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Complete Stories
The publication of Clarice Lispector's Collected Stories, eighty-five in all, is a major literary event. Now, for the first time in English, are all the stories that made her a Brazilian legend: 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. Lispector's stories take us through their lives - and ours. From one of the greatest modern writers, these 85 stories, gathered from the nine collections published during her lifetime, follow Clarice Lispector throughout her life.
672 pages, Paperback
First published August 4, 2015
About the author
Clarice Lispector
210 books5,722 followersClarice 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.
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.
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January 9, 2019
Literature saves -- master of the craft, Clarice Lispector from Brazil
This recently published collection translated from the Portuguese by Katrina Dodson of all eighty-six Clarice Lispector short stories is a treasure. Inventive in both style and content, a number of these masterful stories will haunt a reader, but, for me, none more haunting than the following piece I have chosen to make the focus of my review:
THE FIFTH STORY
The Attack: One of the acknowledged kings of fiction editing, Gordon Lish, termed the first lines of a short story “the attack.” No better example of a literary attack than: “This story could be called “The Statues.” Another possible name is “The Murder.” And also “How to Kill Cockroaches.” So I will tell at least three stories, all true because they don’t contradict each other. Through a single story they would be a thousand and one, were I given a thousand and one nights.” Oh, Clarice! Fantastic way to build dramatic tension – your first-person narrator has such a story to tell, a veritable weaving Shahrazad, she will tell her story several different ways, and, given the chance, she could tell the same story in a thousand and one diverse ways.
How to Kill Cockroaches: Cockroach problem? Our narrator (let’s call her Livia) employs an effective solution. From one vantage point this sounds so cut and dry but for the person sensitive to the entire web of life, killing is never cut and dry. There are a good number of spiritual traditions, Buddhism for example, that emphasize compassion for all living beings, including insects. The Jain religion of India is even more extreme, a religion founded upon the tradition of nonviolence to all living creatures where many devotees even go so far as to wear masks so as not to breathe in microorganisms.
The Murderess, One: Livia lets us know this story, although told second, is actually the first, a story starting out where she is overheard complaining about cockroaches, a complaint lodged in the abstract, that is, not her actual problem but rather a general complaint about the insects, since the cockroaches were on the ground floor and would crawl up the pipes to her home. But, she says, once she prepared the mixture, the cockroaches became, in fact, her cockroaches. Very true. When we actively engage with others, even animals or insects, at that exact point we enter into a personal relationship.
The Murderess, Two: At this juncture in the story, we read: “In our name, then, I began to measure and weigh the ingredients with a slightly more intense concentration. A vague resentment had overtaken me, a sense of outrage. By day the cockroaches were invisible and no one would believe in the secret curse that gnawed at such a peaceful home.” My goodness, the narrator’s emotions are fully engaged. This version of the story kicks into high gear with language touching on the sacred and religious.
The Murderess, Three: Oh, yes, Livia measures out the deadly elixir for those cockroaches’ drawn-out death, an excited apprehension and her own clandestine curse providing the direction. She has reached that dramatic climax where, icily, she desires but one thing: death to all cockroaches. Is this story beginning to sound a bit sinister, as if our narrator has crossing over to the dark side?
The Murderess, Four: Livia reflects how cockroaches will crawl up the pipes while we, exhausted, dream. But now she’s ready: she has spread the powder expertly, making it look like something from the natural world. She wakes the next morning and inspects: there they all are on the laundry room floor, hard and huge. Not only is there is something eerie and unsettling about what she sees, those many petrified cockroaches, dark, still bodies on a white floor, but also the manner in which she uses language to frame her seeing.
Statues: In this third version of the story, Livia waxes poetic, eulogizing in many exquisite, excruciating details how the cockroaches have hardened from the inside out. She likens herself to the first witness at daybreak in ancient Pompeii. Here’s a snip from her panegyric: “Others—suddenly assaulted by their own core, without even the slightest inkling that some internal mold was being petrified!—these suddenly crystallize the way a word is cut off in the mouth: it’s you I . . ."
The Fourth Story: As she tells us, this forth version initiates a new era in her home. She looks over at the pipe where the cockroaches enter and knows she will prepare the lethal mixture each night as if performing a rite. Then eagerly anticipating bearing witness to the mass death toll the next morning, Livia trembles at the double life she is now living as a sorceress. Think of how many thousands of novels and stories have been written in the genres of dark fantasy and horror. To my mind, Clarice Lispector’s brief tale powerfully encapsulates much of the underlying psychology of these genres.
The Fifth Story: The narrator’s fifth version has an exotic title, a title including the name Leibniz, the German philosopher and co-inventor of calculus, as well as the transcendental nature of love. Thanks, Clarice! Number five can gyrate into at least a thousand and one tales, a gyration serving as a pronouncement: imagination rules! Very true - given the slightest bit of tension, even something seemingly minor, like the extermination of insects, for a fiction writer on fire, such tension opens wide into a world of near infinite possibilities. And to think this is but one of her eighty-six stories collected in this book. Happy reading.
February 19, 2021
“The courage to be something other than what one is, to give birth to oneself, and to leave one’s former body on the ground. And without having answered to anyone about whether it was worthwhile.”
Clarice Lispector's The Complete Stories includes 85 short stories and spans her entire career, from her very earliest writing to stories she wrote late in her life. Though there are recurring themes such as love, marriage, motherhood and domesticity, it is the intensity with which Lispector observes the inner life of her heroines that is most striking. Ben Moser, who provides an excellent introduction to this collection and a biography I'd recommend, refers to the writing here as Lispector's 'witchcraft.' This is most evident in Lispector's heroines who more often struggle to live rather than simply exist.
There are way too many stories to discuss. I do think it started nicely with "The Triumph," in which a young woman awakens to new possibilities after her lover's surprising confession. "The Egg and the Chicken," a story I'd read before, is one of the most interesting and surreal. In this story, Lispector attempts to explore the inner life of a chicken before philosophical musings on the nature of the egg. It sounds strange, but it is very compelling! Some others I liked included "Love," "Daydream and Drunkenness of a Young Lady," "Miss Algrave," "The Buffalo," "The Message," "The Chicken," and "The Man Who Showed Up."
The collection ends with Lispector's musings on Brazil's new capital, Brasilia as well as her position at the end of her life as a renowned author: "Brasilia, you are scratching yourself...Brasilia is hot off the press. Brasilia is a wedding march...Brasilia is an eyelid fluttering like a butterfly...One day I was a child like Brasilia." Some of the stories have a fragmentary quality to them and don't necessarily go anywhere. And I still think I prefer Lispector's novels, but as a whole, this is a great collection of an important writer. NPR's Juan Vidal sums up his reading of this collection, "Reading Lispector is like being handed a world on fire. Or rather, a number of blazing worlds that at any moment could explode and level everything around them. And yet they are worlds you choose to hold, because their melancholy holds a certain depth of meaning." 4.5 stars
Clarice Lispector's The Complete Stories includes 85 short stories and spans her entire career, from her very earliest writing to stories she wrote late in her life. Though there are recurring themes such as love, marriage, motherhood and domesticity, it is the intensity with which Lispector observes the inner life of her heroines that is most striking. Ben Moser, who provides an excellent introduction to this collection and a biography I'd recommend, refers to the writing here as Lispector's 'witchcraft.' This is most evident in Lispector's heroines who more often struggle to live rather than simply exist.
There are way too many stories to discuss. I do think it started nicely with "The Triumph," in which a young woman awakens to new possibilities after her lover's surprising confession. "The Egg and the Chicken," a story I'd read before, is one of the most interesting and surreal. In this story, Lispector attempts to explore the inner life of a chicken before philosophical musings on the nature of the egg. It sounds strange, but it is very compelling! Some others I liked included "Love," "Daydream and Drunkenness of a Young Lady," "Miss Algrave," "The Buffalo," "The Message," "The Chicken," and "The Man Who Showed Up."
The collection ends with Lispector's musings on Brazil's new capital, Brasilia as well as her position at the end of her life as a renowned author: "Brasilia, you are scratching yourself...Brasilia is hot off the press. Brasilia is a wedding march...Brasilia is an eyelid fluttering like a butterfly...One day I was a child like Brasilia." Some of the stories have a fragmentary quality to them and don't necessarily go anywhere. And I still think I prefer Lispector's novels, but as a whole, this is a great collection of an important writer. NPR's Juan Vidal sums up his reading of this collection, "Reading Lispector is like being handed a world on fire. Or rather, a number of blazing worlds that at any moment could explode and level everything around them. And yet they are worlds you choose to hold, because their melancholy holds a certain depth of meaning." 4.5 stars
February 22, 2016
Each of our days is a strange prism, subdivided like the problem of Achilles and the Tortoise into ever-retreating fragments of memoried experience - in this continual tideflow of lifeshards somehow "the human" can be identified. With this we write our stories.
