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Acenos e Afagos
Em ACENOS E AFAGOS, Noll narra a história de um homem que abandona uma vida monótona para buscar sua verdadeira identidade e suas paixões — uma epopeia libidinal, como define, em certo momento, divertidamente, o personagem-narrador.
O escritor Sérgio Sant’Anna afirma na orelha do livro: “Como em A fúria do corpo (1981), outra grande obra de João Gilberto Noll, é a libido, radicalmente, que move a escrita (...) Uma libido, no presente caso, quase sempre homoerótica, sem freios, culpa ou pecado. Por isso mesmo, pode-se falar, a respeito de Noll, em santidade, como no caso de Genet visto por Sartre.”
O escritor Sérgio Sant’Anna afirma na orelha do livro: “Como em A fúria do corpo (1981), outra grande obra de João Gilberto Noll, é a libido, radicalmente, que move a escrita (...) Uma libido, no presente caso, quase sempre homoerótica, sem freios, culpa ou pecado. Por isso mesmo, pode-se falar, a respeito de Noll, em santidade, como no caso de Genet visto por Sartre.”
206 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2008
About the author
João Gilberto Noll
26 books40 followersJoão Gilberto Noll was a Brazilian writer born in Porto Alegre, in the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul.
His early years were spent studying at the Catholic Colégio São Pedro. In 1967 he began university coursework in literature at the UFRGS-Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, but in 1969 he interrupted his studies to pursue a career as a journalist in Rio de Janeiro, working for the newspapers Folha da Manhã and Última Hora. In 1970 Noll spent a year in São Paulo working as a copyeditor at the publishing house Editora Nacional, but a year later he moved back to Rio and resumed both his work in journalism at Última Hora, writing on literature, theater and music, and his university studies in literature, first at the Faculdade Notre Dame and then at the PUC-Rio, where he received his degree in 1979.
Noll published his first short story as part of a 1970 Porto Alegre anthology entitled Roda de Fogo, but his more formal literary debut came in 1980 when his first book of short stories O cego e a dançarina (English title: The blind man and the dancer) was released, for which he received three literary prizes. One of Noll's short stories from O cego e a dançarina, Alguma coisa urgentemente (Something urgent), was the basis for the film Nunca fomos tão felizes (English title: We've Never Been So Happy) in 1983, directed by Murilo Salles and starring the actor Claudio Marzo.
Noll received early international attention as a participant in the Writer's Program at the University of Iowa in 1982, and when his work appeared in an anthology of new Brazilian writers published in Germany in 1983. After a short visit to the University of California, Berkeley in 1996, he was invited to teach Brazilian literature there in 1997. He was an invited scholar for a Rockefeller Foundation seminar in Bellagio, Italy, was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002, and spent a two-month writing residency at the Centre for the Study of Brazilian Culture & Society at King's College London in 2004. All of these experiences were to shape the subject matter of later works.
His first collection of stories was followed by the novels A fúria do corpo (1981), Bandoleiros (1985) and Rastros do Verão (1986). Two of his subsequent and perhaps best-known works, the novels Hotel Atlantico (1989) and Harmada (1993), later came out in a 1997 English edition, translated by David Treece and published by Boulevard Books in London. Another novel, entitled O quieto animal da esquina, appeared in 1991.
From 1998 to 2001 Noll published a twice-weekly series of short stories in the major São Paulo daily Folha de São Paulo, and in 2004 he began to publish longer stories every two weeks in the daily Correio Braziliense published in the federal capital Brasília.
His early years were spent studying at the Catholic Colégio São Pedro. In 1967 he began university coursework in literature at the UFRGS-Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, but in 1969 he interrupted his studies to pursue a career as a journalist in Rio de Janeiro, working for the newspapers Folha da Manhã and Última Hora. In 1970 Noll spent a year in São Paulo working as a copyeditor at the publishing house Editora Nacional, but a year later he moved back to Rio and resumed both his work in journalism at Última Hora, writing on literature, theater and music, and his university studies in literature, first at the Faculdade Notre Dame and then at the PUC-Rio, where he received his degree in 1979.
Noll published his first short story as part of a 1970 Porto Alegre anthology entitled Roda de Fogo, but his more formal literary debut came in 1980 when his first book of short stories O cego e a dançarina (English title: The blind man and the dancer) was released, for which he received three literary prizes. One of Noll's short stories from O cego e a dançarina, Alguma coisa urgentemente (Something urgent), was the basis for the film Nunca fomos tão felizes (English title: We've Never Been So Happy) in 1983, directed by Murilo Salles and starring the actor Claudio Marzo.
