Com os Meus Olhos de Cão

by Hilda Hilst

Como esclarece na nota introdutória ao livro o professor Alcir Pécora, organizador das obras reunidas da autora publicadas pela Editora Globo, Com os meus olhos de cão se situa entre a novela A obscena senhora D e o romance O caderno rosa de Lori Lamby, podendo ser visto como uma ponte, portanto, entre a literatura dita “séria” e a dita “obscena”, como Pécora prefere caracterizar, em oposição à idéia de que a autora teria escrito literatura pornográfica.
Em Com os meus olhos de cão nos encontramos com uma autora absolutamente madura, orquestrando com vigor todos os domínios técnicos da escrita. Como já se sugeriu, a prosa de Hilda é poética, o que se evidencia em qualquer fragmento do texto, que mistura poemas, diálogos e prosa propriamente dita. Retomando recursos anteriormente já experimentados, a autora também multiplica os narradores, tornando ambíguos os enunciadores e criando relações fantasmáticas entre eles, podendo inclusive se replicar em diversos alter egos. O leitor tem que estar atento, pois a passagem de um narrador para outro ou entre presente e passado não é efetuada por procedimentos óbvios da prosa, cabendo ir desmontando, frase após frase, os enunciadores.

Genres: Fiction, Brazil, Poetry, Novella, Literature, Classics, Latin American

96 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

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.

Reviews

[s.penkevich [mental health hiatus] · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘[H]ow should I kill in me the various forms of madness and be at the same time tender and lucid, creative and patient, and survive?’

A mathematics professor persuaded to take a leave of absence finds his mind slipping from clarity towards chaos and self-destruction in Brazilian author Hilde Hilst’s 1984 With My Dog-Eyes (com meus olhos de cão), almost miraculously brought to life in English by Adam Morris. Swaying between first and third person on a surreal riptide of self-reflection that addresses his dismay and distress over his career, his family and ultimately himself, Hilst sends us on an avant-garde journey full of sporadic and seamless transitions of spiraling ramblings and poems interjected into the text. It is a dark, metaphysical voyage of a ‘distorted and trembling’ mind and while only 60 pages in length it will leave you battered and bewildered yet likely in awe of her craft and the philosophical heart that comes alive in the maelstrom of imagery and ideas. While it is certainly dense and disorienting—Morris certainly deserved the Susan Sontag Prize for Literary Translation he was awarded for what must have been quite the undertaking with all the wordplay and hypnotic cadence to Hilst’s prose—it is also a joy to read and not impenetrable by any means. With My Dog-Eyes is a fascinating and feverish account of a mind losing its grip on itself that brilliantly demonstrates the possibilities of language and narrative by an author celebrated in her home country and deserving of a much further reaching admiration.

‘Amós Kéres, mathematician, doomed to the gallows for attempting suicide, justified in his view for having understood that the universe is the work of Evil an man its disciple, and then almost executed for trying to prove the logic of his understanding’

Hilst’s fixation on fraught mental health is on dazzling display in this short yet sprawling novella. As Adam Morris writes in the introduction, this book ‘directly addresses the nexus she believed existed between genius and madness, poetry and mathematics, ’ a subject she frequently explored given her own father had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, as well as a younger cousin she once took as a doomed lover, and her mother with dementia. The ideas presented in the book come in disarray, pushing each other to the side to abruptly take the stage—sometimes apropos of nothing and within the same sentence—and seem blown about like like leaves dancing in the tumult of ‘the wind of ideas uncovering the grotesque mess of our condition.’ These grotesqueries and her habit of exploring sexuality often led critics and readers to term her books as obscene. However, as Morris postulates:

‘in Hilst's formulation, the obscene is differentiated from the erotic and the pornographic by its philosophical and spiritual elements, and also through its act of social provocation.’

This is a philosophical work indeed, often owing a great deal to the minds Kéres himself quotes, most notably Bertrand Russell. It is certainly an avant-garde style and difficult to translate, though the celebrity of Hilst having been mostly confined to Brazil is also due to her refusal to publish outside of small presses providing meager copies. Still, she has been highly acclaimed. Hilst disliked being compared to Virginia Woolf or Clarice Lispector, as critics commonly did, and preferred to align her work with the authors she considered her major influences such as Henry Miller, D.H. Lawrence and Georges Bataille. ‘If I wrote in English,’ she claimed, ‘I’d be Joyce,’ and one can easily find similarities to the famous soliloquies in Ulysses in her own prose style here.

‘God? A surface of ice anchored to laughter. That was God’

Hilst is an author where her biographical details are just as engaging as her stories. A socialite known for her great beauty in her youth, she once stalked Marlon Brando across Paris to seduce him, even dating Dean Martin to get nearer to him. She collected young poets who came to her home, Casa do Sol, to be near her brilliance and serve her around the house (which she filled with numerous dogs, approaching 100 of them at any given time). Her status allowed her entry into the circles of mathematicians and philosophers she respected and learned from them. In her later years to drink heavily for the purpose of not remembering the night, though never starting before 7pm.

‘A minuscule heart trying
To escape instead
Dilating
In search of pure understanding’

This is a discombobulating ride, full of references to other works and punctuated with Kéres’ own poems (such as the one above) that give further abstract insights into his mind. He is a mathematician and has viewed the world through strict principals towards discovering and decoding order, though as his thoughts become scattered (he is put on leave for often pausing 15 full minutes in the middle of a sentence during his lectures) and turn towards suicide the math that once upheld his mind now tortures it (such as question like the solution to I plus I, I being the self).

‘I looked at numbers formulas equations theorems and it was a pleasure, a fiery freeze, a bodyguard for wandering alone without the speech-rupture of others, logicality and reason and nevertheless the possibility of a surprise as though we were unfolding a piece of silk, blue triangles on the fresh surface and suddenly just a dull little grid, lines that we can separate and recompose into triangles again, yes, this we could do, but where did the blue get to, where?’

We follow as best we can through spiralling thoughts on his distaste for academia, his frustrations with being a father and husband, his fondness for a local brothel where he goes to work on equations, and through a sinister and surreal sequence imagining his own execution. It is all in a search for a sense of freedom from the oppressive weight of reality.