September 10, 2024
dare i say that clarice lispector's writing can bring world peace 🤭
June 27, 2020
Introduction: Glamour and Grammar, by Benjamin Moser
First Stories
--The Triumph
--Obsession
--The Fever Dream
--Jimmy and I
--Interrupted Story
--The Escape
--Excerpt
--Letters to Hermengardo
--Gertrudes Asks For Advice
--Another Couple of Drunks
Family Ties
--Daydream and Drunkenness of a Young Lady
--Love
--A Chicken
--The Imitation of the Rose
--Happy Birthday
--The Smallest Woman in the World
--The Dinner
--Preciousness
--Family Ties
--Beginnings of a Fortune
--Mystery in São Cristóvão
--The Crime of the Mathematics Teacher
--The Buffalo
The Foreign Legion
--The Disasters of Sofia
--The Sharing of Loaves
--The Message
--Monkeys
--The Egg and the Chicken
--Temptation
--Journey to Petrópolis
--The Solution
--Evolution of a Myopia
--The Fifth Story
--A Sincere Friendship
--The Obedient Ones
--The Foreign Legion
Back of the Drawer
--The Burned Sinner and the Harmonious Angels
--Profile of Chosen Beings
--Inaugural Address
--Mineirinho
Covert Joy
--Covert Joy
--Remnants of Carnival
--Eat Up, My Son
--Forgiving God
--One Hundred Years of Forgiveness
--A Hope
--The Servant
--Boy in Pen and Ink
--A Tale of So Much Love
--The Waters of the World
--Involuntary Incarnation
--Two Stories My Way
--The First Kiss
Where Were You at Night
--In Search of a Dignity
--The Departure of the Train
--Dry Sketch of Horses
--Where Were You at Night
--Report on the Thing
--Manifesto of the City
--The Conjurings of Dona Frozina
--That's Where I'm Going
--The Dead Man in the Sea at Urca
--Silence
--A Full Afternoon
--Such Gentleness
--Soul Storm
--Natural Life
The Via Crucis of the Body
--Explanation
--Miss Algrave
--The Body
--Via Crucis
--The Man Who Showed Up
--He Drank Me Up
--For the Time Being
--Day After Day
--The Sound of Footsteps
--Before the Rio-Niterói Bridge
--Praça Mauá
--Pig Latin
--Better Than to Burn
--But It's Going to Rain
Vision of Splendor
--Brasília
Final Stories
--Beauty and the Beast or The Enormous Wound
--One Day Less
Appendix: The Useless Explanation
Translator's Note, by Katrina Dodson
Bibliographical Note
Acknowledgments
First Stories
--The Triumph
--Obsession
--The Fever Dream
--Jimmy and I
--Interrupted Story
--The Escape
--Excerpt
--Letters to Hermengardo
--Gertrudes Asks For Advice
--Another Couple of Drunks
Family Ties
--Daydream and Drunkenness of a Young Lady
--Love
--A Chicken
--The Imitation of the Rose
--Happy Birthday
--The Smallest Woman in the World
--The Dinner
--Preciousness
--Family Ties
--Beginnings of a Fortune
--Mystery in São Cristóvão
--The Crime of the Mathematics Teacher
--The Buffalo
The Foreign Legion
--The Disasters of Sofia
--The Sharing of Loaves
--The Message
--Monkeys
--The Egg and the Chicken
--Temptation
--Journey to Petrópolis
--The Solution
--Evolution of a Myopia
--The Fifth Story
--A Sincere Friendship
--The Obedient Ones
--The Foreign Legion
Back of the Drawer
--The Burned Sinner and the Harmonious Angels
--Profile of Chosen Beings
--Inaugural Address
--Mineirinho
Covert Joy
--Covert Joy
--Remnants of Carnival
--Eat Up, My Son
--Forgiving God
--One Hundred Years of Forgiveness
--A Hope
--The Servant
--Boy in Pen and Ink
--A Tale of So Much Love
--The Waters of the World
--Involuntary Incarnation
--Two Stories My Way
--The First Kiss
Where Were You at Night
--In Search of a Dignity
--The Departure of the Train
--Dry Sketch of Horses
--Where Were You at Night
--Report on the Thing
--Manifesto of the City
--The Conjurings of Dona Frozina
--That's Where I'm Going
--The Dead Man in the Sea at Urca
--Silence
--A Full Afternoon
--Such Gentleness
--Soul Storm
--Natural Life
The Via Crucis of the Body
--Explanation
--Miss Algrave
--The Body
--Via Crucis
--The Man Who Showed Up
--He Drank Me Up
--For the Time Being
--Day After Day
--The Sound of Footsteps
--Before the Rio-Niterói Bridge
--Praça Mauá
--Pig Latin
--Better Than to Burn
--But It's Going to Rain
Vision of Splendor
--Brasília
Final Stories
--Beauty and the Beast or The Enormous Wound
--One Day Less
Appendix: The Useless Explanation
Translator's Note, by Katrina Dodson
Bibliographical Note
Acknowledgments
March 28, 2020
This collection deserves a proper review, but I am fighting with my son for the limited computer resources and losing the battle. So, for now just a few thoughts.
It is amazing to see how multidimensional was her talent and to follow how the themes of her stories changing with time from domestic life of a woman to something totally abstract and transcendental.
In her language, her word imagery, she effortlessly transcends the usual limits between different facets of the sensual word:
"The shadows were of a low and dark sound like the darkest note from cello."
“the citric flavour of heroic pains”
living “without anesthesia the terror of being alive”
I could trace the ideas of the stories to her novels I've read. The one in particular, "Forgiving God" might be a precursor of The Passion According to G.H..
If I could single out, my favourite three stories would be:
"The Buffalo" from the early collection "Family ties" about a woman visiting a zoo after the break up with her lover.
"The Egg and the Chicken" - a philosophic but playful mediation about the nature of things and out perception of reality.
"Understanding is a proof of making an error. Understanding it (egg) is not the way to see it. - Never thinking about the egg is a way to have seen it. - I wonder, do I know of the egg? I almost certainly do. Thus: I exist, therefore I know. - What I do not know about the egg is what really matters. What I don't know about the egg gives me the egg properly speaking. - The Moon is inhabited by eggs."
"Where you were at night" - is mythical, Dantesque fable about ascending and descending to some sort of divine essence. I've read it a few times, and each time came up with the different interpretation what is going on and what all of this means - perfect literature!
A collection to come back to many times. But probably the most effective in small doses.
It is amazing to see how multidimensional was her talent and to follow how the themes of her stories changing with time from domestic life of a woman to something totally abstract and transcendental.
In her language, her word imagery, she effortlessly transcends the usual limits between different facets of the sensual word:
"The shadows were of a low and dark sound like the darkest note from cello."
“the citric flavour of heroic pains”
living “without anesthesia the terror of being alive”
I could trace the ideas of the stories to her novels I've read. The one in particular, "Forgiving God" might be a precursor of The Passion According to G.H..
If I could single out, my favourite three stories would be:
"The Buffalo" from the early collection "Family ties" about a woman visiting a zoo after the break up with her lover.
"The Egg and the Chicken" - a philosophic but playful mediation about the nature of things and out perception of reality.
"Understanding is a proof of making an error. Understanding it (egg) is not the way to see it. - Never thinking about the egg is a way to have seen it. - I wonder, do I know of the egg? I almost certainly do. Thus: I exist, therefore I know. - What I do not know about the egg is what really matters. What I don't know about the egg gives me the egg properly speaking. - The Moon is inhabited by eggs."
"Where you were at night" - is mythical, Dantesque fable about ascending and descending to some sort of divine essence. I've read it a few times, and each time came up with the different interpretation what is going on and what all of this means - perfect literature!
A collection to come back to many times. But probably the most effective in small doses.
February 10, 2022
I read this 650-page volume over several months, so it’s not surprising I don’t remember much of the early stories. Based on my post-it notes, I was most impressed with the stories of The Foreign Legion (1964), especially the Jamesian “The Message.” Above all the girl had already started taking no pleasure in being awarded the title of man whenever she showed the slightest hint…of being a person. (The ellipsis belongs to Lispector.)
The story “Remnants of Carnival” might seem slight, but it was a favorite: The narration of an adult looking back on a particular childhood memory, the only time she, an 8-year-old with a severely ill mother, was able to costume. She describes the inner tumult of anticipation, Carnival was mine, mine. /However, in reality, I barely participated at all; her brief encounters with maskers as indispensable contact with my inner world; and then, finally—despite her fragile costume in ruins from running in the rain to fetch her mother’s medicine—recognition and fulfillment.
The last two stories were unfinished, but they felt complete to me. Of course not all the stories were 5-stars for me (I particularly struggled through the late-period “Brasilia”); but the existence of the volume in itself is an impressive feat, thanks to the efforts of editor Benjamin Moser and translator Katrina Dodson.
The story “Remnants of Carnival” might seem slight, but it was a favorite: The narration of an adult looking back on a particular childhood memory, the only time she, an 8-year-old with a severely ill mother, was able to costume. She describes the inner tumult of anticipation, Carnival was mine, mine. /However, in reality, I barely participated at all; her brief encounters with maskers as indispensable contact with my inner world; and then, finally—despite her fragile costume in ruins from running in the rain to fetch her mother’s medicine—recognition and fulfillment.
The last two stories were unfinished, but they felt complete to me. Of course not all the stories were 5-stars for me (I particularly struggled through the late-period “Brasilia”); but the existence of the volume in itself is an impressive feat, thanks to the efforts of editor Benjamin Moser and translator Katrina Dodson.
February 3, 2019
[3.5] A dizzying collection of stories that provoked a range of emotions in me. Many of the stories tell, in a surrealistic, dreamy way, about the horror of a "silent, slow, persistent life." A thread of disappointment runs through the stories - Lispector's women straddle a tenuous line between contentment and suffocation. Her stories are often confusing, sometimes tongue-in-cheek and usually left me shaking my head.
After the first twenty or so stories, I was tempted to quit. The interior dialogues of dissatisfied women are burdensome to read. At times they are indecipherable experimental fragments. But how could I abandon a writer's life work? So I read it dutifully, an assignment to myself. And there are some wonderful gems in these pages. I am glad I persisted because the last stories are particularly powerful. Very hard to rate - as my response to the stories varied from between 2 and 5 stars.