Noll received early international attention as a participant in the Writer's Program at the University of Iowa in 1982, and when his work appeared in an anthology of new Brazilian writers published in Germany in 1983. After a short visit to the University of California, Berkeley in 1996, he was invited to teach Brazilian literature there in 1997. He was an invited scholar for a Rockefeller Foundation seminar in Bellagio, Italy, was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002, and spent a two-month writing residency at the Centre for the Study of Brazilian Culture & Society at King's College London in 2004. All of these experiences were to shape the subject matter of later works.
His first collection of stories was followed by the novels A fúria do corpo (1981), Bandoleiros (1985) and Rastros do Verão (1986). Two of his subsequent and perhaps best-known works, the novels Hotel Atlantico (1989) and Harmada (1993), later came out in a 1997 English edition, translated by David Treece and published by Boulevard Books in London. Another novel, entitled O quieto animal da esquina, appeared in 1991.
From 1998 to 2001 Noll published a twice-weekly series of short stories in the major São Paulo daily Folha de São Paulo, and in 2004 he began to publish longer stories every two weeks in the daily Correio Braziliense published in the federal capital Brasília.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 41 reviews
November 13, 2024
The Publisher Says: After abandoning his traditional life in a deteriorating Porto Alegre, the narrator of Hugs and Cuddles zealously recommits himself to a man he calls “the engineer”, a childhood friend with whom he shared a pivotal sexual encounter. Many years have passed since their prepubescent wrestling; everywhere around them is a nation in decline. Representatives of the Brazilian state—everyone from government officials to the impoverished—endlessly harass passers-by for donations to “the cause,” even as a mysterious plague rages. Never mind that. Our insatiable narrator, driven to discover his true self through increasingly transgressive sexual urges, is on an epic journey through the shadows of this dysfunctional yet polite society.
The resulting novel is the late João Gilberto Noll’s most radical statement: A Book of Revelations-grade voyage to the end of gender and the outermost reaches of sexual and artistic expression. Nimbly translated from Portuguese by Edgar Garbelotto, Hugs and Cuddles is an unapologetically explicit fable of fluidity that takes readers from decaying city centers to the dark corridors of a mysterious submarine to a miserable hovel in the rainforest, where, at long last, our narrator finds peace.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: Remember when I reviewed Quiet Creature on the Corner back in 2016? It's the very first Noll story to appear in English. It contained non-consensual heterosex, and it gave me a definite dirty-old-man vibe. That is to say, the book's for a dirty old man not that I'm one!
Buckle up for this tale, ye of little sexcapade tolerance.
There is nothing for it but to say it: Noll's got the one-handed reader squarely in his sights from giddy-up to whoa. If you can think of a way to think about sex, it's in this book. I'm not at that stage of life anymore, but let me tell you it's a heavy breather's dream book.
There is a salad dressing of family secrets, of loyalty given but not reciprocated, reciprocated but betrayed, of gender identities as traps and prisons and comforting hiding places...it's a story that never settles into one groove. There are half a dozen grooves. They each matter, and in the end, each contains a clue to the preoccupations of Author Noll's writing: Honesty and clarity are only so useful in this life but a well-crafted line of bullshit can guide, sustain, and reward you.
The style of the book should be no issue to those who read Milkman or Poguemahone. It's a long, divagating paragraph of startling complexity. Yet the burden of the lyric is simple, that being centered on sex as activity is only fun if you play with sex as biology defines it. The way in and the way out of a soul is the same as it is for a body.
If the roman-fleuve formal technique were somehow packed tight into this book's sausage-casing of 240 pages, it would resemble the scope and the effect of the paragraph as we move from a submarine to a rural shack, from the kind of sex that lives in your memory to the kind you'd pay money to forget. There's not one page not steeped in sex, whether actual sexual activity or contemplating it.
All of which, most curiously, is the opposite of erotically thrilling to me. I quickly discounted the erotic tone of the writer's discussion of personhood, belonging, and power dynamics. It became for me a kind of background, a soundtrack...the sounds!...and thus led me to the sad, wistful realization that Author Noll was always questing, Quixote-like, for the one greatest possible reward of sex: Connection. Giving your sexual energy to someone in return for their emotional vulnerability isn't routinely rewarded. It felt to me that, through this entire read, I was hearing a longing tone and a sad wistful sigh as another orgasm rocked the narrator.