‘I can hear him thinking of the various manners of madness and suicide. The madness of the Search, which is made of concentric circles and never arrives at the center, the obscuring, incarnate illusion of finding and understanding. Madness of the refusal, one of the saying everything's okay, we're here and that's enough, we refuse to understand. The madness of passion, the disordered appearance of light upon flesh, delicious-tasting chaos, idiocy feigning affinities. The madness of work and of possession. The madness of going so deep and later turning to look and seeing the world awash in vain slaughter, to be absolutely alone in the depths.’

Hilst’s With My Dog-Eyes is quite the work, though it does lead somewhere and is certainly worth your while. Even if to admire the incredible use of imagery and language constructing this examination of a troubled mind. I am eager to read more of Hilst after this, and am thankful for Morris’ lengthy and insightful introduction. Brief yet feeling far greater than its page length (I finished it in a day but felt like I’d read it for far longer, in a good way) this is a heady and impressive work that pushes language to see what it is really made of.

3.5/5

[Uroš Đurković · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hilda Hilst rođena je 1930. godine u Brazilu u imućnoj porodici. Njen otac bio je veleposednik plantaža kafe, ali i pisac. Ipak, odrastanje u bogatom okruženju nije podrazumevalo i bezbrižnost – Hildini roditelji se razvode kad je ona imala svega dve godine, a otac postepeno pokazuje sve jače znake paranoidne šizofrenije, dok majka oboljeva od demencije nešto kasnije i umire u istom sanatorijumu u kojem je boravio njen bivši muž. Ipak, bez obzira na sve ove okolnosti, Hilda upisuje i završava studije prava na Univerzitetu u Sao Paolu. Iako biva primećena i prihvaćena od strane visoke klase pedesetih godina, Hildi više prija daleko slobodnije društvo umetnika. Postepeno se odaljuje od pravne struke i sa trideset i nekom godinom se potpuno posvećuje književnosti. U međuvremenu putuje Evropom gde, između ostalog, u Parizu (bezuspešno, treba li reći?) uhodi Marlona Branda ne bi li se zainteresovao za nju. Vrativši se u Brazil, gradi svoju čuvenu Kuću Sunca (Casa do Sol) u Kampinosu, na zemljištu koju je nasledila od oca. Tu pravi sopstvenu alternativnu književnu republiku, skupljajući najnekonvencionalnije likove sa raznih strana. Bije je opravdani glas da je osobenjak, pa i neko ko podriva porodične vrednosti. Njena svakodnevica, pa i njen brak sa vajarem Danteom Kasarinijem, bili su, u najmanju ruku, liberalni, a ako je Hilda do nečega držala, to je bio horoskop. Verujući da pisanje pojačava njenog Bika u horoskopu, nije dozvoljavala da je iko spreči u toj nameri. Takođe, osim što je ozbiljno shvatala zodijak, ko god ju je posećivao u Kući Sunca morao je, osim horoskopskog znaka, da otkrije detalje svog seksualnog života, ali i to da li voli pse. Ukoliko je odgovor negativan – Hilda bi mu/joj bez problema uskratila gostoprimstvo. S tim u vezi, treba imati u vidu da je upravo naslov ovog dela vezan za pseću perspektivu, iako je pravo pitanje ne da li u delu pasa uopšte ima, već uopšte šta od čitanja i ostaje. Kao retko šta književnost Hilde Hils uspeva da provocira i to nakon prebogate istorije književnih ekscesa. Nije čudo što je sebe smatrala brazilskim Džojsom, a svoje pomoćnike – Beketima. Ipak, možda bi pre mogla da bude Gertruda Stajn. Paralela sa Klaris Lispektor je takođe apsolutno na mestu, s time što je Hilda još neobičnija. Moglo bi se razmišljati, naravno, i o sponama između Hilde i dekadencije Leopolda Marije Panera. Bilo kako bilo ona je pisac-vanzemaljac koji ujedinjuje matematiku, teologiju, seksualnost, provokaciju i lirizam, bordel i univerzitet, mikologiju i mitologiju, Ernesta Bekera i indijsku misao sedmog veka. Čitanje je izazov i doživljaj gde bi, paradoksalno, letimičnost mogla da donese više uvida od close reading-a. Praćenje rasutosti i poziv na dopričavanje mogu se organizovati upravo kroz nadhermenutiku horoskopa ili, što da ne, tarota – bacite karte i dozvolite tekstu da mađija.

Od početka devedesetih, Hilda počinje religiozno da pije... ma šta pije, šljoka!... jer, život je previše težak da bi se drukčije mogao podneti. Umire nekih petnaestak godina kasnije, ali odjeci njenog dela postaju sve jači, življi i daleko van Brazila. 

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

A mind in the process of shattering careens towards a path of destruction of itself. It is a man, but losing himself; once destroyed does that still make him a man? Once gone where does it go?

"What are feelings anyway? How is it that they vanish without a vestige? Were they ever there?"

Amós: A mathematician and family man losing himself through his misery and through the numbers that amass his being inside his head. Through equations. Through geometry. Through reality.

"I looked at numbers formulas equations theorems and it was a pleasure, a fiery freeze, a bodyguard for wandering alone without the speech-rupture of others, logicality and reason and nevertheless the possibility of a surprise as though we were unfolding a piece of silk, blue triangles on the fresh surface and suddenly just a dull little grid, lines that we can separate and recompose into triangles again, yes, this we could do, but where did the blue get to, where?"

As the darkness takes a hold of him, Amós continues to wander, stammering in no direction, losing control of his sanity and will to live.

"I'm not even sure of the time, a light illuminating and shading my son's face, he on the bicycle, now going slower around through the arbor, and this sofa where I'm still stretched I pass my fingers over the cloth, I cross my hands. Am I still alive? and one day I will leave this house, the sofa for sure, I'll never see the boy or the man (in the mirror) again, and the hibiscus and the arbor and I'll stop seeing any kind of light or any kind of shade. Or will I myself be a shade. And I will stop feeling you, Amós, and I will never again touch paper and books, nor anybody's flesh, not even my own flesh. I swallow as though I were sighing and swallowing at the same time..."

Amós is almost gone, almost there, where he needs to be.