After the first twenty or so stories, I was tempted to quit. The interior dialogues of dissatisfied women are burdensome to read. At times they are indecipherable experimental fragments. But how could I abandon a writer's life work? So I read it dutifully, an assignment to myself. And there are some wonderful gems in these pages. I am glad I persisted because the last stories are particularly powerful. Very hard to rate - as my response to the stories varied from between 2 and 5 stars.
January 16, 2021
Clarice é maravilhosamente inigualável. Poucos escritores descrevem com tanta precisão os meandros da alma. Por vezes, foi em transe que a senti e a acompanhei, espantada por as (suas) palavras conseguirem dizer tanto do que nunca se fala.
A Imitação da Rosa, Feliz Aniversário e Amor são os meus contos preferidos.
A Imitação da Rosa, Feliz Aniversário e Amor são os meus contos preferidos.
July 29, 2019
As must be obvious to anyone who’s read her, Clarice Lispector is an original. The Hour of the Star – until 2009 by far her most prominent work in English – is a dizzying game of mirror-selves, stark and unsparing, and to those unfamiliar with her work probably as jarring an introduction to an author as it’s possible to have, short of mid-period Samuel Beckett. Other major works A Breath of Life (her Unnamable) and The Passion According to G.H. (until recently my favourite, and the only one I could claim – if tangentially – to have grasped) are just as unnerving. Unnervement, I think, could be said to be her strategy, or a crucial part of it. To soften up the terrain of the reader’s mind for planting, for the seeding of myth and paradox which is her main work – an insidious task which you sense could lead (as with Beckett, or Thomas Bernhard, or Gerald Murnane) to takeover.
Well, though there are plenty of instances of it (in his introduction Benjamin Moser calls it “glamouring”), in my case the Lispector seed has not infiltrated all mental furrows, but my reading (slowly, at intervals) of her Complete Stories takes me a significant step closer. The beautiful thing here – and essential, for me, in finally comprehending her aesthetic – is that I can get on “at ground level”, with her early stories, as she herself is in the process of comprehending. (Not that this process of self-comprehension, for an imaginitive writer, ever ends.) And to my mind, with my Lispector-comprehension as developed as it is, a sweet spot is reached about late mid-career (1964) with the stories originally published as The Foreign Legion:
Less shocking than her novels, less obviously experimental, her stories, for me, are where Lispector’s writing is most fertile. From The Passion..., a tight tangled thicket persists, dense and dark, in which the explorer glimpses, at intervals, bright bursts of night from above. Granted it’s a journey worth taking, it’s harrowing, baffling; you hack your own path. Maybe the stories here, for the most part, deprive us of the explorer’s role, but they present a vast plain of varied bioregions, circled and transcribed but wild within, where the apprentice can train, before the hard slog of the novels. Plus – strangely – where the novels seem almost shorn of characters and setting and drama (elements normally crucial in stretching a story over 100 pages), the stories make space for all of this and are enriched by it.
All of which is to say, maybe, that my interest in Lispector is peripheral and I’ve thus been drawn to her periphery – the place most easily accessed. Also it’s possible (likely?) that in the light of these stories the novels would come alive for me – that I’ve now “cracked the code”. And of course there’s my stated love for the short-story form (which I’ve frequently, only half jokingly, called the “pre-eminent artform”). Plus my reading is ever more scattered, more fragmented. But for what it’s worth, this book has the feel of permanence to me – of something I’ll return to often and forever, till death do us (Clarice and I) part. Moreso than the novels, this is my Clarice Lispector. This is is raw, unself-conscious genius. This is prose that shapes all prose after it – prose that will shape my prose, in any case, for years to come. A treasure, a discovery, a revelation.
Well, though there are plenty of instances of it (in his introduction Benjamin Moser calls it “glamouring”), in my case the Lispector seed has not infiltrated all mental furrows, but my reading (slowly, at intervals) of her Complete Stories takes me a significant step closer. The beautiful thing here – and essential, for me, in finally comprehending her aesthetic – is that I can get on “at ground level”, with her early stories, as she herself is in the process of comprehending. (Not that this process of self-comprehension, for an imaginitive writer, ever ends.) And to my mind, with my Lispector-comprehension as developed as it is, a sweet spot is reached about late mid-career (1964) with the stories originally published as The Foreign Legion:
I was a very odd girl and, going pale, I saw it. Bristling, about to vomit, though to this day I don’t know for sure what I saw. But I know I saw it. I saw deep as into a mouth, in a flash I saw the abyss of the world. What I saw was as anonymous as a belly opened up for an intestinal operation. I saw some thing forming on his face – the already petrified distress was fighting its way up to his skin, I saw the grimace slowly hesitating and bursting through a crust – but this thing that in mute catastrophe was being uprooted, this thing so little resembled a smile as if a liver or a foot were trying to smile, I don’t know. Whatever I saw, I saw at such close range that I don’t know what I saw. As if my curious eye were glued to the keyhole and in shock came upon another eye looking back at me from the other side. I saw inside an eye. An eye opened up with its moving jelly. With its organic tears. An eye cries all by itself, an eye laughs all by itself. Until the man’s effort reached a peak of full awareness, and in a childish victory he showed, a pearl plucked from his open belly – that he was smiling. I saw a man with entrails smiling. I could see his extreme worry about getting it wrong, the diligence of the slow student, the clumsiness as if he’d suddenly become left-handed. Without understanding, I knew I was being asked to accept this offering from him and his open belly, and to accept the weight of this man. My back was desperately pushing against the wall, I shrank away – it was too soon for me to see all that. It was too soon for me to see how life is born. Life being born was so much bloodier than dying. Dying is uninterrupted. But seeing inert material slowly trying to loom up like one of the living-dead... Seeing hope terrified me, seeing life tied my stomach in knots. They were asking too much of my bravery simply because I was brave, they were asking for my strength simply because I was strong. “But what about me?” I shouted ten years later because of lost love, “who will ever see my weakness!” I looked at him in surprise, and never ever figured out what I saw, what I had seen could blind the curious.
Less shocking than her novels, less obviously experimental, her stories, for me, are where Lispector’s writing is most fertile. From The Passion..., a tight tangled thicket persists, dense and dark, in which the explorer glimpses, at intervals, bright bursts of night from above. Granted it’s a journey worth taking, it’s harrowing, baffling; you hack your own path. Maybe the stories here, for the most part, deprive us of the explorer’s role, but they present a vast plain of varied bioregions, circled and transcribed but wild within, where the apprentice can train, before the hard slog of the novels. Plus – strangely – where the novels seem almost shorn of characters and setting and drama (elements normally crucial in stretching a story over 100 pages), the stories make space for all of this and are enriched by it.
All of which is to say, maybe, that my interest in Lispector is peripheral and I’ve thus been drawn to her periphery – the place most easily accessed. Also it’s possible (likely?) that in the light of these stories the novels would come alive for me – that I’ve now “cracked the code”. And of course there’s my stated love for the short-story form (which I’ve frequently, only half jokingly, called the “pre-eminent artform”). Plus my reading is ever more scattered, more fragmented. But for what it’s worth, this book has the feel of permanence to me – of something I’ll return to often and forever, till death do us (Clarice and I) part. Moreso than the novels, this is my Clarice Lispector. This is is raw, unself-conscious genius. This is prose that shapes all prose after it – prose that will shape my prose, in any case, for years to come. A treasure, a discovery, a revelation.
November 3, 2021
Once in a while, groundless melancholy would darken my face, a dull and incomprehensible nostalgia for times never experienced would invade me.
*
As for me, I go on.
Alone now. Forever alone.
*
[…] I also understood how beautiful and how impossible that other dream is, that of trying to save oneself.
*
After all, what did we want? Nothing. We were worn out, disillusioned.
*
Right then she knows herself even less than she knows the sea. Her courage comes from not knowing herself, but going ahead nevertheless. Not knowing yourself is inevitable, and not knowing yourself demands courage.
*
As for me, I go on.
Alone now. Forever alone.
*
[…] I also understood how beautiful and how impossible that other dream is, that of trying to save oneself.
*
After all, what did we want? Nothing. We were worn out, disillusioned.
*
Right then she knows herself even less than she knows the sea. Her courage comes from not knowing herself, but going ahead nevertheless. Not knowing yourself is inevitable, and not knowing yourself demands courage.
September 3, 2015
Reading Clarice Lispector for the first time is like falling in love. Each of her stories is a rare jewel. Shocking, funny and wildly imaginative, this collection is a landmark, reclaiming her as one of the underrated voices of the twentieth century.
February 28, 2017
A beautiful collection of stories by a great talent. Her talent lays in the fact that she never takes things for evident. All is to be questioned and dissected. She can make great stories of big trivialities.
May 3, 2020
"La coerenza non la voglio più. Coerenza vuol dire mutilazione."
Il mio scrittore preferito è brasiliano ma è nato in Ucraina.
Il mio scrittore preferito è una scrittrice.
Il mio scrittore preferito è Clarice Lispector.
Scrive sempre la stessa storia, una storia di solitudine, un'introspezione letteraria sempre nuova e sempre uguale, una discesa nelle profondità dell'Io. È un percorso tra zolfo e incenso, un furioso attorcigliarsi alla ricerca della natura dell'uomo e delle cose. Un viaggio affascinante eppure impossibile, perché destinato ad arrestarsi sulla soglia della conoscenza.
