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. ( )

So on my last day in New York, we took the subway down to Brooklyn so that I could make my pilgrimage to Melville House Books. There I was, fresh out of a book conference where there had been multiple sessions on representation, conversations about bias and counting as a way to be aware of your own, and I had two books by men in my hand, and I was struggling to find a book by a woman that I wanted to buy. I didn't attempt an actual count of the authors on the shelves, but they did look overwhelmingly male. And so many books by women that did look interesting (because Melville House is my favorite publisher) I already owned, or in some cases, at least suspected that I owned. It wasn't that there weren't books by women left on the shelves, but there should be enough books there for me to choose from that I could find one I was excited to buy.

Okay, well, then I found this. A female Brazilian writer whose works have been untranslated because they are too radical? Sold! With all the build up of the introduction and stress of how avant-garde Hilst was, I got a little worried that this book would prove inaccessible, but it was not. It was a fever dream of poetry, mathematics, philosophy, of a descent into madness, but it never tried to put distance between itself and the reader. Which isn't to say that it wasn't sometimes challenging, but then, so is losing one's grip on sanity.

A great find. Will be keeping an eye out for more translations of Hilst. ( )