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.

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.

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. 

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 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 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.

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.

'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.

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'.

An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here. Living in the slums of Rio and eking out a living as a typist, Macabéa loves movies, Coca-Cola and her philandering rat of a boyfriend; she would like to be like Marilyn Monroe, but she is ugly and unloved. Yet telling her story is the narrator Rodrigo S.M., who tries to direct Macabéa's fate but comes to realize that, for all her outward misery, she is inwardly free. Slyly subverting ideas of poverty, identity, love, and the art of writing itself, Clarice Lispector's audacious last novel, arguably her best, is a haunting portrayal of innocence in a bad world.

Fresh from the enormous success of her debut novel Near to the Wild Heart, Hurricane Clarice let loose something stormier with The Chandelier. In a body of work renowned for its potent idiosyncratic genius, The Chandelier in many ways has pride of place. “It stands out,” her biographer Benjamin Moser noted, “in a strange and difficult body of work, as perhaps her strangest and most difficult book.” Of glacial intensity, consisting almost entirely of interior monologues—interrupted by odd and jarring fragments of dialogue and action—the novel moves in slow waves that crest in moments of revelation. As Virginia seeks freedom via creation, the drama of her isolated life is almost entirely internal: from childhood, she sculpts clay figurines with “the best clay one could desire: white, supple, sticky, cold. She got a clear and tender material from which she could shape a world. How, how to explain the miracle ...” While on one level simply the story of a woman’s life, The Chandelier’s real drama lies in Lispector’s attempt “to find the nucleus made of a single instant ... the tenuous triumph and the defeat, perhaps nothing more than breathing.” The Chandelier pushes Lispector’s lifelong quest for that nucleus into deeper territories than any of her other amazing works.

O surgimento de Perto do Coração Selvagem, em 1943, causou grande impacto no cenário literário brasileiro, proporcionando à autora aclamação imediata da crítica e de seus colegas escritores. Houve quem encontrasse no livro a influência de Virginia Woolf, ao passo que outros apostavam em Joyce, seguindo a falsa pista da epígrafe da qual Clarice pinçou seu título: "Ele estava só. Estava abandonado, feliz, perto do coração selvagem da vida." Ambos os grupos estavam errados, apesar do uso do fluxo de consciência pela escritora estreante a justificar tais correlações. Ocorre, no entanto, que esse havia sido um achado natural e espontâneo para Clarice Lispector, que admitiu como única influência neste caso O Lobo da Estepe, de Hermann Hesse. Não em termos estilísticos tampouco por se identificar com o caráter do protagonista, mas sim por compartilhar com ele e, sobretudo, com Hesse, o desejo imperioso de romper todas as barreiras e ultrapassar todos os limites na busca da própria verdade interior. Anseio personificado pela personagem central, Joana, com uma expressão que se tornou célebre: "Liberdade é pouco. O que desejo ainda não tem nome." Íntima e universal, destemida e secreta, Joana "sentia o mundo palpitar docemente em seu peito, doía-lhe o corpo como se nele suportasse a feminilidade de todas as mulheres" e ela destoava do sistema patriarcal em que se encontrava inserida da mesma forma que Clarice se distanciava da literatura de seu tempo, ainda dominada pelo regionalismo e o realismo. Ambas, autora e protagonista, eram forças divergentes, porém não dissonantes, já que introduziam uma nova musicalidade, uma harmonia própria, poética e triunfal, na aspereza circundante, enquanto buscavam "o centro luminoso das coisas" sem hesitar em "mergulhar em águas desconhecidas", deixando o silêncio e partindo para a luta. Deste embate à beira do íntimo abismo, Joana torna-se uma mulher completa e Clarice, uma escritora singular e inimitável.

'Aprendizaje o El libro de los placeres' (publicado por primera vez en 1969) despertó la polémica entre los críticos, que aún hoy debaten sus posibles interpretaciones. 'Aprendizaje' es el relato de cómo el amor se forja en dos seres; a través de un arduo desnudamiento interno los protagonistas van recuperando su identidad hasta alcanzar la renovación vital en la mutua entrega. A su ejercicio introspectivo opone la autora su propia búsqueda formal, el intento de superar los límites del estilo amalgamando forma y fondo en una prosa rebosante de imágenes que desarman al lector con su verdad hiriente. Su lectura ofrece a quien la emprende el desafío de seguir paso a paso ese hondamiento, ese despojarse de todos los bagajes para iniciar un definitivo aprendizaje de la existencia.