Clarice Lispector è una scrittrice cerebrale. Il suo ambito di ricerca è limitato, limitatissimo: parte dall'oggetto e si ferma al pensiero dell'oggetto. Alla parola spetterà poi il compito di tradurre quel pensiero ma Lispector si ferma allo stadio precedente, a quello che avviene dentro alla persona, a quel calderone nel quale si agitano idee, sentimenti, esperienze contrastanti e che poi, solo poi, si esprimeranno in qualche modo. È in quel calderone che Lispector ha scelto di gettarsi, novello Ulisse che decide di imbarcarsi in un'impresa irrealizzabile ma alla quale non sa sottrarsi.
E così, anche questi racconti non fanno altro che inserirsi nella scia delle altre opere della grande scrittrice brasiliana. Non tutti, ovviamente, sono di pari valore, spesso globalmente rimangono al disotto del livello eccelso dei romanzi, anche perché il limite imposto dalla forma racconto impedisce loro quell'approfondimento esasperato che è il marchio di fabbrica di Clarice Lispector. Nonostante ciò, immergersi nel mare della sua prosa rimane per me un'esperienza unica, che ogni volta mi confonde e mi inebria perché mi stimola ad arrampicarmi sugli stessi specchi, a seguirla su un terreno che sembra crollare ad ogni passo.
Parliamo, di nuovo, di un viaggio, di una discesa degli abissi dell' anima:
"Adesso so tutto su coloro che cercano di sentire per sapere che sono vivi. – scrive in Ossessione – Intrapresi anch'io questo viaggio pericoloso, così povero per la nostra terribile ansia. E quasi sempre deludente. Imparai a far vibrare la mia anima e so che, mentre ciò accade, nel più profondo del proprio essere si può restare vigili e freddi, appena a osservare lo spettacolo che abbiamo creato per noi stessi."
Per aggiungere più avanti:
"avevano risvegliato in me la sensazione che nel mio corpo e nel mio spirito palpitasse una vita più profonda e più intensa di quella che vivevo.".
Si scende sempre più giù, alla ricerca della natura più vera, alla ricerca di un assoluto inconoscibile eppure irrinunciabile.
"Lui mi aveva permesso di intravedere il sublime e aveva imposto che anch'io mi bruciassi nel fuoco sacro".
E siamo solo a pagina 30 di oltre 500…
Il cammino che intraprendono i personaggi di questi racconti è un percorso iniziatico irto di ostacoli. Devono saper schivare le passioni e contemporaneamente non fare troppo affidamento sulla razionalità, recuperare la parte più istintuale del loro essere e continuare a cercare senza mai arrendersi, spogliandosi delle false convinzioni e delle verità transitorie di cui si sono vestiti durante il percorso, consapevoli che la strada deve essere percorsa da soli e che anche le parole non sono in grado di aiutarli in questa impresa.
Un cammino impervio, lungo il quale, prima o poi, tutti i personaggi finiscono per arrestarsi. Perché è difficile accettare la solitudine, perché i sentimenti, l'amore, l'odio, la sofferenza, il possesso…li portano fuori strada, perché credono di essere arrivati quando invece sono ancora lontani dalla meta, perché si accontentano di un succedaneo di verità e non vogliono o non sanno andare più in profondità.
Un cammino che è un lento apprendistato nel quale la conquista della consapevolezza è solo una tappa, per quanto importante, lungo il percorso di avvicinamento all'essenza delle cose, un viaggio nel quale non sempre realtà fa rima con verità e la verità e sempre un po' più in là di dove la cerchiamo, nascosta nel cuore delle cose, un cuore al quale ci si può avvicinare solo spogliandosi degli strumenti tradizionali che usiamo per arrivare alla conoscenza. "Era solo bravo a 'comprendere'. – dice Angela Pralini ne La partenza del treno – Quella sua intelligenza che la affogava". E ancora: "Ad Angela Pralini venivano pensieri talmente profondi che non c'erano parole per esprimerli. Non era vero che si poteva formulare solo un pensiero alla volta: a lei ne venivano molti che si incrociavano l'uno con l'altro ed erano vari. Per non parlare dell' 'inconscio' che esplode dentro di me, che tu lo voglia o meno." E prosegue: "La coerenza non la voglio più. Coerenza vuol dire mutilazione. Voglio il disordine. Riesco a intuire solo attraverso una veemente incoerenza. Per meditare mi sono prima distolta da me stessa, e allora percepisco il vuoto. È nel vuoto che passa il tempo."
Il mio scrittore preferito è brasiliano ma è nato in Ucraina.
Il mio scrittore preferito è una scrittrice.
Il mio scrittore preferito è Clarice Lispector.
Scrive sempre la stessa storia, una storia di solitudine, un'introspezione letteraria sempre nuova e sempre uguale, una discesa nelle profondità dell'Io. È un percorso tra zolfo e incenso, un furioso attorcigliarsi alla ricerca della natura dell'uomo e delle cose. Un viaggio affascinante eppure impossibile, perché destinato ad arrestarsi sulla soglia della conoscenza.
Clarice Lispector è una scrittrice cerebrale. Il suo ambito di ricerca è limitato, limitatissimo: parte dall'oggetto e si ferma al pensiero dell'oggetto. Alla parola spetterà poi il compito di tradurre quel pensiero ma Lispector si ferma allo stadio precedente, a quello che avviene dentro alla persona, a quel calderone nel quale si agitano idee, sentimenti, esperienze contrastanti e che poi, solo poi, si esprimeranno in qualche modo. È in quel calderone che Lispector ha scelto di gettarsi, novello Ulisse che decide di imbarcarsi in un'impresa irrealizzabile ma alla quale non sa sottrarsi.
E così, anche questi racconti non fanno altro che inserirsi nella scia delle altre opere della grande scrittrice brasiliana. Non tutti, ovviamente, sono di pari valore, spesso globalmente rimangono al disotto del livello eccelso dei romanzi, anche perché il limite imposto dalla forma racconto impedisce loro quell'approfondimento esasperato che è il marchio di fabbrica di Clarice Lispector. Nonostante ciò, immergersi nel mare della sua prosa rimane per me un'esperienza unica, che ogni volta mi confonde e mi inebria perché mi stimola ad arrampicarmi sugli stessi specchi, a seguirla su un terreno che sembra crollare ad ogni passo.
Parliamo, di nuovo, di un viaggio, di una discesa degli abissi dell' anima:
"Adesso so tutto su coloro che cercano di sentire per sapere che sono vivi. – scrive in Ossessione – Intrapresi anch'io questo viaggio pericoloso, così povero per la nostra terribile ansia. E quasi sempre deludente. Imparai a far vibrare la mia anima e so che, mentre ciò accade, nel più profondo del proprio essere si può restare vigili e freddi, appena a osservare lo spettacolo che abbiamo creato per noi stessi."
Per aggiungere più avanti:
"avevano risvegliato in me la sensazione che nel mio corpo e nel mio spirito palpitasse una vita più profonda e più intensa di quella che vivevo.".
Si scende sempre più giù, alla ricerca della natura più vera, alla ricerca di un assoluto inconoscibile eppure irrinunciabile.
"Lui mi aveva permesso di intravedere il sublime e aveva imposto che anch'io mi bruciassi nel fuoco sacro".
E siamo solo a pagina 30 di oltre 500…
Il cammino che intraprendono i personaggi di questi racconti è un percorso iniziatico irto di ostacoli. Devono saper schivare le passioni e contemporaneamente non fare troppo affidamento sulla razionalità, recuperare la parte più istintuale del loro essere e continuare a cercare senza mai arrendersi, spogliandosi delle false convinzioni e delle verità transitorie di cui si sono vestiti durante il percorso, consapevoli che la strada deve essere percorsa da soli e che anche le parole non sono in grado di aiutarli in questa impresa.
Un cammino impervio, lungo il quale, prima o poi, tutti i personaggi finiscono per arrestarsi. Perché è difficile accettare la solitudine, perché i sentimenti, l'amore, l'odio, la sofferenza, il possesso…li portano fuori strada, perché credono di essere arrivati quando invece sono ancora lontani dalla meta, perché si accontentano di un succedaneo di verità e non vogliono o non sanno andare più in profondità.
Un cammino che è un lento apprendistato nel quale la conquista della consapevolezza è solo una tappa, per quanto importante, lungo il percorso di avvicinamento all'essenza delle cose, un viaggio nel quale non sempre realtà fa rima con verità e la verità e sempre un po' più in là di dove la cerchiamo, nascosta nel cuore delle cose, un cuore al quale ci si può avvicinare solo spogliandosi degli strumenti tradizionali che usiamo per arrivare alla conoscenza. "Era solo bravo a 'comprendere'. – dice Angela Pralini ne La partenza del treno – Quella sua intelligenza che la affogava". E ancora: "Ad Angela Pralini venivano pensieri talmente profondi che non c'erano parole per esprimerli. Non era vero che si poteva formulare solo un pensiero alla volta: a lei ne venivano molti che si incrociavano l'uno con l'altro ed erano vari. Per non parlare dell' 'inconscio' che esplode dentro di me, che tu lo voglia o meno." E prosegue: "La coerenza non la voglio più. Coerenza vuol dire mutilazione. Voglio il disordine. Riesco a intuire solo attraverso una veemente incoerenza. Per meditare mi sono prima distolta da me stessa, e allora percepisco il vuoto. È nel vuoto che passa il tempo."
February 13, 2023
A mysterious "83" stories, counted as "86", that are about to become "89."
Review of the New Directions Kindle eBook edition (2015)
February 13, 2023 Update The New Yorker online edition published A Lost Interview with Clarice Lispector from April 20, 1976 translated for the first time into English by biographer & editor Benjamin Moser. The audio of the original Portuguese language interview can also be listened to embedded in the article. This was not behind a paywall for me, so hopefully is accessible to everyone else also.
