, heim? E apalpava, escorria os dedos na minha anca, nas coxas, encostava a boca nos pêlos, no meu mais fundo, dura boca de Ehud, fina úmida e aberta se me tocava, eu dizia olhe espere, queria tanto te falar, não, não faz agora, Ehud, por favor, queria te falar, te falar da morte de Ivan Ilitch, da solidão desse homem, desses nadas do dia a dia que vão consumindo a melhor parte de nós, queria te falar do fardo quando envelhecemos, do desaparecimento, dessa coisa que não é existe mas é crua, é viva, o Tempo."
Profile Image for Fábio.
237 reviews18 followers
January 15, 2020
“Ter sido. E não poder esquecer. Ter sido. E não mais lembrar. Ser. E perder-se.” Creio que ‘A Obscena Senhora D’ seja o mais desabrido, visceral e agudo retrato da solidão que já li. Não apenas da solidão, mas da precisa combinação de rememoração e amnésia que faz arder a existência até louvá-la, até queimá-la, até aniquilá-la. Derrelição (um dicionário cai bem com esse livro…).

Paixão, desprezo, sexo, deus, poesia, escatologia, filosofia e ignomínia… tudo em um grande fluxo de pensamento. E funciona: Hilda Hilst não parece fazer esforço algum para escrever nessa técnica! Ah, sim… amor. Também se fala de amor, não como certeza — coisa que não é —, mas como “[…] perguntas perguntas, como se fosse simples isso de amar, como se o peito soubesse desse adorno, como posso saber se a alma não compreende?
“a alma sente
“a carne é que sente […]”.

Acho que é isso: amei esse livro; eu o li com a carne.
Profile Image for Caleb.
13 reviews106 followers
January 9, 2022
"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 exorcise 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."

Recommended for fans of Lautréamont, Bataille, and Artaud.
Profile Image for Lori.
199 reviews33 followers
May 27, 2024
Měla jsem to jako knížečku na cesty MHD a nezklamalo. Ani jsem nepoužívala záložku, prostě jsem otevřela a bylo. Nějak nevím, co si o tom celém myslet, nejvíc mě pobavila představa, že jsem učitelka portugalštiny a úryvky dávám jako překlad do písemek 3:)
Profile Image for Chad Post.
251 reviews304 followers
January 21, 2013
This is really interesting. And unique. Reminds me a bit of Duras . . . a schizophrenic Duras. I'm not sure I completely understand this on my first reading, but there are a lot of great parts, such as the litany of curses Hille (aka Madame D) yells at her neighbors ("pig's woody," "cow's cunt") and this bit about trying to understand the body (the whole book is like an existential nightmare of trying to understand life and the relationship between body and self and other):

"Animals, say, why do we kill them? To eat. But eating is abominable, no? All that stuff going down the tube and later becoming mass and even later shit. Close your eyes and try to imagine your body inside. Wriggling, blood. Take the microscope. Ah, not me. What a thing, flesh, nails, hair, and such colors in there, purplish-red. Look at yourself. Where are you now? I'm looking at my stomach. It's horrible Ehud. And you? I'm looking at my lungs. They dilate, compress. Everything enters into me, everything goes out. There's nothing that only goes in? No. And God? God enters and goes out, Ehud? I don't know about that. The priest says that God is inside the heart. So, look at yours, see if it's there, inside. I'm lookin'. Is it? No. Let me listen to your heart. Lord, how it beats!"

Definitely worth reading and contemplating, and hopefully more Hilst books will come out in translation in the near future.
Profile Image for Cody.
991 reviews302 followers
August 29, 2025
The only obscenity here is how criminally under-read Hilst is, am I right or amiright? Bam—comedy. It’s not like there’s a reading market for dried up old fruits pining for the yesterdays of moist fecundity in the basket, their buds so full-to-bursting that they’re practically popping themselves out of their bags, is there? Or is there? Wooh-ha—somebody stop me; I’m terrible, puh-lease. Everybody good? Everyone nice and lubricated out there? Hellll-ooooooo—is this thing on? I mean, the idea that books written prior to the advent of the mp3 might be worthy of a fraction the attention afforded the faux-edgelord boho bullshit cosplaying at transgression via—what?—the easy, often visual appropriation of signs and signifiers older than the desiccated persimmon that wrote this book? You really think my canines have never known the slathering succor of the vibratory secretion? Woof-Woolf! Hot lava incoming! Is that intersection guilty of committing intersectionality, or can no one just use a fucking crosswalk anymore? Hey, no crossing the Left, youknowwhatImean? In whose endo? Mas oui—I’m outta control up here! How much is morality by the pound around this joint, and—no, no—I don’t do scales, Miss Thing. Oooh-gah!—I know I are but what am you.

Goodnight! You’ve been a terrible fucking audience. The Doll. Is. Out.
Profile Image for maria vitória .
69 reviews17 followers
June 30, 2020
"Daqui por diante te chamo A Senhora D. D de Derrelição, ouviu? Desamparo, abandono, desde sempre a alma em vaziez, buscava nomes, tateava cantos, vincos, acariciava dobras, quem sabe se nos frisos, nos fios, nas torçuras, no fundo das calças, nos nós, nos visíveis cotidianos, no ínfimo absurdo, nos mínimos, um dia a luz, o entender de nós todos o destino, um dia vou compreender."
Profile Image for Will.
307 reviews83 followers
March 8, 2013
Wow...this is a powerful piece of one of my favorite writing styles: the self-conscious stream of consciousness novel of reflection; The Obscene Madame D is a short, mad, sexy, shocking, brilliant look into the mind and life of the narrator, Hille (maybe it's Hilst's alter-ego, the introduction alludes) with her husband, Ehud, their passionate conversations and her experiences in the village where she lives . . . Right after finishing I was reminded of the same sense of absolute amazement I felt when I first read Lispector (Hilst's fellow Brazilian country-woman and admirer) and Duras last summer . . . these three women completely change the way I look at literature, for the better, they are absolutely amazing . . . And this is a book where I couldn't help but sympathize with the translator, this is a difficult work, with abnormal punctuation and capitalization, sentences that drift off mid-idea, a cacophonous polyphony of villagers, a stream of consciousness style that drifts throughout time, where the reader can only tell where they are by the occasional context clue (usually revolving around the words God, sex, father, death). This is a profoundly important book, tremendously moving, passionate, ethereal, human . . .

". . . life was splendor and marvel, unparalleled glimmer when you touched me, and sinister and hiccuping and nothingness when you were absent"
Profile Image for Márcio.
682 reviews1 follower
March 4, 2018
O livro é constituído por fluxos de consciência, pensamento, entremeados com conversas/pensamento de Hillé, a obscena senhora D. (de derrelição: abandono; desamparo) com seu falecido amante/marido. Nada é certo, nem mesmo a vida. E nos fluxos e refluxos é que a obra se torna tão interessante, mesmo se a leitura parece difícil, faltam indicações de falas, de quem fala, de quando fala, mas são essas outras forças do texto.

"...e o que foi a vida? uma aventura obscena, de tão lúcida."
Profile Image for floreana.
416 reviews256 followers
June 17, 2021
"una Nada igual a la Tuya, repensando miserias, intentando escapar como Tú mismo, contorneando un vacío, recordando. ¿Tienes memoria? ¿Nostalgia? ¿Alguna vez fuiste otro y ahora eres uno que todavía se acuerda de lo que fue y ya no es?"

quiero. comerme este libro
Profile Image for Brubat.
51 reviews
July 15, 2020
muito bom, não entendi nada, mas muito bom
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