The Obscene Madame D

I really enjoyed reading this, it had that concept that I was looking for and enjoyed the way this was told. It had that element that was promised in the description. I though the story worked overall and had that adult feel that I was expecting. Hilda Hilst wrote a great book in this and was excited to read more.

Hilda Hilst’s ‘The Obscene Madame D’ is if Georges Bataille was a woman and Sylvia Plath was Hilda Hilst.

The Obscene Madame D is one of those books that hits you in the gut and never really lets go. It’s a wild, intoxicating ride through the fragmented mind of its narrator, Hille (possibly the alter-ego of the author, Hilst), whose introspective reflections on her life, marriage, and existence twist in unexpected ways. This novel is raw, seductive, and startlingly intelligent, and it drips with a kind of chaotic beauty that can only be found in the works of those who dare to stretch the limits of storytelling.

Reading this felt like revisiting the awe I first experienced with Clarice Lispector and Marguerite Duras—two literary icons who, like Hilst, completely revolutionize how we understand narrative. These writers take the boundaries of literature and pull them apart, leaving us with something far more intimate, fragmented, and profoundly human. And just like Lispector and Duras, Hilst’s work makes you reconsider everything you thought you knew about narrative structure, about language, and about the deep, often contradictory complexities of being human.

The Obscene Madame D is not for the faint of heart. It’s a dizzying stream-of-consciousness journey where the text twists and drifts, like a river of thought that refuses to stay in one place. The punctuation is erratic, the capitalization sometimes nonsensical, and the sentences often drift off into nothingness—much like the narrator’s mind. But it’s this very dissonance that brings the story to life. The words are alive, like fragments of memory, emotions, and fleeting moments that the narrator can’t quite capture or contain.

The novel is filled with conversations—often passionate and sometimes troubling—between Hille and her husband, Ehud, but also with villagers, with the space around them, and with her own inner world. Themes of God, sex, death, and fatherhood ripple through the text, giving us glimpses into a deeper, darker landscape of thought. There are moments of stunning clarity, where life and love appear as "splendor and marvel," and then there are the darker, more unsettling moments, full of "sinister" silence and aching absence. It’s a deeply emotional and surreal experience, yet it’s also undeniably beautiful in its way.

One thing that struck me about this book is the incredible effort of the translator, who took on the challenge of rendering such a complex, unruly work into another language. The original’s structure and fragmented syntax must have been a nightmare to translate, but the result is an astonishingly powerful piece of writing. The translator has done the book justice, capturing the raw, chaotic beauty of the original in a way that makes you feel every shift in the narrator’s thoughts.

If you’re someone who loves to lose yourself in the intricacies of language and emotion, who enjoys books that demand your full attention and don’t make it easy to follow, then The Obscene Madame D is a must-read. It is profound, moving, and strange in the most remarkable ways.