It is, in the end, a sad acknowledgment of the "eternal hell of libido" as the organizing principle of a life. Fascinating, strong meat yet savory in its easy-goes-down tartare preparation. Definitely a worthy addition to your shelf.
The resulting novel is the late João Gilberto Noll’s most radical statement: A Book of Revelations-grade voyage to the end of gender and the outermost reaches of sexual and artistic expression. Nimbly translated from Portuguese by Edgar Garbelotto, Hugs and Cuddles is an unapologetically explicit fable of fluidity that takes readers from decaying city centers to the dark corridors of a mysterious submarine to a miserable hovel in the rainforest, where, at long last, our narrator finds peace.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: Remember when I reviewed Quiet Creature on the Corner back in 2016? It's the very first Noll story to appear in English. It contained non-consensual heterosex, and it gave me a definite dirty-old-man vibe. That is to say, the book's for a dirty old man not that I'm one!
Buckle up for this tale, ye of little sexcapade tolerance.
There is nothing for it but to say it: Noll's got the one-handed reader squarely in his sights from giddy-up to whoa. If you can think of a way to think about sex, it's in this book. I'm not at that stage of life anymore, but let me tell you it's a heavy breather's dream book.
There is a salad dressing of family secrets, of loyalty given but not reciprocated, reciprocated but betrayed, of gender identities as traps and prisons and comforting hiding places...it's a story that never settles into one groove. There are half a dozen grooves. They each matter, and in the end, each contains a clue to the preoccupations of Author Noll's writing: Honesty and clarity are only so useful in this life but a well-crafted line of bullshit can guide, sustain, and reward you.
The style of the book should be no issue to those who read Milkman or Poguemahone. It's a long, divagating paragraph of startling complexity. Yet the burden of the lyric is simple, that being centered on sex as activity is only fun if you play with sex as biology defines it. The way in and the way out of a soul is the same as it is for a body.
If the roman-fleuve formal technique were somehow packed tight into this book's sausage-casing of 240 pages, it would resemble the scope and the effect of the paragraph as we move from a submarine to a rural shack, from the kind of sex that lives in your memory to the kind you'd pay money to forget. There's not one page not steeped in sex, whether actual sexual activity or contemplating it.
All of which, most curiously, is the opposite of erotically thrilling to me. I quickly discounted the erotic tone of the writer's discussion of personhood, belonging, and power dynamics. It became for me a kind of background, a soundtrack...the sounds!...and thus led me to the sad, wistful realization that Author Noll was always questing, Quixote-like, for the one greatest possible reward of sex: Connection. Giving your sexual energy to someone in return for their emotional vulnerability isn't routinely rewarded. It felt to me that, through this entire read, I was hearing a longing tone and a sad wistful sigh as another orgasm rocked the narrator.
It is, in the end, a sad acknowledgment of the "eternal hell of libido" as the organizing principle of a life. Fascinating, strong meat yet savory in its easy-goes-down tartare preparation. Definitely a worthy addition to your shelf.
November 20, 2022
My goodness this book is filthy in the best way. The prose is dense, which did take some getting used to. I'd call this book a queer hallucinatory fever dream. I'd warn it's not for the easily perturbed.
September 16, 2022
A water slide, an acid trip, a no-holds-bar extravaganza—whatever you choose to describe this peculiar and obscene book wouldn’t be enough. The beginning: the unnamed main character is falling for a childhood friend who they only call ‘the engineer.’ What follows is a seedy and difficult sexual ramble, as the narrator follows their eroticism into a submarine, exponential affairs, and island wilds. I left this book speechless, aghast, and, somehow, wanting more and more. Tread carefully but with abandon!
February 17, 2023
the fuck was that
December 29, 2022
A rare dnf for me. It's probably on me more than on the book itself, but I can't tell what the hell is happening. I am not the right reader for Noll's free-wheeling dreamscape style of writing.
November 10, 2022
This was a wild ride — it’s all one big swirl of verbose liquid, unrelenting until it’s final sentence, drenched in sexuality, physicality, and unflinching desire, all mixed up into a blunt and beautiful blur of the wildness at the core of human existence; a novel that throws ideas of sexuality, longing, gender, family, and loyalty into a massive literary blender before pulsing it out into a kaleidoscope of writing difficult to call anything other than… alive.
January 26, 2025
Que final sensacional!
