Lori Lamby’s Pink Notebook – Hilda Hilst

[Massao Ohno, Editor; 1990]

O caderno rosa de Lori Lamby is narrated by an eight-year-old girl who, between snacks and homework, recounts her sexual adventures with older men in exchange for money. Sharing a house with an unstable family, Lori is the daughter of a decadent writer and a nymphomaniac mother. Her father writes beautiful and complex texts, but is constantly harassed by his editor Lalau, who insists that he write pornography, instead, to sell more books. At a certain point, Lori’s father succumbs and decides to write the story of a “nymphet,” a text we don’t get to read. This is the setting of the controversial novel by Hilda Hilst (Brazil, 1930-2004), published in 1990 as a provocation against the literary market and an attempt to attract media attention. It worked. The author, who already had a forty-year career with formally innovative and thematically transgressive works, shocked the literary world when she began what became known as the “obscene trilogy,” with Lori Lamby followed by Letters from a Seducer (1991, tr. John Keene, with a new edition coming out in 2025) and Contos d’escárnio. Textos grotescos (1990, untranslated). The three works, written after the end of Brazilian Military Dictatorship (1964-1985), feature the same “pornographic” language and daring subjects, and they all present writers in a state of permanent crisis: bankruptcy, unsuccess, suicide.

Lori Lamby’s Pink Notebook is a Russian doll with a great twist: in the end, it is discovered that Lori’s entire narrative was invented, inspired not only by dirty magazines and porn films that she watched in secret, but also by her father’s texts. Lori reread her dad’s notes about the “nymphet” and imagined what it would be like if she were the protagonist. The girl wanted to help her father please Lalau, which worked, since the editor reads and loves her pink notebook. These three figures—Lori Lamby, her Father, and the editor Lalau—make up not so much a love triangle as a pornographic triangle. Love is not as important in this text as pornography and its implications in ethics and aesthetics.

Lori Lamby is eight years old—an age eternally idealized in Brazilian poetry by Casimiro de Abreu in the famous 1858 poem “Meus oito anos” (“My eight years”), a romantic portrait of children’s innocence. Hilda Hilst provocatively deconstructs the romantic idea that childhood is a time of naivete. One of the novel’s aesthetic games is to expose the obscene through the eyes of a child who is completely unaware of what is happening, that is, the crime of pedophilia. Yet, the narrator seems to enjoy what happens to her. Sexual circumstances are treated in a banal way, as much a part of her daily life as an afternoon snack: “I won’t write anymore because Mommy asked me to have milk and cookies,” writes Lori. “Later I’ll put talcum powder and Johnson’s oil on my little thing because it got really swollen and chubby after the guy licked me so much.” What’s more, the child’s gaze generates funny constructions and dark humor: “I’m laughing,” thinks the reader, “but this is horrible!”

Defying the taboo against discussing children’s sexuality, as well as the sexual abuse of children, Hilst brings the child’s voice to the center of the scene. Lori has no idea that children should not have sex, because, for her, licking is in the realm of simplicity. Since there seems to be “consent” and even desire on her part, the violence takes on an ambiguity. Hilst takes aim at adults, who abuse children’s desires for their own benefit, and at a perverse society that sells childhood as an object.

Children are fast learners, and this novel is an example of the “education” trope in pornographic literature. The novel, after all, is narrated in the first person by a young woman beginning her sexual life, a traditional genre of erotic writing. Uncle Abel, Lori’s favorite lover, “said that one day he also dreamed of being a writer”—another failed writer from Hilst’s trilogy—and assists Lori in a classic pornographic endeavor: sexual education. He says that Lori not knowing how to “suck Abelzinho” would be a flaw in her sentimental education—a dialogue with Flaubert and Rousseau—, a reference to how pornographic texts served, historically, as pedagogical. So, the role of Abel is to be Lori’s sexual “teacher,” introducing her to the world of sex with erotic lessons.

