It's difficult to describe a book that's at turns baffling, vertiginous, spiteful, pornographic. It's ridden with acid wit in the sense that you probably drift 10ft further from God every time this book makes you laugh (in my case, quite a lot). What story there is ends up subjugated (to my way of reading, at least) to her vertiginy - such pacing, such turns. A litany of weird and abject characters who never quite get fleshed out but rather hover over the text like ghosts.

I read her 'with my dog eyes' previously and I imagine I mentioned her spite - I was describing this as like if Joyce was a bastard and if Joyce is a high water mark of writing in English (which he is) then I'd put Hilst squarely next to him. It's not as enjoyable as Joyce but it's doubly as pornographic. But Hilst is electrifying, her translator John Keene has done what I can only assume is a formidable job in keeping a sense of the contraction and expulsions of Hilst's language.

There's moments where this is 'standardly' experimental - insofar as it seasickly switches from prosaic tracts to dialogue, poetry - but never with a feeling of affectation; more like Hilst has just excised this fully formed like some kind of eldritch, glistening, pus-filled welt.

I suspect it's also worth noting that while this is pornographic - insofar as it describes intimate sexual acts graphically - I wouldn't describe it as erotic, except in the sense of the writerly-eros. It's distinctly not a turn-on, is my point - any sex is oddly passive or existential rather than bodily and ecstatic. In itself I wonder if this is a book, like '...dog eyes', designed to exude spite from every pore.

Formidable, astonishing, bastard awkward, amazing.