July 20, 2012
Obra incrível, texto surpreendente, narrativa complexa cheia de idas e vindas no tempo, misturando realidade com delírios.
Violento, explosivo, calmo, saudoso e definitvamente sexual, recomendo leitura.
Violento, explosivo, calmo, saudoso e definitvamente sexual, recomendo leitura.
September 12, 2023
"In other words, the possible, banal faults of my days were supplanted by my carnal fever at night. I felt more like a woman each day. Or not: whenever I felt some craving from the past arise inside me, I would immediately access the man I had been in the golden days of my youth. In certain moments, I felt so much longing I thought only sudden death could help me. Other times, I felt so feminine that, yes, I'd fall in love with the man I'd once been."
When I search for adjectives to describe Hugs and Cuddles by João Gilberto Noll, which wins the Most Mistitled Book award, trans, I end up with 'filthy', 'seedy', 'obscene', and such. It is so sexually explicit, transgressively freewheeling, so orgiastic and dissolute in ways that test the boundaries, that you just read on in mesmeric, and somewhat horrified, fascination. It doesn't help that it is a 274-page block of text, without paragraph or chapter breaks. Laurels to Edgar Garbelotto for translating it from Portuguese.
Through its sex- and orgasm-fueled narrative, a very controversial picture of sexuality emerges, especially in the sections exploring bestiality and incest, that turn conceptions of pleasure quite unconventional. By the by, Noll examines gender norms and identities, queer relationship dynamics, the joys and limits of purely physical sex, and the dawn and demise of desire. The body, in all its basest and most corporeal functions, lies at the center. But be warned: it's a difficult, off-putting novel to read for a range of reasons.
(I received a finished copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.)
July 6, 2024
This was a very, very interesting book, and definitely the most sexually explicit book I’ve ever read. It’s about a man’s exploration of sex and gender, against the backdrop of a politically unstable Brazil. There were parts that I enjoyed, but I definitely struggled with both the content and the writing style. It definitely pushed boundaries, which I can respect, but I think it just wasn’t for me.
September 21, 2023
I'm not totally sure how to even rate this! A weird stream of consciousness whirlwind of horniness and gender fuckery. Sometimes kinda funny, sometimes nasty, with a dark political commentary looming throughout. Sex, sexuality, gender roles, family, and violence all melt together. I feel a sense of the political statement but I think much of it has flown over my head.
October 18, 2022
In stores today! Read Jenny Wu’s brilliant review in Astra Mag: https://astra-mag.com/articles/prison...
March 31, 2025
One of my weirdest, albeit enjoyable, reads.
Not for straight people.
Not for straight people.
March 23, 2024
Virginia Woolf’s Orlando but much, much hornier. Someone is having sex on every page of this, multiple times, in ways that confuse the soul. I loved it
June 22, 2026
I’m sure some could argue that there are interesting things happening in this book; however, I’d say nothing is interesting enough to ignore the run-on format, the nonchalant beastiality, or the unapologetic incest.
I paired this book with Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl to explore what it takes to be liberated by one’s desire. However, Hugs and Cuddles is much more of the main character’s plea to be liberated from, not by, his sexual desire. Sex is written as compulsory and spiritless, which wouldn’t be a problem if it was intentionally spotlighting his shame. However, any such commentary was lost in the uninterrupted prose, droning on and on until all of the intended erotic pathos gets depleted. Fortunately (for my 2026 book-pairings), the second half of this book does take a turn towards the magical realism of Lawlor’s novel. Where Paul transforms under genderfuck logics, the narrator of Hugs and Cuddles has a much more passive transformation in order to comply with the heteronormative boundaries of his desires. With ground as fertile as the transfiguration of the main character’s biological sex by sheer will, it’s disappointing to reflect on how much I ultimately felt this story to be a waste.
——————————————————————————
“As much as I had taken in his body, perhaps he still didn’t realize that our tumid embrace was in fact pleasure, and we would never tire of repeating it from that moment onward. Addiction. We could not forgive ourselves for the intensity we were feeling for each other.”
“The place he meant to hide because of hygiene was a secret treasure, an opium for the seeker of pleasure… We would become a tomb in which to bury the toy we had created of each other’s bodies.”
“He kept talking and I retreated into the night’s hidden place between me and myself: darkness the only matter surrounding my repressed lust.”