This pedagogical aspect is also present in the character’s name: Lori, in an intertextual reading, refers to the homonymous protagonist of Clarice Lispector’s An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures (1969, tr. Stefan Tobler), a work about a young woman’s delicate emotional and sexual discoveries. By using the same name for the heroine of her novel—also a learning experience, but perverse and raw, the opposite of Lispector—Hilda Hilst once again disrupts high literature through a destructive parody. The surname Lamby is a multiple sign that affirms language as a central component of her character, whether as a verb (meaning “to lick” in Portuguese), or as a noun, in a sonorous memory of lamb in English, a young and innocent sheep. Within this metalinguistic realm, the book is dedicated to “the memory of language,” as if it was an homage to something dead.

Lori licks. And she likes to be licked. She laughs when she discovers that her little thing, as her mother explains to her, is called lips: “I thought it was funny because I thought lips were our mouths, and mommy told me there are even more lips inside.” The mouth that speaks has lips, and the licked vagina does, too. Sex stages a clash between speaking and licking, in which the latter wins: “I also thought it was delicious, but I didn’t say anything because if I did I would have to stop licking.” This tension is revisited in Uncle Abel’s letters, in which the text functions as a preliminary to sex: “[…] the letter is already soaked, I’ll write more tomorrow.”

Lori’s tongue has a main interlocutor, the second vertex of this pornographic triangle: her father. “A misunderstood genius,” her father is presented as a decadent writer, configuring the misery of this category. As he writes complex and sublime stories, Lori’s father suffers systematic reprisals from Lalau, who pressures him to write dirty, more lucrative books. Lori does not understand how sex and profanity can generate money, while her father’s intellectualism earns no profit at all: “Why is it that they don’t give money to daddy who is such a genius, and they give it to me just by saying that I’m a little bitch?”

The main reason Lori takes up the pen is to create an homage to her father: “That’s why I’m writing my story now, because he also keeps writing his story.” This gesture is similar to statements made by Hilst in interviews, evoking the memory of her father, also a writer: “I wrote my work because of my father. I wanted to please him. I wanted him to one day say that I was someone.” The literary connection between daughter and father is one of the reasons for the work’s creation—both for Lori and for Hilda. In this sense, Hilda Hilst has endowed both figures with autofictional resonances: Lori Lamby—the paternal influence in her work, being the daughter of a writer who was not recognized—and her father—the figure of a writer who, despite writing beautiful texts, is excluded from the market and sees pornography as a possible path to profit and fame. The author’s greatest provocation can be seen on the back cover of the first edition of O caderno rosa, with a photo of a little Hilda at age six and the caption: “She was a good girl.”

Now we reach the last vertex of this triangle, the editor Lalau, a name that, in Brazilian slang, means “thief.” The editor is described as a pimp, an unstoppable mercenary who does not care about the literary text’s quality, but about its possible profitability and commercial success. Books, here, have ceased to be art, becoming mere products.

The crisis portrayed in the novel is above all commercial. Capitalism is the subject of criticism and irony: “As he licked, he asked me if I liked the money he was going to give me. I said I really liked it because without money we get sad because we can’t buy the beautiful things we see on TV.” Absorbed in capitalist logic, Lori, in one of the book’s most iconic moments, masturbates with a banknote. With an acute understanding of how the laws of the market work, the girl understands from an early age that the female body is sexually coveted as an object, whether by men or by symbolism.

Hilst also criticizes the imperialist influence of American cultural industry, seen by most Brazilians as “superior” and “civilized,” in contrast to Brazilian rural culture, viewed as “inferior” and “barbaric.” We can see this debate in this fragment of the “Dark Notebook,” a story that Abel sends to Lori to learn from: “Put your dick in now, Ed, she said. I liked my name shortened like that, it sounded like something a movie hero would say, because sometimes I would go to Salinas, a small town near there, and I would hear names similar to that. Ed, Ned.” The comments continue in passages in which the most beautiful language is the one from abroad, and foreign beauty is considered the absolute ideal: “The letters you send me are awesome. They seem like a foreign language. […] Daddy is going to live in London LONDON! and learn English and only write in English because the stinking fucking language he writes in can’t be read because they’re all ILLITERATE.” This criticism also appears in the mouth of Hilda Hilst, in an interview: “You can’t think in Portuguese. It’s good to think in English, in German, people accept it. Thinking in Portuguese is a horrible thing, publishers hate it, they spit in your face.”

