A grand, perturbing erotic novel in which the wealthy, amoral Karl records his sexual life and search for meaning in letters with a surprising legacy
"Maybe all women wonder what men would be like without their posturing, but it seems to me Hilst had more than an inkling..." - Dodie Bellamy
This epistolary novel tells the story of Karl, a wealthy, amoral and erudite man who records his daily life in a series of 20 letters to his sister Cordelia. She is cloistered and chaste, but the letters are wildly promiscuous - not just in their explicit sexual content, which have earned the novel the epithet 'pornographic', but in their form. Ranging in style and register from modernist fragments worthy of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, to letters that could have been penned by Enlightenment libertines like Choderlos de Laclos and the Marquis de Sade, the letters make up a polyphonic text that pushes the boundaries both of fiction and of decency.
The novel - a standalone masterpiece which originally appeared as part of a Brazilian tetralogy - changes form again partway through, when the indigent poet Stamatius finds Karl's record of his erotic adventures in a trash can, and begins to write stories based on what he reads, and then to break down those stories into even briefer fragments. Karl's letters inspire Stamatius' writing, and their narratives and identities become ever more fragmented, until we begin to doubt whether they are truly separate people. What unites them is an abundantly lewd imagination and a fantastically creative relationship to the greatest seducer of all: language.
Industry Reviews
"'She is a novelist with the fecundity and multivocality of Joyce, with the precision and wit of Sarraute, and yet she is something new under the sun, the poet of ""friezes, strips, joyful bands, columbombastic screams."" Maybe all women wonder what men would be like, without their posturing and wack, but it seems to me Hilst had more than an inkling' - Dodie Bellamy
'Letters of a Seducer seduces the reader with all the strategies available to a fine writer: wit, wonderfully inventive language lushly captured by the translator, an intriguing story-and did I say sexuality that broils and bubbles along at a mad and marvelous intensity? This is a brilliant performance!' - Samuel R. Delany
'Consider this your personal message of recommendation from me to you to read Hilda Hilst, as much as you can... Letters From a Seducer will make you blush, gasp, become aroused then feel weird about it, laugh a lot. After reading any Hilst your body and mind will make more and less sense to each other. Your verbal and sensorial understandings will alter, youll slap your thigh and yell at the shock of a line, youll feel drunk, ungodly and fantastically free.' - Holly Pester, author of The Lodgers
'A modern master of disturbance... A joyfully wicked writer' - TLS"
