Clarice Lispector
Clarice Lispector was a Brazilian writer. Acclaimed internationally for her innovative novels and short stories, she was also a journalist. Born to a Jewish family in Podolia in Western Ukraine, she was brought to Brazil as an infant, amidst the disasters engulfing her native land following the First World War.She grew up in northeastern Brazil, where her mother died when she was nine. The family moved to Rio de Janeiro when she was in her teens. While in law school in Rio she began publishing her first journalistic work and short stories, catapulting to fame at age 23 with the publication of her first novel, 'Near to the Wild Heart' (Perto do Coração Selvagem), written as an interior monologue in a style and language that was considered revolutionary in Brazil.She left Brazil in 1944, following her marriage to a Brazilian diplomat, and spent the next decade and a half in Europe and the United States. Upon return to Rio de Janeiro in 1959, she began producing her most famous works, including the stories of Family Ties (Laços de Família), the great mystic novel The Passion According to G.H. (A Paixão Segundo G.H.), and the novel many consider to be her masterpiece, Água Viva. Injured in an accident in 1966, she spent the last decade of her life in frequent pain, steadily writing and publishing novels and stories until her premature death in 1977.She has been the subject of numerous books and references to her, and her works are common in Brazilian literature and music. Several of her works have been turned into films, one being 'Hour of the Star' and she was the subject of a recent biography, Why This World, by Benjamin Moser.
The Hour of the Star
Clarice Lispector
The Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector's consummate final novel, may well be her masterpiece. Narrated by the cosmopolitan Rodrigo S.M., this brief, strange, and haunting tale is the story of Macabéa, one of life's unfortunates. Living in the slums of Rio de Janeiro and eking out a poor living as a typist, Macabéa loves movies, Coca-Cola, and her rat of a boyfriend; she would like to be like Marilyn Monroe, but she is ugly, underfed, sickly, and unloved. Rodrigo recoils from her wretchedness, and yet he cannot avoid realization that for all her outward misery, Macabéa is inwardly free. She doesn't seem to know how unhappy she should be. Lispector employs her pathetic heroine against her urbane, empty narrator--edge of despair to edge of despair--and, working them like a pair of scissors, she cuts away the reader's preconceived notions about poverty, identity, love, and the art of fiction. In her last novel she takes readers close to the true mystery of life, and leaves us deep in Lispector territory indeed.
The Passion According to G.H.
Clarice Lispector
G.H., a well-to-do Rio sculptress, enters the room of her maid, which is as clear and white 'as in an insane asylum from which dangerous objects have been removed'. There she sees a cockroach - black, dusty, prehistoric - crawling out of the wardrobe and, panicking, slams the door on it. Her irresistible fascination with the dying insect provokes a spiritual crisis within, in which she questions her place in the universe and her very identity, propelling her towards an act of shocking transgression. Clarice Lispector's spare, deeply disturbing yet luminous novel transforms language into something otherworldly, and is one of her most unsettling and compelling works.
The Complete Stories
Clarice Lispector
Clarice Lispector’s Complete Stories, 85 in all, are an epiphany, among the important books of this—or any—year
The recent publication by New Directions of five Lispector novels revealed to legions of new readers her darkness and dazzle. Now, for the first time in English, are all the stories that made her a Brazilian from teenagers coming into awareness of their sexual and artistic powers to humdrum housewives whose lives are shattered by unexpected epiphanies to old people who don’t know what to do with themselves. Clarice’s stories take us through their lives—and ours.
From one of the greatest modern writers, these stories, gathered from the nine collections published during her lifetime, follow an unbroken time line of success as a writer, from her adolescence to her death bed.
An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures
Clarice Lispector
What to make of a writer who follows the metaphysical heights of her great Passion According to GH with a book that looks suspiciously like a romance novel?
In The Apprenticeship, or The Book of Pleasures, Clarice Lispector tries to discover how to bridge the gap between people, or how to even begin to try.
A woman struggles to emerge from solitude and sadness into love, including sexual love: her guide on this journey is Ulisses, who (yes) leads her patiently into the fullness of life.
The Apprenticeship was a bestseller and, as her biographer Benjamin Moser writes, "This accessible love story surprised many readers. When it came out, an interviewer said: 'I thought The Book of Pleasures was much easier to read than any of your other books. Do you think there’s any basis for that?' Clarice answered: 'There is. I humanized myself, the book reflects that.'”