"With a mirror. I'm looking. Unforgettable grotesque condition. Oh, I want the face of He who lives inside."
"I descend into the glassy gorge. Amós Kéres. From here I can hear him comparing the lucidity of an instant to the opacity of infinite days, I can hear him thinking of the various manners of madness and suicide. The madness of the Search, which is made of concentric circles and never arrives at the center, the obscuring, incarnate illusion of finding and understanding. Madness of the refusal, one of the saying everything's okay, we're here and that's enough, we refuse to understand. The madness of passion, the disordered appearance of light upon flesh, delicious-tasting chaos, idiocy feigning affinities. The madness of work and of possession. The madness of going so deep and later turning to look and seeing the world awash in vain slaughter, to be absolutely alone in the depths. Is Amós? From here can I hear him thinking how should I kill myself? or how should I kill in me the various forms of madness and be at the same time tender and lucid, creative and patient, and survive? How can the old love live in me if I understood the instant of Love and now belong to the world of mutes, my fingers wriggling with anxious signals and my throat wide with blanks? How should I kill myself? What sort of signes should Amós transmit before his fingers fall to rest for all eternity? Mute. And man. Lucid and mute. And man."

As he breaks down completely, the scenarios within his mind are vivid and are true to him; reality disappears and he is free. The mind breathes a new breath as he metamorphosizes into the body of a dog.

"With my dog-eyes I stop before the sea. Tremulous and sick. Bent, thin, I smell fish in the driftwood. Fishbone. Tail. I gaze at the sea but don't know its name. I remain standing there, askance, and what I feel is also nameless. I feel my dog body. I don't know the world, nor the sea in front of me. I lie down because my dog body orders it. There's a bark in my throat, a gentle howl. I try to expel it but man-dog I know that I'm dying and I will never be heard. Now I'm a spirit. I'm free and fly over my miserable being, my abandonment, the nothing that contains me and that made me on Earth. I am rising, wet like fog."

Amós is reborn; himself at ease. His conscience has ceased to exist, he is of Earth, of water, of fire, of air. He is.

[jeremy · Rating 4 out of 5]

the third work from hilda hilst - the late brazilian novelist, dramatist, and poet - to be translated into english (after the obscene madame d and letters from a seducer), with my dog-eyes (com meus olhos de cão) is a vertiginous, sometimes disquieting little book. slim and singular, hilst's novella is the story of amós kéres, a professor of mathematics whose tenuous grasp on reality slow begins to disintegrate after a suggested leave of absence. as kéres's sanity slips ever further away, hilst's prose becomes progessively disjointed - a use of style that works to magnificent effect (and must have been very difficult to translate well). punctuated with literary and philosophical references, poems, and a stunning use of language, with my dog-eyes is a unique, unaffected work rife with sexuality and psychological intrigue that persists far beyond the page.

the translator's introduction is indispensable to those unfamiliar with hilst, her life, and her writing. in addition to necessary background, it offers insight and context into both the book and its genesis.

from here i can hear him comparing the lucidity of an instant to the opacity of infinite days, i can hear him thinking of the various manners of madness and suicide. the madness of the Search, which is made of concentric circles and never arrives at the center, the obscuring, incarnate illusion of finding and understanding. madness of the refusal, one of saying everything's okay, we're here and that's enough, we refuse to understand. the madness of passion, the disordered appearance of light upon flesh, delicious-tasting chaos, idiocy feigning affinities. the madness of work and of possession. the madness of going so deep and later turning to look and seeing the world awash in vain slaughter, to be absolutely alone in the depths.

*translated from the portuguese by adam morris

[Jenny McPhee · Rating 5 out of 5]

THE OBSCENE HILDA HILST--my review from Bookslut

"If everyone were to remember what comes out of their butt, everyone would be more generous, show more solidarity," says Tui, in Letters from a Seducer, concluding one of literature's greatest discourses on farting during sex. Shocking, exquisite, mesmerizing, metaphysical, and, above all, obscene considerations abound in three recently, masterfully translated novels, With My Dog-Eyes (Melville House), The Obscene Madame D, and Letters from a Seducer (Nightboat & A Bolha) by Hilda Hilst (1930-2004). Recognized in Brazil as one of the most significant and controversial voices in contemporary literature, Hilst is virtually unknown outside her native country.

Born into a wealthy family of coffee growers, Hilst's childhood was thrown into upheaval when her father was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and eventually institutionalized. She moved with her mother (later committed to the same institution for dementia) to São Paulo, where she earned a law degree and built a successful career as a lawyer. Beautiful and glamorous, she ran with the city's socialites. While still a law student, she began to publish poetry and between 1950 and 1962, produced seven poetry collections. She also wrote plays and in 1970 published her first novel.

In the 1960s, she abandoned her law career, rejected her bourgeois existence, and moved to Casa do Sol, a country house she had built on inherited land. It became a bohemian commune for Hilst's friends, lovers, and aspiring artists and writers, along with her dozens of dogs. In her extensive library she immersed herself in the works of Bataille, Camus, Foucault, Madame de Staël, Bertrand Russell, Ernesto Sábato, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, and William James. Her literary inspirations included Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Jean Genet, D.H. Lawrence, Samuel Beckett, and James Joyce, especially the latter two. "If I wrote in English," she once claimed, "I would be Joyce."

Toward the end of her life she began to drink heavily, cheap whiskey, provoking nasty, belligerent encounters with fellow dwellers at the Casa do Sol. She said, "I drink because it's the only way I can tolerate reality." However, she only hit the bottle after seven p.m. and was up the next morning bright and early tapping away at her Olivetti.

In addition to pornographic, Hilst's work has been described as experimental, unconventional, impenetrable, hermetic, metaphysical, and metalinguistic. Her multi-genre prose overflows with references to world literature, science, philosophy, and religion. As Bruno Carvalho describes in his excellent introduction to Letters from a Seducer, her writing "straddles the lines between seriousness of purpose and irreverence, erudition and kitsch, grotesque and black humor, sublime and sordid." Without taking themselves too seriously, her novels are, as the translator John Keene points out in his introduction to The Obscene Madame D, "anti-novels, de- and re-constructions..." representing "a Foucauldian ethics in fictional form, of becoming and un-becoming, of instability and destabilization; it is an ethics of the mutability of process."

Above all, Hilst is a practitioner of the obscene as a literary aesthetic. Adam Morris, translator of With My Dog-Eyes, says, "In Hilst's formulation, the obscene is differentiated from the erotic and the pornographic by its philosophical and spiritual elements, and also through its act of social provocation."

