I found this a little less gripping than 'Madame D' and 'Dog Eyes.' The central section--the letters of the title--are a glorious, twisted little novella unto themselves. The writer is more or less trying to 'seduce' his sister into either i) playing along with his fantasies or ii) admitting her own perversions. So far so good.

But the frame is relatively dull: a second writer, this time one with a bit more moral fiber, reports on his life. His name is Tiu. There's comparatively little movement, and much of it seems pointless. If you really, really enjoy the pomo writer-writing-stories-in-a-story thing, you'll get more from it than I did, but compared to the Letters themselves... not so great. That said, I suspect this was a failure of execution, rather than of idea. The closing stories are truly repulsive/sexy, and there's real moral urgency to the comparison between the seducer and Tiu, of an almost Kierkegaardian intensity.

Of course, the marketing suggests that the book is just about fucking, and if that's your kind of thing, there's plenty of 'transgression' in here, some of it genuinely appalling. But what's interesting is the question of how we're to judge the relationships between pornography and art, sex and beauty, and, most importantly, immorality and love. ( )

Primeiro livro que li da Hilst que não é uma obra prima absoluta, mas ainda sim é uma grande obra. ( )