Near to the Wild Heart
Clarice Lispector
Near to the Wild Heart is Clarice Lispector's first novel, written from March to November 1942 and published around her twenty-third birthday. The novel, written in a stream-of-consciousness style reminiscent of the English-language Modernists, centers around the childhood and early adulthood of a character named Joana, who bears strong resemblance to her author: "Madame Bovary, c'est moi", Lispector said, quoting Flaubert, when asked about the similarities. The book, particularly its revolutionary language, brought its young, unknown creator to great prominence in Brazilian letters and earned her the prestigious Graça Aranha Prize.
Joana, a young woman very much in the mode of existential contemporaries like Camus and Sartre, ponders the meaning of life, the freedom to be one's self, and the purpose of existence. Near to the Wild Heart does not have a conventional narrative plot. It instead recounts flashes from the life of Joana, between her present, as a young woman, and her early childhood. These focus, like most of Lispector's works, on interior, emotional states of mind.
A Breath of Life
Clarice Lispector
A mystical dialogue between a male author and his creation, this posthumous work has never before been translated, and is a book of particular beauty and strangeness.
A mystical dialogue between a male author (a thinly disguised Clarice Lispector) and his/her creation, a woman named Angela, this posthumous work has never before been translated. Lispector did not even live to see it published.
At her death, a mountain of fragments remained to be “structured” by Olga Borelli. These fragments form a dialogue between a god-like author who infuses the breath of life into his creation: the speaking, breathing, dying creation herself, Angela Pralini. The work’s almost occult appeal arises from the perception that if Angela dies, Clarice will have to die as well. And she did.
Água Viva
Clarice Lispector
Lispector at her most philosophically radical. A meditation on the nature of life and time, Água Viva (1973) shows Lispector discovering a new means of writing about herself, more deeply transforming her individual experience into a universal poetry. In a body of work as emotionally powerful, formally innovative, and philosophically profound as Clarice Lispector’s, Água Viva stands out as a particular triumph.
Too Much of Life
Clarice Lispector
'How did I so unwittingly transform the joy of living into the great luxury of being alive?'
Between 1967 and 1977, Clarice Lispector wrote weekly dispatches from her desk in Rio for the Jornal de Brasil. Already famous for her revolutionary, interior, metaphysical novels, in her Chronicles she turns her attention to the everyday, turning the material of her life into profound, touching and funny, tiny revelations.
Observing the world around her, small encounters like hearing tales of the lost loves of a taxi driver, or the bitterness lurking beneath the prettiness of an old friend, become an exposition of the currents and foibles that define our lives. Everything from the meaning of cosmonauts to the new ideas, writers and artists that populate the sparkling international world of the sixties and seventies are considered and transformed into jewels of insight, delight and devastation.
Sincere and playful, exhilarating and contemplative, Too Much of Life: Complete Chronicles opens up a new way of seeing the world.
A Hora da Estrela
Clarice Lispector
Alternative cover editions for this ISBN can be found here and here.
A história da nordestina Macabéa é contada passo a passo por seu autor, o escritor Rodrigo S.M. (um alter-ego de Clarice Lispector), de um modo que os leitores acompanhem o seu processo de criação. À medida que mostra esta alagoana, órfã de pai e mãe, criada por uma tia, desprovida de qualquer encanto, incapaz de comunicar-se com os outros, ele conhece um pouco mais sua própria identidade. A descrição do dia-a-dia de Macabéa na cidade do Rio de Janeiro como datilógrafa, o namoro com Olímpico de Jesus, seu relacionamento com o patrão e com a colega Glória e o encontro final com a cartomante estão sempre acompanhados por convites constantes ao leitor para ver com o autor de que matéria é feita a vida de um ser humano.
The Besieged City
Clarice Lispector
Written in flight from Lispector's 'shipwreck of introspection' it is a book unlike any other in the Lispector canon, a novel about simply seeing the external world. Its heroine Lucrécia is utterly mute and unreflective. She may have no inner life. The plot itself is utterly unlike any other Lispector narrative: small-town girl marries rich man, sees the world, and lives happily ever after.
But there are miraculous horses, linguistic ecstasies, catty remarks, minor characters' visions and music from unknown sources. There is Lucrécia, the heroine free of the burden of thought, who 'leaned over without any individuality, trying merely to look at things directly'. And yet her 'mere' looking leads, as Lispector's biographer Benjamin Moser notes, 'paradoxically but inevitably, to Clarice's own metaphysical concerns. As it turns out, not being profound is simply another way of being profound'.
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