Like her friend, admirer, and compatriot Clarice Lispector, Hilst rigorously examined the limits of language and the literary pursuit itself. Though their prose styles are equally bouleversant, Lispector uses language like a fine-bladed knife to explore the space between ecstasy and mundanity, while Hilst uses language like a rod, ramming it every which way in order to collapse the space between orgasm and insanity. Lispector's biographer Benjamin Moser says, "they were both passionate explorers of the sacred and the profane, the pure and the obscene."

Letters from a Seducer, originally published in 1991, is the third in Hilst's self-proclaimed "porno-chic" tetralogy. It begins with a series of letters written by Karl, a rich, erudite, sex-crazed writer, to his estranged sister Cordélia about his debauched proclivities, including his wish to rekindle their incestuous relationship. These twenty letters are found in the trash by another writer Stamatius, called Tui, Karl's despised alter ego. Both men are fixated on sex, heterosexual and homosexual, incest, pedophilia, homosexuality, cannibalism, murder, and so on.

As Carvalho specifies, "most of the sex revolves around male-centric ideas of female phallic fixation, and certain passages even verge on parodies of Henry Miller's literature." Hilst's spoof could also be applied to the work of Updike, Roth, Franzen, et al. Karl writes, "A woman's ass should serve as good steaks in case of an avalanche." Realizing his extraordinarily accommodating consort Eulália is unreal, his own invention, Tui writes sadly, "I really did construct my squealing-woman-in-life in a poignant and delicate, submissive and patient way."

Hilst's often spot-on hilarious parody is successful because her male narrators are not only utterly convincing but sympathetic even in their utter depravity. And of course, their self-aggrandizement is equal to their self-serving self-loathing:

Somehow I have been transformed into a scribe or better, into a scribbler, and just knowing that you think me a writer upsets me to the point of nausea. What petulant types. What disgusting people! They rifle through groins, backside cracks, they rummage in sordid hearts, in shrivelled little souls, and then sate themselves with belches when they finish the texts.

With My Dog Eyes, first published in 1986, is a fifty-six-page-long story of the descent into madness of mathematics professor Amós Kéres. In the novella, Hilst investigates the nexus "between genius and madness, poetry and mathematics." At the novel's beginning, Kéres is searching for God; by mid-book he has become detached from himself; and by the end he perceives the world entirely from a dog's perspective. Finally, he's reduced to a mathematical equation.

Hilst's novel, The Obscene Madame D, first published in 1982, is narrated by Hillé, "incestuous theophagite, also known by Ehud as Madame D, I, Nothingness, Name of No One, I in search of light, sixty years in silent blindness, spent seeking the sense of things." When the novel begins Hillé is living in a recess under the stairs, and her husband Ehud has just died -- "causa mortis? The accumulation of questions from his wife Hillé." Chronologically non-linear, the novel frequently shifts perspectives and is an entanglement of death, loss, and oblivion. But it is also a satire of the culturally entrenched dichotomy opposing the chaotic, perennially dissatisfied female with the rational, sex-obsessed male.

Despite her renown in Brazil -- she received many major literary prizes over the course of her career, including Brazil's highest honor, the Premio Jabuti -- Hilst became increasingly scorned and marginalized by the cultural establishment. Ultimately, she was infuriated that the radical tradition of avant-garde expression had been subsumed into modernism.

Your metaphysical obsessions are of no interest to us, Madame D, let's speak of man here and now, how intelligent these people are, how modern, obscene, their big excited asses in front of their television sets, avid for fresh news, two or three modernists controlling the world, gold pouring out through deodorized holes, a vibrant modernist logorrhea...

Nietzsche wrote, "We have art so that we shall not die of reality." Hilda Hilst might have argued for cheap whiskey over art. Her work makes a bludgeoning, beautiful argument for obscenity as a means of surviving our reality.

[Aravindakshan Narasimhan · Rating 5 out of 5]

God or Dog?






Proper review :

Rather than recommending this work (which is just under 90 pages or so), I warn you to take only if you are a strong and hard hearted. This can really dig your visceral and cerebral veins with its near abject hopelessness philosophy, that can put you through drills of extreme pessimism. Pessimism is a wrong term. It goes well beyond painting just a negative world view, rather, as the ageing math genius set outs to prove, it portrays a world decreed by the evil, and the man, is its disciple, an execution tool.

While this in itself isn't something dreary for most, what can make this work heavy is the style in which the author has penned this.
Imagine there is no single usual markers we use to denote the characters conversing, paragraphs used to chanelize the flow, mark the dreams, interior monologues, tenses etc. For the most part it is just his stream of consciousness, with dreams coming and going, reflecting on past, his supposed future, sometimes even working as present, his multiple selfs addressing him. All without any sort of conventional markers!! Along with this add his wife and other people talking to him. This requires your full concentration. And top of this, the language itself!!!

This work can't be described in any of the literary style or devices we normally associate. The closest, one could come is the distant cousin "prose poem".

And it also features many vivid , complex beautiful poems, haikus to be precise, in an aim to show the similarity between maths and poems.

So coming to the plot, our mathematics professor is summoned up by the head in-charge and informed that he needs to take rest for sometime, since he has lately been in the habit of abruptly falling into silence while lecturing, for 15 minutes, which is a serious a charge and as much as he tries to reason out, he is sent out.

From there (after page 3 or 4), it is one helluva ride into his ceaseless thoughts on life, his troubled relationship with family and people, his past, where he was a mute child for most part, that his parents thought he would be mute for rest of his life, particularly with his fuming father, and his own irritation with his son, with his mother, whom he sweetly invites to brothel, his sexual escapades, his internal fight to describe the world/universe through words, and obviously failing at it, his fight to balance the normal life with his professional one ( the problem some obsessive geniuses faces), God, dog, beauty of the unobvious, equations, sex and everything. And we spiral down through the pages as he does through his life, nearing his death and slow disintegration.