“Somehow I knew that whenever I was in public, there was someone there who didn’t want to see me living free. The problem was that my consciousness was damaged by the abuses of this thinking. My thoughts overloaded my consciousness, infesting it with all-powerful vultures. I wanted to be God, that was clear, but I suspected that pursuing such a divine career would require a greater theological imagination.”
“He slapped me on the back of my neck, and I almost wanted to start a fight with him, until we hurt each other and knocked ourselves down. Then, we’d cure each other, amen… He was much more pragmatic than anyone else from our generation, so I felt hopeful about his abilities. We went to the movies. As the movie progressed, we looked at each other in the dark, and each one saw in the other, I’m sure, the substance that was missing in ourselves. Just that? Yes, nothing more than that.”
“That massive underwater chamber, sealed from the outside world, already smelled of secretions divorced from their libidinal labors. Soulless, sour, indigestible secretions. If the vessel could provide me with pleasures that were banned on dry land, if I could delve into new libertine delights, then I’d be content. Then they could take me on that wave, and I would never return. After all, what did I gain by staying in Porto Alegre, always hungry while pretending to be satiated?”
“But in the underground hours, there they were, tasting what they so anxiously longed for. Everyone there was ‘discreet,’ lovers and experts of their own bodies. And when we pronounced that word, we tasted audacity, bravery, and the opening of a universe full of agile subtleties, of mischievous filigrees, where we could experiment with erotic trends. There was a future in those circles. We all learned the art of cunning, so we could not only be accepted but also become the object of desire for the ineffable brotherhood.”
“Our hour has come at last. Slowly, my body began to feel erogenous from head to toe; and his, too, I thought. Our cocks experienced a sui generis pulsation. A moment when you feel the phenomenon happening in the other’s groin, and the other feels it happening in yours, without anyone having to lower their eyes to check the genital areas. This tepid dilatation is transparent on your face, your eyes, your lips. Your whole body turns into seduction, and you want to die if the act won’t be realized. The central point of this lust firms itself, gradually, in darkness behind the zipper. You own your lust, it’s yours. Now, keep going, let it flourish. We had already lived the prelude of this act together many times before. But we had always aborted it. And our underwear, always wet. Sometimes, we perspired so much that we followed the trajectory of the drops of sweat falling from each other’s earlobes—earrings in a furtive flight from their own capacity to adorn. We gasped; we wanted to die of excitement. But nothing. The shift is over.”
“Mysteries prefer not to be named. Their strength comes from the exhaustion of the lexicon. That’s why they’re mysteries; they hide themselves on the other side of expression. There, the channels of the Self would be obstructed from any unhealthy curiosity.”
“When I boldly opened a stranger’s shirt, I’d unleash a constellation of caresses. The hand on the shirt buttons is no lesser of a gesture than the hand on the Bible. They both touch on a fetish—be it the button or the Good Word—and begin the work of feeding our infinite hunger.”
“Perhaps a fresh body will come today in my fantasy? Perhaps it is about to appear? The approaching face is still wishy-washy, indistinguishable. Before I can even decipher the contours of this visitor, I go ahead and place the apparition under my retina. This way, I protect the image, I keep it all to myself. There is no harm in trying to incubate the image behind my eyelids. Here inside, the image evolves, and it grants me its singular and obscene enchantment.”
“I had always put myself in between love and sex. Usually, sex won. Now, I was idealizing a love affair between two mature men, more or less settled in life, neither of whom had the sleazy ways of my engineer friend. Maybe I wanted to have some control of my blinding, disorienting lust. I can’t fuck all the men in the world. But I wish I could.”
“The fiction of things ensnared me to the point where I was unable to untangle myself from it. And what was left of so-called reality would find an ineffable refugee in the consulate of all nations.”
“I was constantly reborn with every outburst of libido. As much as I’d get disappointed by one partner or another, and as much as I needed to escape from someone’s presence after I came, I knew how to touch another body; it was as if I’d touched a live wire and died, then was born again from the same electric shock.”
“I asked myself if it was right to feel so much desire and desolation at the same time.”
“I was constructing the hope of immortality in the basement of my body.”
“Only the frontiers of your body don’t dissipate, I thought of telling him. There comes a moment like this, where it’s all the same to be here or there: everything is the same diffusion. Maybe my sudden indifference to the immediate space around me had to do with the fact that I had spent hours in the darkness of a coffin, taken as a dead man.”
“I had always been a vacant space for anyone to park in. Until I started kicking the invader out to go looking for other parishes.”