Graphic of Clarice Lispector, artist uncredited at The New Yorker
September 25, 2021 Update
No special addendum, but I loved this quote that I saw today on Twitter and wanted to add it.
"I write like I'm going to save someone's life. Probably my own life." - Clarice Lispector. Image sourced from the publisher Eterna Cadencia on Twitter, September 25, 2021.
This was a Kindle Deal of the Day for $1.99 Cdn. back in July 2017 and although I'm not a fan of eBooks it was impossible to resist at that price. It then took me about 8 months to February 2018 to read it since without an actual eBook reader I could only read it in spurts when I had the patience to scroll through it on a laptop. So it was not an ideal medium, but I could at least read at my own pace and when I was in the mood. To keep track over such a long time frame I made brief notes on each story. It was because of my note making that my count came up short, see further below. The collection isn't numbered otherwise.
To add to the mystery and allure, these supposed 86 "Complete Stories" are about to be supplanted by an even newer edition of 89 "Complete Stories" to be published June 26, 2018 by New Directions Publishing, see their blurb at https://www.ndbooks.com/book/the-comp...
It is actually a bit difficult to pin down what is even meant by the current 86 "Complete Stories" as any sort of standard headcount here would result in a total of 83. As best as I can figure, it becomes 86 if you add 83 + 1 "Explanation" (the foreword to the "A via crucis do corpo" collection) + 1 "Appendix: The Useless Explanation" (used as an afterword for the entire collection) + 1 "Brasilia 2" (counting the 2nd part of "Brasilia" as a separate story, since it was written 12 years later than "Brasilia 1", the 2 are otherwise printed as one story though). There is actually a 4th option if you count the single story "Two Stories My Way" as an actual 2 stories, but there isn't as much of a clear separation there as there is in "Brasilia," so let's not go there.
As mentioned in the excellent foreword by biographer Benjamin Moser (see Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector) and the afterword by translator Katrina Dodson the lines between fiction and non-fiction are easily blurred in Lispector's work and further "stories" seem to appear as her journalism work is reassessed as creative non-fiction writing. Her surrealistic extended description / vision of the capital city "Brasilia" in the present collection is a perfect example of this.
The collection here spans juvenilia stories from 1940 through all of her published collections through to 2 stories uncompleted at her death in 1977. The translator's note explains the complex process of piecing together the collection from all the disparate sources and publishers. A timeline would have been helpful to follow the publishing history as it is a bit hard to visualize just as text.
Overall my favourites here were mainly from the published collections "The Foreign Legion" (orig. "A Legião Estrangeira" and "Covert Joy" (orig. Felicidade Clandestina) (the English translations are not available as separate volumes).
My 4 rating is a compromise as the overall work of putting together and translating this collection is definitely in 5 territory. It was just a bit too overwhelming to take all of it in though and there are likely to be sections where your enthusiasm and attention will flag esp. in the some too many "Desperate Housewives"-flavoured tales. And is it just me or did the theme of chicken and the egg seem to come up constantly?
Review of the New Directions Kindle eBook edition (2015)
February 13, 2023 Update The New Yorker online edition published A Lost Interview with Clarice Lispector from April 20, 1976 translated for the first time into English by biographer & editor Benjamin Moser. The audio of the original Portuguese language interview can also be listened to embedded in the article. This was not behind a paywall for me, so hopefully is accessible to everyone else also.
Graphic of Clarice Lispector, artist uncredited at The New Yorker
September 25, 2021 Update
No special addendum, but I loved this quote that I saw today on Twitter and wanted to add it.
"I write like I'm going to save someone's life. Probably my own life." - Clarice Lispector. Image sourced from the publisher Eterna Cadencia on Twitter, September 25, 2021.
This was a Kindle Deal of the Day for $1.99 Cdn. back in July 2017 and although I'm not a fan of eBooks it was impossible to resist at that price. It then took me about 8 months to February 2018 to read it since without an actual eBook reader I could only read it in spurts when I had the patience to scroll through it on a laptop. So it was not an ideal medium, but I could at least read at my own pace and when I was in the mood. To keep track over such a long time frame I made brief notes on each story. It was because of my note making that my count came up short, see further below. The collection isn't numbered otherwise.
To add to the mystery and allure, these supposed 86 "Complete Stories" are about to be supplanted by an even newer edition of 89 "Complete Stories" to be published June 26, 2018 by New Directions Publishing, see their blurb at https://www.ndbooks.com/book/the-comp...
It is actually a bit difficult to pin down what is even meant by the current 86 "Complete Stories" as any sort of standard headcount here would result in a total of 83. As best as I can figure, it becomes 86 if you add 83 + 1 "Explanation" (the foreword to the "A via crucis do corpo" collection) + 1 "Appendix: The Useless Explanation" (used as an afterword for the entire collection) + 1 "Brasilia 2" (counting the 2nd part of "Brasilia" as a separate story, since it was written 12 years later than "Brasilia 1", the 2 are otherwise printed as one story though). There is actually a 4th option if you count the single story "Two Stories My Way" as an actual 2 stories, but there isn't as much of a clear separation there as there is in "Brasilia," so let's not go there.
As mentioned in the excellent foreword by biographer Benjamin Moser (see Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector) and the afterword by translator Katrina Dodson the lines between fiction and non-fiction are easily blurred in Lispector's work and further "stories" seem to appear as her journalism work is reassessed as creative non-fiction writing. Her surrealistic extended description / vision of the capital city "Brasilia" in the present collection is a perfect example of this.
The collection here spans juvenilia stories from 1940 through all of her published collections through to 2 stories uncompleted at her death in 1977. The translator's note explains the complex process of piecing together the collection from all the disparate sources and publishers. A timeline would have been helpful to follow the publishing history as it is a bit hard to visualize just as text.
Overall my favourites here were mainly from the published collections "The Foreign Legion" (orig. "A Legião Estrangeira" and "Covert Joy" (orig. Felicidade Clandestina) (the English translations are not available as separate volumes).
My 4 rating is a compromise as the overall work of putting together and translating this collection is definitely in 5 territory. It was just a bit too overwhelming to take all of it in though and there are likely to be sections where your enthusiasm and attention will flag esp. in the some too many "Desperate Housewives"-flavoured tales. And is it just me or did the theme of chicken and the egg seem to come up constantly?
September 19, 2015
No one starts a story off better than Clarice Lispector, one of my favorite authors.
From the first story: "The clock strikes nine. A loud, sonorous peal, followed by gentle chiming, an echo."
To the last: "I doubt that death will come. Death? Could it be that the days, so long, will end?"
I'm not satisfied that those are the best examples. There are much better ones, but I couldn't be bothered to type them out because they just don't stop. The beginning just seamlessly flows into the rest of the story.
Many of the stories here are more traditional than her longer works, less experimental. But there are definite exceptions, like "Brasilia," where she does impressionist atmospheric paintings rather than realist portrait stories. She's so skilled at writing a mood, a fear, a hope, more than a straightforward narrative arc. Philosophical, charming, witty, stark, surprising, unusual. She deserves mention alongside Borges, Italo Calvino, Chekov.
I finished the Complete Stories a few days ago but couldn't bring myself to write a GoodReads review because it feels like the book deserves much more than that. It really does. And the translator, Katrina Dodson, did an incredible job, although her translations made me wish I could read Portuguese all the more.
PS- If you want to check her word out, start with her book Agua Viva.
From the first story: "The clock strikes nine. A loud, sonorous peal, followed by gentle chiming, an echo."
To the last: "I doubt that death will come. Death? Could it be that the days, so long, will end?"
I'm not satisfied that those are the best examples. There are much better ones, but I couldn't be bothered to type them out because they just don't stop. The beginning just seamlessly flows into the rest of the story.
Many of the stories here are more traditional than her longer works, less experimental. But there are definite exceptions, like "Brasilia," where she does impressionist atmospheric paintings rather than realist portrait stories. She's so skilled at writing a mood, a fear, a hope, more than a straightforward narrative arc. Philosophical, charming, witty, stark, surprising, unusual. She deserves mention alongside Borges, Italo Calvino, Chekov.
I finished the Complete Stories a few days ago but couldn't bring myself to write a GoodReads review because it feels like the book deserves much more than that. It really does. And the translator, Katrina Dodson, did an incredible job, although her translations made me wish I could read Portuguese all the more.
PS- If you want to check her word out, start with her book Agua Viva.
Read
June 6, 2021There are few writers who can express the weirdness and horror on the fringes of domestic life quite like Clarice Lispector. Maybe you don't know her. Apparently a lot of people don't.
So here we go: Clarice Lispector is a tropical Kafka, a complete anomaly in the world of Latin American literature. If Borges puttered around in his library, Lispector took his abstraction and genius and chose to dance in the street instead. If Garcia Marquez wrote jungle-dense sentences about his lush homeland in terms of magical widows and goose-stepping generals, Lispector took the same sensibility but wrote about nothing more remarkable than a tomato rotting on a kitchen windowsill. Her novels I've read are miracles of mundane life. Her stories are much the same, told a thousand different ways, with each one going in a bold new direction.
So here we go: Clarice Lispector is a tropical Kafka, a complete anomaly in the world of Latin American literature. If Borges puttered around in his library, Lispector took his abstraction and genius and chose to dance in the street instead. If Garcia Marquez wrote jungle-dense sentences about his lush homeland in terms of magical widows and goose-stepping generals, Lispector took the same sensibility but wrote about nothing more remarkable than a tomato rotting on a kitchen windowsill. Her novels I've read are miracles of mundane life. Her stories are much the same, told a thousand different ways, with each one going in a bold new direction.