Someone had pointed out that the initial bits were difficult to follow and that the ending parts were normal. I found it in the reverse way, towards the ending, i.e last few pages, it becomes sooo cryptic that I am still at loss to understand what she tries to say. Perhaps the author rather than following a conventional decay map, placed the after life, or purgatory before the actual death. That you see him :

I do a few somersaults. Mirror and boots. I’m a castaway from myself and a gardener. I’m in the depths but I plant as though I were outside. I’m an executioner in a classroom. If they ask me I don’t respond. This is who I am. Somersault, cuddle, fish, silken tail, water, grindstone clouds in this aquarium. The eyes eye me. The faces lean their noses into my space. Mutely I roam through the room. There is a circle of glass between us. There are a bunch of people in the entryway: is that the professor? Begonia. I revisit the window in its yellows. We are questions in an extensive and inconclusive ball of twine.
I lie down on the thread, the twine nestles me, it goes concave, gets longer, makes a hammock, I sleep hearing groans and complaints. The ones who can see me are very annoyed. A man crosses the room, sits down, farts on my black chair. I ask: did you say your name, sir? There are laughs from the desks in the back. Someone gives me a jasmine. I am mutely bored. The questions grow and form cubes in the air. They collide. I stretch out on the smoothness of the mats. A cube wounds my worn-out elbow. Another bangs against my forehead, testing my bone brown with shackles. Women invade the room. They stomp on me with their high heels. Sado-slippery I’m sweating and laughing. Grotesquely I’m dispersing. There’s blood spattering the walls of the circle. An avalanche of cubes blankets my tissues of flesh. I’m empty of anything good. Full of the absurd.

Then he goes on to die. Don't think I am giving spoilers. It ain't. This work can never be spoiled by reviews, as much as one tries.


I sadly found that not many English readers ( lack of better term) have read this amazing experimentalist. Saving one Guardian article on her work ( this work), which I solemnly ask you to check, nothing is there about her works. It is really sad.


And yes, I have removed my impression, in the form of a writing which I had posted some days back. I don't think it should be here, what matters is perhaps not my impression in a cryptic form, rather people discovering this unjustly forgotten writer from a land which has ( not had, writers live) many famous and great writers.

[Adriana Scarpin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Aí eu venho aqui e encontro alguém classificando a literatura de Hilst como "imitação medíocre de Georges Bataille." Rá! Me recuso a acreditar que tal pessoa realmente leu Hilst, mesmo havendo tal influência o estilo e talento de Hilda sempre foi infinitamente superior ao de Bataille.

[Justin Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hilst's style is rather extreme, and I imagine many people would find this book dull, but I was quite taken with it. The first few pages, in particular, are impenetrable (why do authors always want to put their most difficult pages early on, as if to test the reader? Better to put the difficulty last, I think), but once the character and his situation become clear it's a wonderful ride. I'm particularly impressed that Hilst manages to keep my attention even during the occasional staccato stream of consciousness bits--usually I tune out such stuff.

I didn't read the introduction, which other people found useful; they tend to read the text more biographically than I do. I say this not to praise myself. It's just that I still don't know anything about Hilst's biography, aside from the very general drunken artist, friend of Lispector stuff. And not knowing definitely altered my reading--it seems like a more extreme version of Bernhard; funny, scabrous, and so wildly pessimistic that it was impossible to take the pessimism seriously.

"Mother, you've never been to a brothel, it's nice in the early morning, calm like the country, just like at your house."

"Amos Keres, mathematician, doomed to the gallows for attempting suicide, justified in his view for having understood that the universe is the work of Evil an man its disciple, and then almost executed for trying to prove the logic of his understanding, was free."

"Sado-slippery I'm sweating and laughing. Grotesquely I'm dispersing."

I'm really, really sick of modernist writers playing the nihilist, but Hilst's character does it so entertainingly that I'm willing to keep reading her books. The translator deserves credit, too; this can't have been easy.

[Montserrat Letona · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’ve been wanting to read Hilst for quite some time since this year I’ve read a lot of stream of consciousness and modernism.

Probably I’ll have to re read this in the future, for now it didn’t touched me that much but I know there’s something in there.

Or maybe I had very high expectations? Great style I’ll give her that, but I just didn’t connected with the book and I am a sucker for this genre.

So, for now this is my rating, I’m confident I’d liked this much more if only I had read it in Spanish.

[Rosa Ramôa · Rating 5 out of 5]

33,33 de poemas + 33,33 de diálogos + 33,33 de prosa=
="Tu não te moves de TI",*

[Mark George · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've had this writer on my radar for sometime now. Weighing in at a mere 59 pages this avant-garde novella reads more like a disjointed, fragmented prose-poem. There are some great reviews on GR but I think this will be a re-read for me somewhere down the line. Aptly described as an account of an unraveling, Hilst draws on many literary traditions to explore the void between genius and madness. It was a tough read for me but one that was illuminated somewhat by the excellent introduction which outlines Hilst's life and work.

[Hind · Rating 5 out of 5]

"There are certain walls that should never be seen before we grow old: moss and ocher, dahlias across some of them, lacerated, sounds that should never be heard, pulsations of a lie, the metallic sounds of cruelty echoing deep down to the heart, words that should never be pronounced, hollow eloquences, the vibrations of infamy, the throbbing ruby-reds of wisdom. Frights. How do I feel? As if they’d placed two eyes on the table and said to me, I who am blind: this is that which sees. This is the material that sees. I touch the two eyes on the table. Smooth, still tepid (recently wrenched out), gelatinous. But I don’t see the seeing. That’s how I feel trying to materialize in narrative the convulsions of my spirit."

This book was an experience akin to that of a trance. It's mad and so very beautiful. I've been dying to get my hands on the poetry of Hilda Hilst and unfortunately luck still holds animosity towards me in that regard. But the poems I've managed to read so far were absolutely exquisite. Something about her is so very dazzling yet as sharp as a blade. Her words cut through and heals you concurrently. This novelette devoured me as I devoured it, and I'm glad I've got to read a full work by such a great writer. I love it. I love her.

[Lezlie The Nerdy Narrative · Rating 3 out of 5]

WTF did I just read?

[Alana · Rating 5 out of 5]

hell yeah new favourite

[Jessiane Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incrível como a cada leitura eu percebo mais um detalhe. Um livro icoságono

[Rachel Bea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning, strange, evocative story. Quick read, as it's under 100 pages, but there's a lot layered in here. I thought it was fantastic and moving, and I can't wait to read more of her work.

