The Publisher Says: After abandoning his traditional life in a deteriorating Porto Alegre, the narrator of Hugs and Cuddles zealously recommits himself to a man he calls “the engineer”, a childhood friend with whom he shared a pivotal sexual encounter. Many years have passed since their prepubescent wrestling; everywhere around them is a nation in decline. Representatives of the Brazilian state—everyone from government officials to the impoverished—endlessly harass passers-by for donations to “the cause,” even as a mysterious plague rages. Never mind that. Our insatiable narrator, driven to discover his true self through increasingly transgressive sexual urges, is on an epic journey through the shadows of this dysfunctional yet polite society.

The resulting novel is the late João Gilberto Noll’s most radical statement: A Book of Revelations-grade voyage to the end of gender and the outermost reaches of sexual and artistic expression. Nimbly translated from Portuguese by Edgar Garbelotto, Hugs and Cuddles is an unapologetically explicit fable of fluidity that takes readers from decaying city centers to the dark corridors of a mysterious submarine to a miserable hovel in the rainforest, where, at long last, our narrator finds peace.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Remember when I reviewed Quiet Creature on the Corner back in 2016? It's the very first Noll story to appear in English. It contained non-consensual heterosex, and it gave me a definite dirty-old-man vibe. That is to say, the book's for a dirty old man not that I'm one!

Buckle up for this tale, ye of little sexcapade tolerance.

There is nothing for it but to say it: Noll's got the one-handed reader squarely in his sights from giddy-up to whoa. If you can think of a way to think about sex, it's in this book. I'm not at that stage of life anymore, but let me tell you it's a heavy breather's dream book.

There is a salad dressing of family secrets, of loyalty given but not reciprocated, reciprocated but betrayed, of gender identities as traps and prisons and comforting hiding places...it's a story that never settles into one groove. There are half a dozen grooves. They each matter, and in the end, each contains a clue to the preoccupations of Author Noll's writing: Honesty and clarity are only so useful in this life but a well-crafted line of bullshit can guide, sustain, and reward you.

The style of the book should be no issue to those who read Milkman or Poguemahone. It's a long, divagating paragraph of startling complexity. Yet the burden of the lyric is simple, that being centered on sex as activity is only fun if you play with sex as biology defines it. The way in and the way out of a soul is the same as it is for a body.

If the roman-fleuve formal technique were somehow packed tight into this book's sausage-casing of 240 pages, it would resemble the scope and the effect of the paragraph as we move from a submarine to a rural shack, from the kind of sex that lives in your memory to the kind you'd pay money to forget. There's not one page not steeped in sex, whether actual sexual activity or contemplating it.

All of which, most curiously, is the opposite of erotically thrilling to me. I quickly discounted the erotic tone of the writer's discussion of personhood, belonging, and power dynamics. It became for me a kind of background, a soundtrack...the sounds!...and thus led me to the sad, wistful realization that Author Noll was always questing, Quixote-like, for the one greatest possible reward of sex: Connection. Giving your sexual energy to someone in return for their emotional vulnerability isn't routinely rewarded. It felt to me that, through this entire read, I was hearing a longing tone and a sad wistful sigh as another orgasm rocked the narrator.

It is, in the end, a sad acknowledgment of the "eternal hell of libido" as the organizing principle of a life. Fascinating, strong meat yet savory in its easy-goes-down tartare preparation. Definitely a worthy addition to your shelf. ( )