June 30, 2022
Clarice Lispector fué una escritora ucraniana - brasileña de orígen judío.
En este libro se recopilan 85 cuentos que la autora escribió durante toda su vida.
Se enfoca en temas cotidianos de la mujer en sus diferentes etapas, podría decirse que es como una autobiografía, lo que le pasa a ella lo plasma en sus cuentos, conforme va madurando lo va reflejando en su narrativa.
Sus historias son cotidianas, pero no por eso son sencillas, invita a la introspección.
Algunos de sus relatos suelen ser perturbadores como "El cuerpo", "La lengua de la f" o "Pero va a llover", por mencionar algunos.
TEMPESTAD DE ALMAS.
"El futuro de la tecnología amenaza con destruir todo lo que hay de humano en el hombre, pero la tecnología no llega a la locura; y en ella se refugia, entonces, lo humano del hombre".
En este libro se recopilan 85 cuentos que la autora escribió durante toda su vida.
Se enfoca en temas cotidianos de la mujer en sus diferentes etapas, podría decirse que es como una autobiografía, lo que le pasa a ella lo plasma en sus cuentos, conforme va madurando lo va reflejando en su narrativa.
Sus historias son cotidianas, pero no por eso son sencillas, invita a la introspección.
Algunos de sus relatos suelen ser perturbadores como "El cuerpo", "La lengua de la f" o "Pero va a llover", por mencionar algunos.
TEMPESTAD DE ALMAS.
"El futuro de la tecnología amenaza con destruir todo lo que hay de humano en el hombre, pero la tecnología no llega a la locura; y en ella se refugia, entonces, lo humano del hombre".
February 3, 2016
I've lived with these stories since October and it's a book that's quite impossible to review or rate on a star system. These are all of Lispector's short stories and there are many failures here, places where she attempts to transcend language or basic human experience mediated by words and fails consistently because language is inadequate. These failures are exquisite, because it's rare to read writing that consistently reveals its technical flaws. It helps that Lispector is sharp, intelligent, and funny often when you least expect it. As for Lispector's overall aesthetic programme I'm less sure--there is a certain conformity to gender roles and beauty standards that her female characters seem to be locked in, and often Lispector's droll, knowing narrative voice doesn't allow them any means of escape. It is a book filled stories about bourgeois guilt and suffocation. And what she's striving for in her stories is unique, because it's mystical, if not religious. However, because of that the underlying themes feel conservative--most characters are sealed-off individuals, inscrutable to others. The stories are often the private meditations and philosophical musings of characters. Although firmly rooted in the world, they find it insufficient and live in their heads, and there is a certain sense of superiority to that, which I didn't often like even if I found it bewitching, at times... Lispector's range is quite astounding in this collection, so on a technical level there are so many things that are plain intriguing about these stories.
June 7, 2020
Depois de mais de 600 páginas de contos da Clarice dá para entender, de fato, a sua singularidade.
Alguns poucos contos envelheceram mal, sim. Nada que prejudique, todavia, a grandeza de sua escrita.
Alguns dos meus contos preferidos: “eu e jimmy”; “a fuga”; “trecho”; “amor”; “feliz aniversário”; “os desastres de sofia”; “viagem a petropolis”; “evolução de uma miopia”; “uma amizade sincera”; “a legião estrangeira”; “perfil de seres eleitos”; “mineirinho”; “felicidade clandestina”; “perdoando deus”; “uma esperança”; “menino a bico de pena”; “uma história de tanto amor”; “as águas do mundo”; “encarnação involuntária”; “silêncio”; “tanta mansidão “; “tempestade de almas”; “ele me bebeu”; “ruído de passos”; “a bela e a fera ou a ferida grande demais”.
Alguns poucos contos envelheceram mal, sim. Nada que prejudique, todavia, a grandeza de sua escrita.
Alguns dos meus contos preferidos: “eu e jimmy”; “a fuga”; “trecho”; “amor”; “feliz aniversário”; “os desastres de sofia”; “viagem a petropolis”; “evolução de uma miopia”; “uma amizade sincera”; “a legião estrangeira”; “perfil de seres eleitos”; “mineirinho”; “felicidade clandestina”; “perdoando deus”; “uma esperança”; “menino a bico de pena”; “uma história de tanto amor”; “as águas do mundo”; “encarnação involuntária”; “silêncio”; “tanta mansidão “; “tempestade de almas”; “ele me bebeu”; “ruído de passos”; “a bela e a fera ou a ferida grande demais”.
April 19, 2016
Mixed feelings on this.
Clarice Lispector is clearly a great author and this is an important addition to her works in English, and an impressive achievement by the translator Katrina Dodson and editor, and Lispector's biographer, Benjamin Moser. Dodson's translation is excellent, in particular she preserves the deliberate ruptures in Lispector's Portuguese which other translators have been tempted to smooth over.
But as a book to read, it didn't really work for me. I'm not a fan of short-story collections unless they cohere, and that's precisely what this work doesn't. The stories weren't even meant to be read together: Moser makes a virtue of the fact that bringing Lispector's complete short stories together in one volume (600+ pages and 80+ stories) hasn't been done even in Brazil, but one can't help feel there is a reason for that.
The short stories are also typically less abstract than her better known novels and I suspect would not support her high reputation in their own right.
It is interesting to see how her style evolves during her writing life but this may have been better achieved by a selection of the stories and in that regard I'd offer by own suggested reading path for those wanting to dip-in rather than read cover-to-cover:
"Gertrude asks for Advice" - "The Escape" - "Love"- "A Chicken" - "Happy Birthday" - "The Buffalo" - "Disasters of Sofia" - "The Foreign Legion" - "Covert Joy" - "The Tale of so much Love" - "In Search of Dignity" - "Where were you at Night" - "Report on the Thing" -"Miss Algrave"--"Beauty and the Beast or the Enormous Wound"
The early stories seem largely about anticipation ("something would happen"), girls struggling with adolescence ("flustered at her bad timing in having breasts"), young woman expecting something more from life if only they could take a decisive step to break away from their family or the trap of an early marriage:
"Mama, before she got married, according to Aunt Emília, was a firecracker, a tempestuous redhead, with thoughts of her own about liberty and equality for women. But then along came Papa, very serious and tall, with thoughts of his own too, about … liberty and equality for women. The trouble was in the coinciding subject matter."
One such heroine goes to visit a doctor and advice columnist, who thinks (which one can't help but see as self-criticism by Lispector):
"So many people dying, so many 'homeless" children, so many unsolvable problems (her problems) and here was this little girl, with a family, a nice bourgeois life, inflating her own importance."
As the author herself ages, so do the subjects of her stories, for example elderly women still burdened by their increasingly inconvenient and unfulfilled sexuality, still feeling “the desire for pleasure.”, and the cynicism and bitterness also grows.
And some of the stories approach the lyrical abstraction of the stories, for example this excerpt from "Where were you at night":
"He-she with seven musical notes achieved the howl. Just as with the same seven notes one can create sacred music. They heard themselves inside the do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti, the “ti” soft and extremely high. They were independent and sovereign, despite being guided by the He-She. Death roaring in dark dungeons. Fire, scream, color, vice, cross. I remain vigilent in the world: by might I live and by day I sleep, elusive. I, with a dog’s sense of smell, orgiastic.”
For me the strongest of the collections within the Complete Stories was Via Crucis, all written over a long weekend and which even contains a meta-fictional story Day After Day featuring the author herself commenting on the stories.
To end with, perhaps my favourite paragraph in all the stories:
“Back when Nenê was about to be born and she was in the hospital, lying down, white and scared to death, she doggedly accompanied the buzzing of a fly around a teacup and came to think, in a general, about the tumultuous life of flies. In fact, she concluded there were great studies to be done on these tiny beings. For instance, why is it that, with their beautiful wings, don’t fly higher. Could it be that those wings are powerless, or did flies lack ideals? Another question: what is the mental attitude of flies toward us and toward the teacup, that big lake, sweetened and warm? Indeed, those problems were not worthy of attention. We’re not the ones worthy of them.”
Clarice Lispector is clearly a great author and this is an important addition to her works in English, and an impressive achievement by the translator Katrina Dodson and editor, and Lispector's biographer, Benjamin Moser. Dodson's translation is excellent, in particular she preserves the deliberate ruptures in Lispector's Portuguese which other translators have been tempted to smooth over.
But as a book to read, it didn't really work for me. I'm not a fan of short-story collections unless they cohere, and that's precisely what this work doesn't. The stories weren't even meant to be read together: Moser makes a virtue of the fact that bringing Lispector's complete short stories together in one volume (600+ pages and 80+ stories) hasn't been done even in Brazil, but one can't help feel there is a reason for that.
The short stories are also typically less abstract than her better known novels and I suspect would not support her high reputation in their own right.
It is interesting to see how her style evolves during her writing life but this may have been better achieved by a selection of the stories and in that regard I'd offer by own suggested reading path for those wanting to dip-in rather than read cover-to-cover:
"Gertrude asks for Advice" - "The Escape" - "Love"- "A Chicken" - "Happy Birthday" - "The Buffalo" - "Disasters of Sofia" - "The Foreign Legion" - "Covert Joy" - "The Tale of so much Love" - "In Search of Dignity" - "Where were you at Night" - "Report on the Thing" -"Miss Algrave"--"Beauty and the Beast or the Enormous Wound"
The early stories seem largely about anticipation ("something would happen"), girls struggling with adolescence ("flustered at her bad timing in having breasts"), young woman expecting something more from life if only they could take a decisive step to break away from their family or the trap of an early marriage:
"Mama, before she got married, according to Aunt Emília, was a firecracker, a tempestuous redhead, with thoughts of her own about liberty and equality for women. But then along came Papa, very serious and tall, with thoughts of his own too, about … liberty and equality for women. The trouble was in the coinciding subject matter."