[Bernardo Lima · Rating 4 out of 5]

-8/10

O retrato de uma mente se despedaçando em fragmentos infinitesimais conforme um matemático aceita que não consegue encontrar uma razão na vida. É uma experiência interessante lê-la no mesmo dia que A Obscena Senhora D, as diferenças e semelhanças entre as ambas pintando para mim uma ideia do que motiva Hilda a escrever - algo que não consigo colocar em palavras, mas acho que sinto. Seu talento como escritora aqui se mantém óbvio, e a veracidade e precisão com que desintegrou uma personalidade masculina diante de mim é uma experiência que me torna humilde - tem tanto ou mais comando sobre o masculino do que a maioria dos homens que li.
Acho impossível não compará-lo com A Obscena Senhora D, seja pela presença ainda tão fresca da obra em memória ou por serem do mesmo molde: esta, mais legível e sóbria, desconstrução geométrica; a outra, mais fulgurosa e espirituosa, o calor do viver revivido. Me identifico mais com o sofrimento de Amós do que com o de Hillé (D), porém creio que a Senhora D configura uma obra de mais impacto, embora não coloque muito mérito em compará-las ao nível de qualidade.

[Alix · Rating 4 out of 5]

"o fruto verde foi arrancado? ele disse isso? o muro do outro lado da rua. há certos muros que não devem ser vistos antes de envelhecermos. musgo e ocre, dálias sobre alguns, dilaceradas, sons que não devem ser ouvidos, pulsações da mentira, os metálicos sons da crueldade ecoando fundo até o coração, palavras que não devem ser pronunciadas, as eloquente-ocas, as vibrantes de infâmia, as rubras de sabedoria, latejantes. sustos. como me sinto? como se colocassem dois olhos sobre a mesa e dissessem a mim, a mim que sou cego: isto é aquilo que vê."

[Erwin Maack · Rating 5 out of 5]

“A brevidade da vida, a rudez dos sentidos, o torpor
da indiferença e ocupações sem proveito nos
permitem conhecer muito pouco. Repetidamente, o
veloz olvido, ilusão do conhecimento e inimigo da
memória, sacode do espírito, com o tempo, até o
que sabemos.”
“Percebo, afundando, que a única verdade do
homem é ser uma súplica sem resposta.” (pág.11)

Falo dos livros de Bertrand Russell. Ah. E a frase
é a seguinte: “a evidência é sempre inimiga da
exatidão”. (pág.14)

[Nicholas Finch · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is a beautifully written book. Truly unique style combined with a powerful voice paired with bold storytelling has made this such a joy to read. Hope to see more translations of her work.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

What an absolutely bizarre piece of literature. I have no idea why I decided to read this, probably when I was jones-ing on non-White authors and google-d "best non-White authors" or something equally ridiculous and uselessly overreaching. The Introduction tells you all you need, o want?, to know about Hilda Hilst. Jesuschistonacracker (would that simply be a communion wafer? huh.) this woman was well out in the proverbial woods. Though I can honestly say I have never been to those woods, nor do I know where that phrase originated, because I would think being IN the woods would be safer than being OUT of the woods, right? where's the protection being out? being in means bears or owls or tree snakes could protect you. Or eat you, but still, possibly protect, right? Anyway. That is the mindset I realized I was in when I escaped this textual monstrosity of whatthefuck and ohmygodthatsfunnyashell. Hilst was a polymath. Or a polynomial. Or a rolypoly, maybe. There was a discernible plot, and it was mostly linear, sure. But I am not entirely sure it was a linear path I would get anywhere close to. Given the option. I might go back into the woods instead.
A fabulously surreal narrative adventure, not for the faint of heart or the sound of mind. I hope to find her other works because who doesn't enjoy a walk in the woods on occasion? Ha!

[Fraser Simons · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hypnotic in its prose, this short little story (around 60 pages) with a hefty, and actually extremely valuable introduction, accomplishes quite a bit in a short time. Amos descends into a fit of madness as he turns his thought inward, resulting in a clash of his person and the feral, unknowable, creature within. A relationship his life as a mathematician and husband and father grants no armour whatever, resulting in further spiralling.

This must have been very difficult to translate because the rhythm and specific cadence forming around this self sacrificial ritual that is Amos life builds and builds, then is contextualized with poetry. The diction feels meticulous. The absurdity builds. Sometimes it’s opaque, even—but the themes are well established and vivid.

A compelling experience that forced me to examine the text and reflect; qualities I very much enjoy.

[Álvaro · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eu gosto MUITO da prosa de Hilda, mesmo com sua lógica que quase "beira o esquizofrenismo", como a própria autora diz sobre alguns trechos desse livro. Para mim, essa literatura é puro charme, um charme que vai do mais baixo do ser humano até o mais poético em um só parágrafo, sem dar o nexo descritivo ao leitor ou se quer mesmo um senso lógico descritivo. E, por conseguinte, os sentimentos vem à tona, te pegando desprevenido.

Em termos de narrativa, "Com meus olhos de cão" versa sobre um matemático que busca razão à vida, amante da lógica e da literatura, esse se perde em seus pensamentos. Deus? uma Superfície de Gelo Ancorada no Riso.

[Salem ⛤⃝ · Rating 1 out of 5]

The protagonist's declining health into eventual death. This was almost impossible to read. I hate books that try to do something unique and end up failing.

We're supposed to follow our main character's jumbled thoughts, and watch as they spiral until the end—but instead they're jumbled from the beginning and downright impossible to read.

I would imagine this is what Dostoevsky's novels would look like had he been a terrible writer. The paragraph formatting and lack of quotations is a pet peeve I have in all literature.

This wasn't for me.

[K's Bognoter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hvad sker der, når en matematikprofessor på vej mod de 50 pludselig overvældes af et øjeblik af “inkommensurabel betydning,” et uventet glimt af mening hinsides fornuft i et ellers kedeligt, borgerligt normalliv? Hos Hilda Hilst går han i mental opløsning i en mere end almindelig alvorlig midtvejskrise – som måske kan være vejen til genfødsel (som hund).
Læs hele min anmeldelse på K’s bognoter: https://bognoter.dk/2021/01/31/hilda-...

[Selin]

Unrateable, what does it even mean?