“The orgasm itself comes from restraint, the greedy moment when you swallow your object of pleasure and pretend to imprison it as a treasure. It is then when you, in fact, possess the lover. Release, on the other hand, can be confused with a brief rest, with a momentary withdrawal from the other’s fleshly object, with the act of catching your breath for the big blow that will soon unravel as if it might go on forever.”
“The relief you feel after ejaculation usually doesn’t last long, just long enough to leave a bedroom and see your image in the mirror. In the mirror, you see yourself as you really are: A detached being who urgently needs to connect to another, even if the lover will only last the exact length of a single fuck.”
“By the way, is there anything more difficult to evoke than the sensation of an alien air in the place where one currently finds oneself? But, nonetheless, the sensation was still amazingly woven throughout my new reality, with certain shades of clarity. What did this je-ne-sais-quoi look like? Would it be possible to name this thing dispersed in time? This thing could be just a delicate sleepwalking figure inserted into the flat, surrounding images. I lived on subtleties. Did I need to commune with the body of yet another partner to materialize myself again and again? Or did I need to evade myself so the world would recognize my absence?”
“I felt like I carried half the world in the damaged body that represented me. That was indeed a consolation: taking some kind of council of the living with me to the grave.”
I paired this book with Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl to explore what it takes to be liberated by one’s desire. However, Hugs and Cuddles is much more of the main character’s plea to be liberated from, not by, his sexual desire. Sex is written as compulsory and spiritless, which wouldn’t be a problem if it was intentionally spotlighting his shame. However, any such commentary was lost in the uninterrupted prose, droning on and on until all of the intended erotic pathos gets depleted. Fortunately (for my 2026 book-pairings), the second half of this book does take a turn towards the magical realism of Lawlor’s novel. Where Paul transforms under genderfuck logics, the narrator of Hugs and Cuddles has a much more passive transformation in order to comply with the heteronormative boundaries of his desires. With ground as fertile as the transfiguration of the main character’s biological sex by sheer will, it’s disappointing to reflect on how much I ultimately felt this story to be a waste.
——————————————————————————
“As much as I had taken in his body, perhaps he still didn’t realize that our tumid embrace was in fact pleasure, and we would never tire of repeating it from that moment onward. Addiction. We could not forgive ourselves for the intensity we were feeling for each other.”
“The place he meant to hide because of hygiene was a secret treasure, an opium for the seeker of pleasure… We would become a tomb in which to bury the toy we had created of each other’s bodies.”
“He kept talking and I retreated into the night’s hidden place between me and myself: darkness the only matter surrounding my repressed lust.”
“Somehow I knew that whenever I was in public, there was someone there who didn’t want to see me living free. The problem was that my consciousness was damaged by the abuses of this thinking. My thoughts overloaded my consciousness, infesting it with all-powerful vultures. I wanted to be God, that was clear, but I suspected that pursuing such a divine career would require a greater theological imagination.”
“He slapped me on the back of my neck, and I almost wanted to start a fight with him, until we hurt each other and knocked ourselves down. Then, we’d cure each other, amen… He was much more pragmatic than anyone else from our generation, so I felt hopeful about his abilities. We went to the movies. As the movie progressed, we looked at each other in the dark, and each one saw in the other, I’m sure, the substance that was missing in ourselves. Just that? Yes, nothing more than that.”
“That massive underwater chamber, sealed from the outside world, already smelled of secretions divorced from their libidinal labors. Soulless, sour, indigestible secretions. If the vessel could provide me with pleasures that were banned on dry land, if I could delve into new libertine delights, then I’d be content. Then they could take me on that wave, and I would never return. After all, what did I gain by staying in Porto Alegre, always hungry while pretending to be satiated?”
“But in the underground hours, there they were, tasting what they so anxiously longed for. Everyone there was ‘discreet,’ lovers and experts of their own bodies. And when we pronounced that word, we tasted audacity, bravery, and the opening of a universe full of agile subtleties, of mischievous filigrees, where we could experiment with erotic trends. There was a future in those circles. We all learned the art of cunning, so we could not only be accepted but also become the object of desire for the ineffable brotherhood.”
