Letters from a Seducer

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.

Hilda Hilst (1930-2004) was a Brazilian poet, novelist and playwright. The only daughter of a coffee planter who suffered from schizophrenia, her parents’ poor mental health and conservatism would leave a deep mark on her writing, with the themes of insanity and sexual liberation running throughout her prolific work. In the mid-1960s she built a rural property called the House of the Sun, where she surrounded herself with other artists and lived the rest of her days, writing and winning many of her native country’s most prestigious literary prizes.

John Keene (b. 1965) is a writer, translator, and professor from St Louis, Missouri. Educated at Harvard and NYU, he is chair of the African American and African Studies department at Rutgers University Newark. He has published fiction and poetry, including the collection Punks (2022), which won the National Book Award. In 2018 he was named a MacArthur Fellow.