[Dimebag · Rating 5 out of 5]

RTC

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have over the last few years become, as have a great many others in the English-speaking world, a full-on convert to the cult of Clarice Lispector, Brazil’s great chic master modernist. The explosion of interest in Clarice can in large part be accounted for by a spate of English translations presented by New Directions and the untiring advocacy of Benjamin Moser, her biographer and staunchest promoter. I have now read the collected stories of Clarice Lispector as well of seven of her novels, THE BESIEGED CITY being the most recent book I have read (before the abbreviated Hilda Hirst novel I am about to discuss). Just the other day I came to the realization that Lispector’s THE PASSION ACCORDING TO G.H. may well be my favourite novel of all time. Anyway, all this is to preface my mentioning that my curiosity in Hilda Hirst is to a large extent dependant on my love of Clarice Lispector, and you will note that this Melville House edition of WITH MY DOG-EYES contains an inside blurb from Benjamin Moser informing us that Hilst was friends with Lispector, that Lispector admired her, and that Hilt is perhaps similar to Lispector insofar as she could be said to be “a passionate explorer of the sacred and profane, the pure and the obscene.” Both women were modernists who challenged limits, pushing forward the boundaries of literature, and both were also glamorous, their physical beauty frequently commented upon, their personas scintillating on account of a kind of tough inscrutability. Hilst was born a decade after Lispector and for many years was known primarily as a poet. She did not begin publishing prose works of note (plays and novels) until after Lispector was herself deceased. THE OBSCENE MADAME D, Hilst’s first serious novel, was not published until 1982. WITH MY DOG-EYES appeared four years later. Both of these works have only been translated into English in the last decade. Hilda Hilst comes with quite a life story, and in his introduction to this Melville House edition, translator Adam Morris fills us in on some of the juicy stuff. Born into a status family of means, heiress to coffee plantation, Hilda moved though high society, an object of fascination, dropping out of law school to write poetry and cavort controversially with artists and bohemians. She was known for her promiscuity and flagrant flouting of bourgeois discretion. She would go on to set up an artist colony called Casa do Sol which she filled with admiring artists, generally young men, and up to a hundred dogs at any one time. She drank heavily, had many affairs, including what would appear to have been a highly tempestuous one with an unbalanced younger cousin, and considered herself an artist of the “obscene,” her work in later years only increasing in its tendency to scandalize and provoke. Her transformation from captivating young libertine to outsized eccentric has all the hallmarks of a great literary tale in and of itself. Adam Morris does a commendable job of covering Hilst’s central interests and prefixations, explaining how WITH MY DOG-EYES “addresses the nexus she believed existed between genius and madness, poetry and mathematics.” She was heavily influenced by Bertrand Russell (especially his writings on the intersection of logic and spirituality) as well as the Argentine writer Ernesto Sábato, areas of interest demonstrative of Hilst’s “self-induction into the circle of heretics, antiphilosophers, and marginalized visionaries that she so admired, from Galileo to Nietzsche and Genet.” She loved Joyce and Beckett, and the Parisian avant-garde in general would seem to have always been close to her heart, from Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin, the Surrealists and Goerges Bataille, back to (I am personally guessing) the wild fin de siècle antics, literary and otherwise, of Alfred Jarry and co. Bataille provides an epigraph for WITH MY DOG-EYES, and it seems to me that he would have to have been a central influence on Hilst’s conception of the “obscene” as a specific kind of philosophical-spiritual domain available for fruitful and even fundamentally emancipatory incorporation in acts of artistic transgression. Adam Morris comes fairly close to rejecting the basic thesis in Benjamin Moser’s blurb, asserting that comparing Hilst to Clarice Lispector is as fundamentally erroneous as comparing either, as is commonly done, to Virginia Woolf. Well, first, as for comparing Lispector to Woolf: it would seem evident based on what she herself has said that Lispector had not read Woolf when she first began publishing the major works that were garnering these comparisons, so it would be fundamentally wrong to suggest direct influence, which is not to say that connections we draw between Lispector and Woolf are entirely without merit. Likewise, though there are indeed major differences at the level of the texts themselves between Lispector and Hilst, and I am not in any position at all to comment upon direct influence, I do not believe we can entirely discount fundamental connections between them without practicing bad faith. A certain amount of bad faith is indeed a charge I would be inclined to levy against Mr. Morris. As far as he is concerned, the fact that Lispector has gone on to be lionized by the Brazilian literary establishment outs her as more or less a palatable bourgeois modernist, whereas Hilst was always a genuinely radical artist at odds with the cultural gatekeepers. It seems to me that matters are significantly more nuanced than that. We should not allow ourselves to forget the challenges Lispector faced early in her career vis-à-vis publication and reception, even after the extraordinary success of her first novel, nor should we forget later difficulties as well, notably the reception of her 1974 story collection THE VIA CRUCIS OF THE BODY, a book at the time deemed by many Brazlian commentators to be obscene, distasteful trash. And, really, at the end of the day, can there be any denying that fundamentally Lispector’s body of work speaks to a torrent, an inundation, an assault on consensus reality and an immersion in an anarchic force of Life intent on liberating vision, annihilating civilizing apparatus? Perhaps such things are in the end palatable for a bourgeois intelligentsia, but I do not personally believe that this could ever deprive Lispector’s work of its capacity to genuinely radicalize readers (even if primarily, you know, spiritually). Sure, there very much is, at least insofar as WITH MY DOG-EYES speaks to such matters, something more fundamentally confrontational and gleefully rebellious about what Hilda Hirst is up to. It is there certainly even at the level of tone. This is a very caustic voice, darkly humorous, attuned as is Beckett to the dehumanizing absurdity of existence rather than the capacity we find in Lispector of the human animal to attain ecstatic fusion with an immanent intensive quasi-divinity. I have already mentioned how Adam Morris addresses this short novel’s engagement with math and madness, suggesting a certain amount of debt to Bertrand Russell. This would certainly seem to stand up well on consideration of the text itself, a kind of stream-of-cosciousness burlesque depicting a delightfully dumb capitulation to dumb destiny—to grim, sublimely idiotic doom—by mad mathematics professor Amós Keres, specialist on “the univocal universe”—has he been reading Lispector?