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At her death in 2004, Brazilian author Hilda Hilst had received a number of her country’s important literary prizes and published more than two dozen books of poetry, drama and fiction What many Brazilians immediately thought of in conjunction with her name, however, was the notoriety generated by what critics labelled Hilst’s ‘pornographic’ tetralogy of the years 1990-1992, with the novel Letters from a Seducer generally considered the masterpiece of the four Yet the charge of pornography, which Hilst did not disavow, hardly approaches her deep skill and artistry in drawing from and upon a mode that might appear inimical to art In Letters from a Seducer, Hilst employs multiple discourses, styles, forms, and registers, including those of the libertine epistolary tradition, evoking works by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos and the Marquis de Sade, as well as by modernist antecedents and later twentieth century models, to create a postmodern polyphonic text that surpasses the limits of the conventional realist novel Unfolding in three parts, beginning with letters from a wealthy, depraved socialite, named Karl, to his cloistered sister, Cordélia, then shifting to a series of stories by a near-homeless graphomane named Stamatius (‘Tiu’), and concluding with even briefer fragments extracted, like atomic particles, from the ‘hollows’ of the imagination, the novel suggests that perhaps the greatest seducer of all is language and its manifold (im)possibilities What becomes ever clearer as we proceed through this novel is Ludwig Wittgenstein’s famous dictum that ‘ethics and aesthetics’ are one —JK   *   How to think about pleasure wrapped up in this crap? In mine This discomfort of knowing myself raggedy and covered with sores, your hair growing long in the crotch, if you dare think about it, and then around the hair a stew of wounds, I do dare think about it I tell myself, my mouth toothless because of all the stress and strains and addiction, I dare think about it and they don’t forgive that Then I take hold of your pubes and your pussy, pound them, your cry is high, hard, a whip, a bone, there’s debris all over the