Unlike her father, who hates him, Lori sees the editor as someone who can transform her notebook into a real book: “I have to continue my story and I’ll ask Uncle Lalau later if he wants to put my notebook in his machine, so it becomes a real book.” In Lori’s logic, to make a book is to process it through the cruel machine of the market. This quote brings up another metalinguistic aspect of the novel: the difference between a book and a notebook, in addition to the latter’s deliberately amateurish aspect. In some sense, Hilst indicates the provisionality of her own text, but also to a text written without censorship or revision. The notebook, generically speaking, suggests an incompleteness—the author, a child, demonstrates linguistic immaturity, corroborated by countless repetitions and deviations.

There is no shortage of metalinguistic reflections on the narrative and literary structure in Lori Lamby’s Pink Notebook. The novel is a mixture of genres: it intersperses the main narrative (the diary) with short stories, letters and poems by Uncle Abel, and the Dark Notebook copied into the Pink Notebook. The young narrator discusses the craft of writing, both her own and her father’s, taking up problems of length; the objectivity of the text; traditional linearity; and the presence or absence of dialogue. In addition to commenting on her father’s work and the conversations she overhears between adults, Lori also reflects on her own writing, which is constantly criticized by her parents. At every turn, they intervene to make her write the way they want, but the girl asserts her authorial autonomy, her desire for originality: “I said I didn’t want to copy anyone, I wanted it to be a notebook of my own things.” However, after stating this, she writes: “I’m going to copy the story that Uncle Abel sent me.”

In the end, we learn that Lori’s narrative is the result of a mixture between her imagination and texts found in the office—also leaving room for a possible interpretation that the entire novel could be the nymphet’s story written by her father. During the narrative, there are some indications of the girl’s habit of copying her dad. The confirmation of the plagiarism comes in the girl’s final letter to her parents, who discovered her notebook and asked for explanations.

From Lori Lamby’s point of view, there is an appropriation and resignification of the texts she reads. On the last page of the notebook, there is the only time that she uses the word “steal” to refer to the act of using her father’s work, followed by a request for forgiveness. However, it seems more appropriate to say not that she stole, but that she appropriated, since appropriation, according to Leonardo Villa-Forte (2019), would be “the act of using something produced by another person with the purpose of proposing, exposing, showing, presenting, selling that something associated with a second signature”; in this case, Lori Lamby writing palimpsests over her father’s texts.

Still, Lori’s parents are frightened by their daughter’s inventiveness and end up in a mental health facility. She does not understand why her parents are away and the book ends with her letter to them: “Oh, mommy and daddy, everyone at school, and you too, talk about this so-called creativity, but when we have this thing, everyone gets mad at us.” This passage also criticizes the supposed desire of the market to publish creative texts that are not well received, as was the case with the book in question.

The novel, then, features three narrative levels: the first, absolute literature, written by author Hilda Hilst; the second, fiction created by the narrator Lori Lamby; and the third, the father’s texts, appropriated by the little girl in her story. The structure of the novel is complex and treats, in this diegetic universe, the crime of plagiarism. Hilst directs her attack at various entities in the publishing market and the universe of literature itself: the editor, embodied in the degraded image of Lalau; the immaculate figure of the “original genius;” and the book itself, which, transfigured in the incompleteness of the “notebook.” The supposed “truth” of the erotic story falls on its confessed farce at the end, however, the pornographic diction constructed throughout the novel shows a refined play of language between the high and the low.

One of the characters created by Lori, wrapped in the philosophy of reflecting on one’s own identity, says: “He thought: I’m a wimp, I’m nothing, I’m just an asshole, I thought I was Something.” Lori’s tongue licks, but also philosophizes. It likes to suck and to write. It laughs, and is serious. Simultaneously licking and spitting on the publishing market.

Bruna Kalil Othero (Belo Horizonte, Brazil, 1995) is a writer, translator, teacher, and researcher. She is the author of a novel, three poetry books, and one fiction collection. She has also organized two essay anthologies on Brazilian women writers. Currently, she is pursuing a Ph.D. in Portuguese and literary translation at Indiana University (USA) and is working on Hilda Hilst’s biography.