—a man who conceives of order in the most disordered terms imaginable, perhaps not terribly unlike Alfred Jarry’s Dr. Faustroll. Amós has an academic post (for the time being (?)) and a wife and a kid, but he is also in the process of becoming a vehicle for the triumph of entropy, losing all order, all meaning. He also has a literal date with destiny. It would seem. The bell tolls for Amós. Every dog has his day. There are many dead dogs lying in many ditches and there is the “winged and ochre bird of death” and that itself might be a perfect image to encapsulate Hilst’s rueful vision of the human condition. The Gods, lest we forget, have oft been said to first make mad those they wish to destroy. Mad people very often have a tendency to spree. This is precisely why they are often so suited for baroque black comedies. WITH MY DOG-EYES likes to break into verse (sterling example: “Designifying / I am digging out screams / Burying height and hauteur”). Otherwise it is written almost entirely in the present tense, but it moves around somewhat haphazardly, spree-like, so part of this experience of madness is a very interesting experience of spatiotemporal dislocation. Conditioned as all of this is by that appointment with the proverbial hangman, we have something like the image of a whirlpool, spree-as-whirlpool, itself perhaps the ultimate symbol of an absurd kind of abject hopelessness. I am not going to quote directly from this particular book overmuch, but I do love this wonderful characteristic passage from early on: “Poetry and mathematics. The black stone structure breaks and you see yourself in a saturation of lights, a clear-cut unhoped-for. A clear-cut unhoped-for was what he felt and understood at the top of that small hill. But he didn’t see shapes or lines, didn’t see contours or lights, he was invaded by colors, life, a flashless dazzling, dense, comely, a sunburst that was not fire. He was invaded by incommensurable meaning. He could say only that. Invaded by incommensurable meaning.” This is a brilliant little fragment, no? (It also happens to be one you could well have told me was written by Clarice Lispector and found me buying your claim.) It presents us with the idea of form which is the the loss of form, order comprised of disorder, the idea of a mathematics in which nothing is any longer properly bound. It tells you exactly what this novel is. Now, you cannot lay out the basics concerning Hilda Hilst’s life without mentioning that her father was institutionalized as a paranoid schizophrenic and that mental health problems seem to have been a recurring hereditary theme in her family. It was by all accounts something over which she suffered and obsessed, and of course certain folks have had a tendency to discount her as a madwoman herself. Paranoid schizophrenia, paranoid psychosis. Back in the 19th century, when Judge Schreber was writing his schizo memoir, they were still just calling it “paranoia,” plain and simple. That word had taken on a slightly new meaning in the period during which Hilst was writing. We might think, for example, of Thomas Pynchon or Hollywood Paranoia movies (they were literally calling them that) like THE CONVERSATION and THE PARALLAX VIEW. Now note how the above passage from WITH MY DOG-EYES ends with this doubled introduction of “incommensurable meaning.” Is this not precisely at the heart of paranoia, this imputation of a sublimated phantom meaning, an errant insistence on malevolent order to help explicate frightfully destabilizing disorder? Psychosis (the schizo realm) is a situation where reality is crazy and I absolutely cannot make sense of it. Paranoia is what happens when a diabolical order reintroduces itself through the back door and tells you unsettling stories about your world, giving it a malignant shape. However, take the psychosis away, remove the schizo, and you begin to see that order is itself always inherently paranoid. Paranoid and often kind of weirdly arbitrary, inherently absurd. That is why WITH MY DOG-EYES is a bit of an anarchist comedy. It spits on all your order. At the same time, it realizes that the paranoid psychotic is probably on to something: there is the paranoid certainty that things probably won’t end well. We all know that old joke about how just ‘cause you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you. Well, yeah, believe it. What about the title? WITH MY DOG-EYES? Adam Morris shares some interesting thoughts on this. First, obviously, Hilda was crazy about dogs, living for many years with a whole heaping hell of a lot of them. Sure. Yes, fine. Morris also hips us to the possibility that the title references THE ODYSSEY, specifically Agamemnon’s deathbed lamentation, in which he calls his wife Clymenstra “the woman with the dog’s eyes” and kvetches about how she cruelly withheld proper death rites from him before sending him off to the underworld. Uh, yeah, wow. Goddamn! It would be pretty great if the author of this book, notoriously down with the occult and just in general master of cosmic obscenity, were attempting to pull some Clymenstra-job; if she can taint our life and our afterlife that would have to be the next best thing to tainting eternity itself. Dogs pop up here and there throughout the book. What they represent is probably shifting. Eyes also shift. In more ways than the obvious. There is a sentence here that considers “what a thing it can be to have eyes on your eyes, eyes on your mouth.” Sure, this would seem upon consideration to simply imply that it is a somewhat curious thing to have somebody looking at your eyes and your mouth, but before we deduce this we experience the immediacy of a more fucked-up kind of scrambling. What does it mean to become-dog in this whole madness and mathematics context? Let me put it simply: I’m pretty sure a dog can be mad but I don’t think it can do math. Listen, I’m being kind of serious. As previously mentioned, I just read Clarice Lispector’s amazing novel THE BESIEGED CITY, in which that unspeakably great writer (and apparent friend of Hilst’s) suggests that, you know, in consideration of Kant and structural linguistics (she doesn’t put it quite so bluntly as that), a horse can almost certainly see a house better than a person can see a house. Why? To really get down and simplify: a horse doesn’t impose much on a house in seeing a house, it just kinda sees the house. Now I ask you: might a dog perhaps make a better kind of schizo? A dog doesn’t have much need for entrenched order or an entrenched need for much order at all. Might a dog make a much less paranoid variety of schizo? Dead dog in a ditch. I imagine this dog not having suffered the prelude much and its ultimate destruction only very briefly if at all. The right kind of poet might be more like this dog than like the mathematician. The mathematician, in his dalliance with order, is liable to get swept up in a more harrowing and continuous species of derangement, fundamentally comic though that horribly pointless person's hilariously pointless derangement may be.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is probably actually 5 stars. Okay, I'll just change it. There. (You see it only now as 5 stars.) Hilst finds a disorienting but effective sweet spot here between pure fragments of prose and poetry and something a little less radical but still challenging. I need to read it again, though, to really put it all into place. But this is a deeply radical, strange, challenging work while remaining compelling page by page.

Apparently she was friends with Lispector. If only someone had transcribed their chats...

[Kim Wong · Rating 4 out of 5]

This tale of a mind unraveling is extremely challenging. It lacks conventional narrative, and reading it made me feel like I was traveling through the Joker's mind made three-dimensional in Grant Morrison's "Rock of Ages" arc in JLA.