HUGS AND CUDDLES
by João Gilberto Noll
Translated by Edgar Garbelotto
Two Lines Press. 274 pages, $14.95
AT ONE POINT in João Gilberto Noll’s bizarre, surreal, and sexy novel Hugs and Cuddles, the narrator finds himself in the dark room of a bathhouse. “You couldn’t see anything at all,” he writes. “You were touched and could reciprocate the touch or not. The body that wanted to play with me had a calm demeanor; once in a while it would just tell me come, come, and I’d ask myself where the hell does this guy want to take me? Isn’t he satisfied with kissing, our close breaths, masturbating each other, my finger wrecking his ass? Where else do I need to go? Our random pairing alone could embody an obscene graciousness all by itself.”
“Obscene graciousness” quite aptly describes, as well, the plot and style of this modern Brazilian “epic written in a trance.” It’s a novel that many readers will find, as this reviewer certainly did, both immensely entertaining and utterly mystifying throughout its single, unbroken, almost 300-page paragraph. Exploring the interplay between reality and imagination, Noll pulls out all the stops, taking his narrator, whose name is also João, on an “itinerary of … interior action.”
The plot, if Hugs and Cuddles may be said to have a plot, concerns the narrator’s obsession with the “engineer,” a childhood friend with whom he innocently used to wrestle, “working surreptitiously so our true intentions could remain unnoticed.” “Our dicks,” the narrator notes, “were ahead of our maturity.” His unconsummated sexual attraction for the friend (“I was truly, brutally in love”) becomes a deep, enduring passion and the central focus of the book.
Years later, João discovers that the friend has been seduced by the crew of a German submarine lurking in the harbor of Porto Alegre. The friend, who has tattooed his penis, becomes part of a sleazy maritime brotherhood whose objective is to “experiment with the vortex of libido.” He completely submits to the Germans’ hypermasculine desires and whims. “I wished I could get closer and give him a hug, then a cuddle,” the narrator wistfully says. He relieves his homosexual frustration with anonymous sexual encounters, fucking strangers in deserted alleys or in the bathroom of a movie theater. Meanwhile, he tries to transfer this “blinding, disorienting lust” to the job of maintaining a heterosexual family. His wife and teenage son, who is blessed with a “torso from the movies,” are the only people who ground him, even if just a little.
When João learns that the German submarine has sunk off the coast of Angola, he becomes obsessed with trying to find out whether his friend survived: “I ignored the credibility of sources. The problem was that, for me, fidelity or not didn’t make any difference anymore. The fiction of things ensnared me to the point where I was unable to untangle myself from it.” The jumble of fantasies and voices inside the narrator’s head—that “fiction of things”—becomes as real for him as whatever events actually do take place. He wakes up (a phrase that occurs more than once in the novel) to discover that the engineer friend is there, touching his hand. The friend has survived the accident and is back in Porto Alegre. “Or was he a specter created in my thoughts?” the narrator wonders.
Surrealism is the conventional label to describe Noll’s technique, but I’m not sure that moniker does full justice to what it’s like to read this novel, adroitly translated by Edgar Garbelotto. Past and present time, “actual” events and imagined ones, loosely drift one into the other. At one point, the narrator tells us he has died. Or perhaps he only imagines that he has. Who knows? Indeed, the “road-trippy character” of the book, as writer John Trefry once described Noll’s style, adds to both the fun and the reader’s bafflement.
The tongue-in-cheek moral of this novel may be to be careful what you wish for, because the narrator eventually does end up closer—a lot closer—to his former adolescent crush. He discovers that he has been transformed into a woman, albeit a woman with a penis: “Unprecedented genitalia had formed between my legs, something close to a vulva, without a doubt, but perhaps still preserving some masculine attributes … eager to have the ability to penetrate.” By day, he manages the domestic chores; by night, he bores his dick into the engineer’s delicious ass. Talk about gender fluidity!
The screwball spirit of the novel’s ever-morphing events plays with the nature of identity, sexuality, desire, and “the eternal hell of the libido.” There are lots more jolts, reversals, and surprises along the way. Some may tickle you; others may gross you out. For my part, after a while I found myself giving in to the madcap wackiness, enjoying the crazy ride that Noll was taking me on.
Noll, who died in 2017, won the Prêmio Jabuti, Brazil’s major literary award, five times. He was just as popular with the public as he was with the prize givers. According to Stefan Tobler, another of his translators, the “transgressive, queer power of [his novels]had a magnetic pull on young readers and writers brought up largely on a diet of social realist and regionalist fiction.” The topsy-turvy nature of sex and desire is something Noll doesn’t shy away from. Rather, he allows his characters to tumble about in the messy wash of the libido’s urgency. At the same time, like Carnival season in Rio, there is a serious underpinning to this zany kaleidoscope of a novel.
Amid all the erratic and unpredictable hurly-burly lurks an important question: how to “be a man at peace with his own story”? Noll’s genius is to let this existential question we all wrestle with resonate in delicious irresolution. “Everything confused me,” the narrator says, “but I know this confusion was part of a game I played so I wouldn’t grow too attached to any particular role at home. Because the future hides surprises, you know.” The narrator’s willingness to accept surprises and go along with the unpredictability of life—to run away, as he says late in the novel, “from any story that wanted to enslave me to my recent or remote past”—is Noll’s invitation to his readers to consider the possibilities of an unbridled, radical openness.
Philip Gambone is the author of five books, including the novel Beijing and the memoir As Far As I Can Tell: Finding My Father in World War II.