“Our hour has come at last. Slowly, my body began to feel erogenous from head to toe; and his, too, I thought. Our cocks experienced a sui generis pulsation. A moment when you feel the phenomenon happening in the other’s groin, and the other feels it happening in yours, without anyone having to lower their eyes to check the genital areas. This tepid dilatation is transparent on your face, your eyes, your lips. Your whole body turns into seduction, and you want to die if the act won’t be realized. The central point of this lust firms itself, gradually, in darkness behind the zipper. You own your lust, it’s yours. Now, keep going, let it flourish. We had already lived the prelude of this act together many times before. But we had always aborted it. And our underwear, always wet. Sometimes, we perspired so much that we followed the trajectory of the drops of sweat falling from each other’s earlobes—earrings in a furtive flight from their own capacity to adorn. We gasped; we wanted to die of excitement. But nothing. The shift is over.”
“Mysteries prefer not to be named. Their strength comes from the exhaustion of the lexicon. That’s why they’re mysteries; they hide themselves on the other side of expression. There, the channels of the Self would be obstructed from any unhealthy curiosity.”
“When I boldly opened a stranger’s shirt, I’d unleash a constellation of caresses. The hand on the shirt buttons is no lesser of a gesture than the hand on the Bible. They both touch on a fetish—be it the button or the Good Word—and begin the work of feeding our infinite hunger.”
“Perhaps a fresh body will come today in my fantasy? Perhaps it is about to appear? The approaching face is still wishy-washy, indistinguishable. Before I can even decipher the contours of this visitor, I go ahead and place the apparition under my retina. This way, I protect the image, I keep it all to myself. There is no harm in trying to incubate the image behind my eyelids. Here inside, the image evolves, and it grants me its singular and obscene enchantment.”
“I had always put myself in between love and sex. Usually, sex won. Now, I was idealizing a love affair between two mature men, more or less settled in life, neither of whom had the sleazy ways of my engineer friend. Maybe I wanted to have some control of my blinding, disorienting lust. I can’t fuck all the men in the world. But I wish I could.”
“The fiction of things ensnared me to the point where I was unable to untangle myself from it. And what was left of so-called reality would find an ineffable refugee in the consulate of all nations.”
“I was constantly reborn with every outburst of libido. As much as I’d get disappointed by one partner or another, and as much as I needed to escape from someone’s presence after I came, I knew how to touch another body; it was as if I’d touched a live wire and died, then was born again from the same electric shock.”
“I asked myself if it was right to feel so much desire and desolation at the same time.”
“I was constructing the hope of immortality in the basement of my body.”
“Only the frontiers of your body don’t dissipate, I thought of telling him. There comes a moment like this, where it’s all the same to be here or there: everything is the same diffusion. Maybe my sudden indifference to the immediate space around me had to do with the fact that I had spent hours in the darkness of a coffin, taken as a dead man.”
“I had always been a vacant space for anyone to park in. Until I started kicking the invader out to go looking for other parishes.”
“The orgasm itself comes from restraint, the greedy moment when you swallow your object of pleasure and pretend to imprison it as a treasure. It is then when you, in fact, possess the lover. Release, on the other hand, can be confused with a brief rest, with a momentary withdrawal from the other’s fleshly object, with the act of catching your breath for the big blow that will soon unravel as if it might go on forever.”
“The relief you feel after ejaculation usually doesn’t last long, just long enough to leave a bedroom and see your image in the mirror. In the mirror, you see yourself as you really are: A detached being who urgently needs to connect to another, even if the lover will only last the exact length of a single fuck.”
“By the way, is there anything more difficult to evoke than the sensation of an alien air in the place where one currently finds oneself? But, nonetheless, the sensation was still amazingly woven throughout my new reality, with certain shades of clarity. What did this je-ne-sais-quoi look like? Would it be possible to name this thing dispersed in time? This thing could be just a delicate sleepwalking figure inserted into the flat, surrounding images. I lived on subtleties. Did I need to commune with the body of yet another partner to materialize myself again and again? Or did I need to evade myself so the world would recognize my absence?”
“I felt like I carried half the world in the damaged body that represented me. That was indeed a consolation: taking some kind of council of the living with me to the grave.”
December 13, 2023
This is one of those Your-One-Star-Review-Reads-Like-My-Five-Star-Review books (seriously, check them out [the WTF-Was-That ones, not the Fill-in-the-Phobic ones]), the literary equivalent of those giant penny-drop funnels in museum lobbies (boy oh boy it’s fun to learn and gosh a stunningly altruistic visual marvel to donate) except… y’know… it’s filthy.
May 7, 2023
Thee single most sexually explicit novel I have ever read in my life. Orgiastic, controversial, and bodily in ever single sentence. An odyssey of sexual impulse and genital euphoria.