One such heroine goes to visit a doctor and advice columnist, who thinks (which one can't help but see as self-criticism by Lispector):
"So many people dying, so many 'homeless" children, so many unsolvable problems (her problems) and here was this little girl, with a family, a nice bourgeois life, inflating her own importance."
As the author herself ages, so do the subjects of her stories, for example elderly women still burdened by their increasingly inconvenient and unfulfilled sexuality, still feeling “the desire for pleasure.”, and the cynicism and bitterness also grows.
And some of the stories approach the lyrical abstraction of the stories, for example this excerpt from "Where were you at night":
"He-she with seven musical notes achieved the howl. Just as with the same seven notes one can create sacred music. They heard themselves inside the do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti, the “ti” soft and extremely high. They were independent and sovereign, despite being guided by the He-She. Death roaring in dark dungeons. Fire, scream, color, vice, cross. I remain vigilent in the world: by might I live and by day I sleep, elusive. I, with a dog’s sense of smell, orgiastic.”
For me the strongest of the collections within the Complete Stories was Via Crucis, all written over a long weekend and which even contains a meta-fictional story Day After Day featuring the author herself commenting on the stories.
To end with, perhaps my favourite paragraph in all the stories:
“Back when Nenê was about to be born and she was in the hospital, lying down, white and scared to death, she doggedly accompanied the buzzing of a fly around a teacup and came to think, in a general, about the tumultuous life of flies. In fact, she concluded there were great studies to be done on these tiny beings. For instance, why is it that, with their beautiful wings, don’t fly higher. Could it be that those wings are powerless, or did flies lack ideals? Another question: what is the mental attitude of flies toward us and toward the teacup, that big lake, sweetened and warm? Indeed, those problems were not worthy of attention. We’re not the ones worthy of them.”
February 7, 2017
“She’d returned so completely: now she got tired every day, every day her face would sag at dusk, and then night would take on its former purpose, it wasn’t just the perfect starlit night. And everything lined up harmoniously. And, as with everyone else, each day wore her out; like everyone else, human and perishable. No longer that perfection, no longer that youth. No longer that thing that one day had spread brightly, like a cancer, to her soul.” (“The Imitation of the Rose”)
The marvelous strangeness of Clarice Lispector is a never-ending delight. I read these stories with deliberate slowness, taking a full month, savoring and pondering each one. I loved the common threads (a simple object or a stray glance hurtling a character into existential distress; chickens, dogs, and horses, but never cats; a woman ready to do something dramatic with her life and then she just goes home). I found my actual decision-making patterns being shifted by her own incantatory logic. In all the excruciating darkness of the world, at least we still have these stories; at least we still have Lispector.
Favorite Stories
“The Triumph”
“Love”
“A Chicken”
“The Imitation of the Rose”
“The Smallest Woman in the World”
“Family Ties”
“The Buffalo”
“The Sharing of Loaves”
“The Egg and the Chicken”
“The Foreign Legion”
“The Departure of the Train”
“Dry Sketch of Horses”
“Soul Storm”
“But It’s Going to Rain”
“Brasilia”
“There’s an old mistake about the word love, and, if many children have been born out of this mistake, countless others have missed their only instant of being born merely due to a susceptibility that demands you be mine, mine! that you like me, and not my money. But in the humidity of the forest there are no such cruel refinements, and love is not being eaten, love is thinking a boot is pretty, love is liking that rare color of a man who isn’t black, love is laughing with the love of a ring that sparkles. Little Flower blinked with love, and laughed warm, tiny, pregnant, warm.” (“The Smallest Woman in the World”)
The marvelous strangeness of Clarice Lispector is a never-ending delight. I read these stories with deliberate slowness, taking a full month, savoring and pondering each one. I loved the common threads (a simple object or a stray glance hurtling a character into existential distress; chickens, dogs, and horses, but never cats; a woman ready to do something dramatic with her life and then she just goes home). I found my actual decision-making patterns being shifted by her own incantatory logic. In all the excruciating darkness of the world, at least we still have these stories; at least we still have Lispector.
Favorite Stories
“The Triumph”
“Love”
“A Chicken”
“The Imitation of the Rose”
“The Smallest Woman in the World”
“Family Ties”
“The Buffalo”
“The Sharing of Loaves”
“The Egg and the Chicken”
“The Foreign Legion”
“The Departure of the Train”
“Dry Sketch of Horses”
“Soul Storm”
“But It’s Going to Rain”
“Brasilia”
“There’s an old mistake about the word love, and, if many children have been born out of this mistake, countless others have missed their only instant of being born merely due to a susceptibility that demands you be mine, mine! that you like me, and not my money. But in the humidity of the forest there are no such cruel refinements, and love is not being eaten, love is thinking a boot is pretty, love is liking that rare color of a man who isn’t black, love is laughing with the love of a ring that sparkles. Little Flower blinked with love, and laughed warm, tiny, pregnant, warm.” (“The Smallest Woman in the World”)
May 21, 2017
I heard about Clarice Lispector from a bookreading community but never felt intrigued. Then I read an article about some prominent writers whose groundbreaking works were getting translated into English and were getting the classic tag. So I went ahead and read Clarice’s two stories available online. I liked them and started reading the thick volume of her complete stories. And my concept of literature got redefined (I confess, for an amateur writer, this happens a lot but this time it was notable).
She wrote ‘The Triumph’ at the age of 23, nearly of my age and it was not really a mind-blowing one. But there was something strange about her approach; her typical ordering of sentences and thoughts intrigued me. So I immediately moved on to the next story, a longer one, called Obsession and upon reaching the 10th page I was overwhelmed, I had this feeling that I was seeing something grand, extraterrestrial. I stopped reading the book mid-story and moved on to something else. Her writing disturbed me in a way I can’t quite pinpoint. I was not ready for this kind of stuff.
But anyway, I gave myself in after a few weeks and merged myself in a world completely new to me. I’m not going to sit down and analyze every great story by her because I am simply inept and she is too good for me. I’d only list some stories that I think have changed me or in other words, become a part of me.
1. Obsession
2. The Escape
3. Gertrudes Asks for advice
4. Daydream and Drunkenness of a Young Lady
5. Love
6. The Imitation of the Rose
7. The Smallest Woman in the World
8. Preciousness
9. The Buffalo
10. Journey to Petropolis
11. Evolution of a Myopia
12. A Sincere Frienship
13. The Obedient Ones
14. Covert Joy
15. Remnants of a carnival
16. One Hundred Years of Forgiveness
17. The Water of the World
18. Involuntary Incarnation
19. The First Kiss
20. In search of Dignity
21. Miss Algrave
22. The Body
23. He Drank me Up
24. Pig Latin
25. But it’s going to rain
26. Praca Maua
27. The Fifth Story
It is time to pick her first novel.
She wrote ‘The Triumph’ at the age of 23, nearly of my age and it was not really a mind-blowing one. But there was something strange about her approach; her typical ordering of sentences and thoughts intrigued me. So I immediately moved on to the next story, a longer one, called Obsession and upon reaching the 10th page I was overwhelmed, I had this feeling that I was seeing something grand, extraterrestrial. I stopped reading the book mid-story and moved on to something else. Her writing disturbed me in a way I can’t quite pinpoint. I was not ready for this kind of stuff.
But anyway, I gave myself in after a few weeks and merged myself in a world completely new to me. I’m not going to sit down and analyze every great story by her because I am simply inept and she is too good for me. I’d only list some stories that I think have changed me or in other words, become a part of me.
1. Obsession
2. The Escape
3. Gertrudes Asks for advice
4. Daydream and Drunkenness of a Young Lady
5. Love
6. The Imitation of the Rose
7. The Smallest Woman in the World
8. Preciousness
9. The Buffalo
10. Journey to Petropolis
11. Evolution of a Myopia
12. A Sincere Frienship
13. The Obedient Ones
14. Covert Joy
15. Remnants of a carnival
16. One Hundred Years of Forgiveness
17. The Water of the World
18. Involuntary Incarnation
19. The First Kiss
20. In search of Dignity
21. Miss Algrave
22. The Body
23. He Drank me Up
24. Pig Latin
25. But it’s going to rain
26. Praca Maua
27. The Fifth Story
It is time to pick her first novel.
July 11, 2020
Apenas comencé con el primer cuento coincidimos. Sentí algo extraño y bonito, como si me estuvieran leyendo, es decir leer lo que en algún momento fui.
En sus cuentos se delinean pensamientos sobre los distintos vínculos emocionales, sobre la incomodidad de lo cotidiano, sobre el pudor y sentir de saberse más frágil, pero también del poder encontrar en esa fragilidad un punto de partida.
Asociaciones entre la emoción, la mente y el sentimiento. Creo que el gran logro es ése: escribir de lo que no se ve, verbalizarlo. Con qué gracia, puede manifestar el dolor y resentimiento y asociarlo con la adrenalina de subirse a una montaña rusa. O hablar de la búsqueda y pérdida de la identidad a través de alguien que se pierde en el maquillaje, convertido casi en una máscara.