Como todo coelho, Joãozinho franzia o nariz muito depressa quando estava cheirando, ou melhor, pensando em algo importante. Num desses dias em que a barriga estava roncando, uma ideia lhe surgiu à cabeça - fugir da casinhola de grade de ferro sempre que esquecessem a sua comida. Essa e outras três histórias compõem esta bela coletânea para os pequenos leitores.

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.

Lazos de familia –publicado inicialmente en 1960– marcó el regreso definitivo de Clarice Lispector a Brasil luego de una prolongada residencia en el exterior, así como el reconocimiento por parte del público y la crítica. Muchos de los textos que componen este libro consagratorio parecen retomar las temáticas que Clarice ya había esbozado en sus primeras novelas Cerca del corazón salvaje (1943) o La araña (1946), en especial las minucias de las relaciones familiares, sus miserias y también sus misterios. Cada una de las narraciones de Lazos de familia se presenta como una detallada serie de movimientos que conduce a los personajes a un estado que puede variar entre la extrañeza perceptiva o la deriva subjetiva hasta alcanzar un fuera de sí. Al mismo tiempo, los cuentos anticipan temas –la vida como potencia desconocida, el lenguaje como creación o registro– que Clarice desarrollará exhaustivamente en La pasión según G.H. (1964) y Agua viva (1973).

G. H. –nunca sabremos el nombre y apellido de la protagonista– es una mujer independiente, escultora amateur y bien relacionada en los círculos más influyentes de Río de Janeiro. Un día, sola en su ático, encuentra una cucaracha. Esto provocará en ella arcadas de repulsión y un caudal de reflexiones íntimas, algunas hasta entonces desconocidas para ella misma, sobre sus sentimientos, miedos, angustias... Este hecho aparentemente intrascendente le servirá para repasar su vida desde la infancia y llegar así a la determinación de vencer todos sus miedos.

La lámpara (1946) es la segunda novela de Clarice Lispector y, como el objeto que lleva por título, deslumbra hasta cegar, a la vez ilumina aspectos cruciales de la narrativa de la siempre personalísima autora brasileña. Reducido a su núcleo esencial, el texto cuenta la historia de un probable incesto —el de los hermanos Virgínia y Daniel— y de una soledad segura, la de ella, que con su aislamiento distorsiona todas las formas de lo real, enfrentándose y enfrentándonos a la evidencia de la fragilidad de nuestra manera de relacionarnos con los demás y con el mundo. Porque la mirada de Virgínia no hace concesiones y penetra hasta esos rincones del yo que los adultos convenimos desde siempre en ocultar. Por eso, cuando llega el sorprendente y rápido desenlace de la trama, todos asentimos al unísono, comprendiendo de inmediato que era el único final posible.(Biblioteca Clarice Lispector)

You can find an alternative cover for this ISBN here. "Reading Clarice Lispector's novels is like listening to a stranger unravel her thoughts and then walk out of the door, leaving behind a strong sense of character but few facts about daily life. You wonder after meeting such a person whether she was real or imagined and then decide it doesn't really matter." Belles Lettres The silent rage that seizes a matriarch whose family is feting her eighty-ninth year. The tangle of emotions felt by a sophisticated young woman toward her elderly mother. An adolescent girl's obsessive fear of being looked at. The "giddying sense of compassion" that a blind man introduces into a young housewife's settled existence. Of such is made the world of Clarice Lispector, the Brazilian writer whose finest work is acknowledged to be her exquisitely crafted short stories. Here, in these thirteen of Lispector's most brilliantly conceived short stories, mysterious and unexpected moments of crisis propel characters to self-discovery or keenly felt intuitions about the human condition. Her characters mirror states of mind. Alienated by their unsettling sense of life's absurdity, they seem at times absorbed in their interior lives, and in the passions that dominate and usually defeat them.