Is anything that happens in this book real? Who is to say!!!!! An orgasmic epic
Is anything that happens in this book real? Who is to say!!!!! An orgasmic epic
June 12, 2017
A temática (relações homossexuais) e a forma de escrita (densa, sem parágrafos e sem capítulos) não tornam o livro minimamente apelativo.
December 29, 2019
Hard to read...but worth it...
February 8, 2023
I truly had no idea what I was in store for when I started this book. It was WILD, to put it mildly. I actually got quite used to the fact that there were no chapters or breaks and it was just one long story. I thought I would hate that but I actually grew to like it. I wouldn’t want every book to be like that, but I think it really suits this story.
Whew, this book was a JOURNEY. I have never read a raunchier book in my life, but yet.. the prose was so unbelievably beautiful. A true testament to the man who translated this book from Portuguese to English. I feared some of the deeper, more flowery metaphors and turns of phrase would not translate well into English, but I think it really did.
I really enjoyed this story, and this book in general. I have quite literally never read anything like it before. I gave it 4 stars but I’d definitely give it 4.5 if I could.
Whew, this book was a JOURNEY. I have never read a raunchier book in my life, but yet.. the prose was so unbelievably beautiful. A true testament to the man who translated this book from Portuguese to English. I feared some of the deeper, more flowery metaphors and turns of phrase would not translate well into English, but I think it really did.
I really enjoyed this story, and this book in general. I have quite literally never read anything like it before. I gave it 4 stars but I’d definitely give it 4.5 if I could.
April 1, 2024
A fun, weird one! I didn’t finish this one before my loan expired (stopped at exactly the halfway mark) and the next person got it, and with all the other books I’m reading I don’t think I’m likely to pick it up again soon, but I liked the insouciant sexual journey through life. Funny, clever, a few sentences I highlighted for being just such good descriptions of how people act.
Its constant looping discursive voice reminded me a bit of El vampiro de la colonia Roma.
Its constant looping discursive voice reminded me a bit of El vampiro de la colonia Roma.
June 22, 2026
Một cuốn sách quá đổi kỳ lạ và nếu ai mong chờ một câu chuyện logic lớp lang thì không thể tìm thấy trong cuốn sách này, toàn bộ cuốn tiểu thuyết ngắn có cấu trúc như một giấc mơ nơi tâm trí bị trôi dạng vô định và thể xác như một mỏ neo bám lấy thực tại, từ đó tình dục trở thành một công cụ để đánh thức bản ngã. Cảm giác trôi tuột, mông lung và nhầy nhụa mà cuốn sách tạo ra có lẽ sẽ khiến nhiều người khó chịu, nhưng vẫn có sức hấp dẫn bởi sự kỳ quặc, ma mị và đặc biệt của nó.
May 2, 2023
I don’t actually know what I just read. The format was difficult to follow, and I’m not sure if my inability to see the work for what it is, is clouding the quality of the work. I didn’t particularly enjoy the book, but I find it an interesting experience, and exercise in literary story telling.
Over all not for me, also not for the squeamish of faint hearted, or easily lost. Weird book.
Over all not for me, also not for the squeamish of faint hearted, or easily lost. Weird book.
June 19, 2023
Difficult to read on many levels. Challenging but not in a useful way. Obscene but not in a fun way. Disgusting and shocking but with no value. After about a quarter of the way through it became a chore to get through. From there I did a lot skimming, and I didn’t miss much of anything in this perverse acid trip.
October 22, 2022
A science fiction world created where all is seemingly lost. Hated the format of one long paragraph. Maybe a lot was lost in the translation.
My thanks to Edelweiss for this free ebook in exchange for a review.
My thanks to Edelweiss for this free ebook in exchange for a review.
January 10, 2023
Utterly supremely bizarre. Time, names, and logic are there, or not? A tale of sex, transformation, more sex, depravity, more and more sex, and last but not least, transfigurative sex in a paragraph-less confusion that for some reason kept me hooked. Maybe it was the sex. Or not?
February 13, 2023
It might be the ebook copy that I have but the first thirteen pages (that I got through) were all one paragraph. I cannot tell what is going on - so I put it down. Not sure where the stellar reviews are coming from, but maybe I am not the target reader for the author.
November 12, 2020
tão bom ser gay
December 20, 2022
Dense writing style was difficult for me. Enjoyed the antics tho!
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