“𝑻𝒖́ 𝒏𝒐 𝒑𝒂𝒓𝒂𝒔 𝒅𝒆 𝒔𝒆𝒓. 𝑻𝒖́ 𝒏𝒐 𝒔𝒖𝒆𝒏̃𝒂𝒔. 𝑵𝒐 𝒔𝒆 𝒑𝒖𝒆𝒅𝒆 𝒅𝒆𝒄𝒊𝒓 𝒒𝒖𝒆 𝒕𝒖́ «𝒇𝒖𝒏𝒄𝒊𝒐𝒏𝒂𝒔»: 𝒕𝒖́ 𝒏𝒐 𝒆𝒓𝒆𝒔 𝒇𝒖𝒏𝒄𝒊𝒐𝒏𝒂𝒎𝒊𝒆𝒏𝒕𝒐, 𝒕𝒖́ 𝒔𝒐𝒍𝒐 𝒆𝒓𝒆𝒔.”
Clarice me gusta más cuando deja conocer la voz interna del personaje, cuando se va cuestionando los límites. Cuando habla desde la propia existencia.
Me es difícil escoger entre sus cuentos uno que resalte más que el resto, diría más bien que tengo un grupo de favoritos: “El triunfo”, “Jimmy y yo”, “El crimen del profesor de matemáticas”, “Los desastres de Sofía”,”Felicidad clandestina”, “Una historia tan grande de amor”, “Las aguas del mundo”, “Es allí donde voy”, “El me absorbió” y “El idioma de la ‘f’”.
Superó mis expectativas (que de por sí eran altas, por todo lo que se dice de ella). Sus cuentos son una buena manera de empezar: son un viaje hacia fuera ,sí, pero mucho más hacia dentro.
En sus cuentos se delinean pensamientos sobre los distintos vínculos emocionales, sobre la incomodidad de lo cotidiano, sobre el pudor y sentir de saberse más frágil, pero también del poder encontrar en esa fragilidad un punto de partida.
Asociaciones entre la emoción, la mente y el sentimiento. Creo que el gran logro es ése: escribir de lo que no se ve, verbalizarlo. Con qué gracia, puede manifestar el dolor y resentimiento y asociarlo con la adrenalina de subirse a una montaña rusa. O hablar de la búsqueda y pérdida de la identidad a través de alguien que se pierde en el maquillaje, convertido casi en una máscara.
“𝑻𝒖́ 𝒏𝒐 𝒑𝒂𝒓𝒂𝒔 𝒅𝒆 𝒔𝒆𝒓. 𝑻𝒖́ 𝒏𝒐 𝒔𝒖𝒆𝒏̃𝒂𝒔. 𝑵𝒐 𝒔𝒆 𝒑𝒖𝒆𝒅𝒆 𝒅𝒆𝒄𝒊𝒓 𝒒𝒖𝒆 𝒕𝒖́ «𝒇𝒖𝒏𝒄𝒊𝒐𝒏𝒂𝒔»: 𝒕𝒖́ 𝒏𝒐 𝒆𝒓𝒆𝒔 𝒇𝒖𝒏𝒄𝒊𝒐𝒏𝒂𝒎𝒊𝒆𝒏𝒕𝒐, 𝒕𝒖́ 𝒔𝒐𝒍𝒐 𝒆𝒓𝒆𝒔.”
Clarice me gusta más cuando deja conocer la voz interna del personaje, cuando se va cuestionando los límites. Cuando habla desde la propia existencia.
Me es difícil escoger entre sus cuentos uno que resalte más que el resto, diría más bien que tengo un grupo de favoritos: “El triunfo”, “Jimmy y yo”, “El crimen del profesor de matemáticas”, “Los desastres de Sofía”,”Felicidad clandestina”, “Una historia tan grande de amor”, “Las aguas del mundo”, “Es allí donde voy”, “El me absorbió” y “El idioma de la ‘f’”.
Superó mis expectativas (que de por sí eran altas, por todo lo que se dice de ella). Sus cuentos son una buena manera de empezar: son un viaje hacia fuera ,sí, pero mucho más hacia dentro.
May 26, 2016
One of the best collections of short fiction I've ever read.
November 17, 2019
This is a huge beast of a collection. Some stories blew me away and others went completely over my head. Based on the ratings, I am guessing it's just me that feels completely confused after some. I really enjoyed the her stories on sex, aging and death. Oh, side note she is obviously very terrified of being fat. Judging 'fat' people comes up a lot.
February 3, 2022
Clarice é o melhor que temos. A crônica sobre Brasília é absolutamente precisa e inteligente, assim como a maioria dos contos desse livro. Leiam a mulher!
January 6, 2021
Here we have it, friends! My very first read of 2021!
Errr, technically.
Because I actually read something like 500 of this book's 650 pages in 2020 ... so should that make this a 2020 read? But, though I only read around 23% of this book this year, I can only mark it as "read" this year since it was only "read" (past tense read, as in finished) yesterday.
Or was it the day before? Yes yes, it was the day before, but I wanted to let this simmer a bit before writing about it.
I suppose one could, if he or she wanted to fudge facts, have actually finished a book on December 31st but marked it as read on January 1st, and in so doing get a jump on the new year's challenge. Unless they're still short a read from their previous year's challenge, in which case it'd be in their best interest to back date it after all.
The thought had crossed my mind with my last two reads, both of which I finished in the waning days of 2020 but the reviews of which I didn't write until 2021. I had already met my 2020 challenge, after all, so why not get out to a strong start?
But no, that wouldn't be honest. In fact, I'll go out on a limb and say it'd be quite dishonest. One day you're fudging the date when you actually finished a book in order to cheat on a Goodreads challenge and then, BAM!, the next day you're looting your local bookshop.
And before you go and say that's a ridiculous jump to make, just ask yourself whether it is, really. We live in the post-truth age. Honesty, and reality itself, hangs by a thread, if it's still hanging at all.
So, upfront then, let me just say, I read only 23% of this this year but I did finish it this year, so there it is. Now you know.
And how was it, you ask?
Disappointing.
Yes, I'm sorry to say it was. I had higher hopes for my very first read of the new year. You know what they say, whatever you're reading to start the new year is what your year will be like (or something like that).
I've been reading this, a book about eels, and a biography of Hitler. I'm not entirely sure what that says about what 2021 has in store for me, but I doubt it bodes well. Particularly because this particularly read was, yes, so disappointing.
I really did have high hopes. But, I have to admit this as well, I purchased this just on style points alone.
It's true. I certainly do judge a book by its cover (we all do at least a little bit if we're being honest), and this cover is fascinating.
Go on. Take a good long look at it.
See what I mean? It's just the author's face. But what you can't see, because it's on the spine, is that these hot pink lines spreading across the front cover emanate out of a sort of orb that sits between the author's lips. And on the back cover the lines continue, over an image of the author's hand lightly grasping her chin.
It's compelling and, if I'm being honest, a bit hot. It puts me in mind of the types of CDs I used to buy when I was 13 or so. I remember going into the store and seeing Kylie Minogue or Celine Dion posed seductively on the album cover — Kylie Minogue significantly more so, as you'd imagine — and, without knowing what either actually sounded like, I'd buy it just because, well, they looked pretty good!
I left one out. Charlotte Church. Voice of an Angel. She was 12, I was 13, and she looked like someone I had a crush on at the time. I bought the album, positively trembling with anticipation, only to get home and put it on to find that it was ... opera?
I was taken aback, but she was still attractive, I couldn't deny that.
But let me get back to Clarice. As in Lispector, not the "Clarice" you hear in Anthony Hopkins' creepy Hannibal Lecter voice.
What a great name! Clarice Lispector. So it's a compelling cover and a truly great name. And it helps that she's quite attractive. Sells more books to be sure. She's Brazilian, with Eastern European roots, so that makes sense.
So I bought the book. At The Tattered Cover Book Store in Denver, Colorado back in March 2019. Lovely place. And that's how long this book sat on the shelf for, nearly two years.
But I brought it with me places. You know how it goes. You think you're going to get through eight books on your two-week vacation but you don't. And this is 650 pages, so it's not going to be the first one you pick up on your trip. You want to read a couple of those shorter ones first to feel as though you're actually making some progress toward your reading challenge.
So this has been with me to a lot of places before, one day, I finally cracked the cover. Except it's a paperback so it didn't really crack, per se, but anyway.
Wow! The introduction of this thing! It's only 13 pages or so, written by Benjamin Moser, who apparently wrote an entire book on Clarice Lispector, but just those 13 or so pages make it clear that she was quite a woman. Her husband was in the foreign service or something, so she was always jetting off to this or that country.
In my mind, I imagine Lispector as a sort of cross between James Bond and Marilyn Monroe. She's stylish, unquestionably glamorous, quite the looker, and, when she's not meeting foreign dignitaries, she's off sipping cappuccinos in Rome or shopping for gloves in Paris.
AND she writes??
Where have you been all my life, Clarice Lispector?
She's supposed to be a great writer too! The New York Times says that Lispector is a "Sphinx, sorceress, sacred monster" and, for good measure, throws in that she's "hypnotic," "glittering," and "savage."
Wow wow wow!
Slate's Book Review says she's a "genius on the level of Nabokov." Whaaaaa!!
Publisher's Weekly says "The Complete Stories is bound to become a kind of bedside Bible."
Yessss! Convert me, my dear Miss Lispector, I will keep you by my bedside!
So for nearly two years I have semi-idolized Clarice Lispector. I would pull the book off the shelf every once in a while just to look at before putting it back down again, my mouth watering in anticipation of one day reading all of the scandalous, sensational tales Miss Lispector was no doubt eager to tell me.
"Clarice Lispector! Isn't she just great?" I wanted to say. "Three cheers for world literature and Clarice Lispector!"
And then one day I finally read Clarice Lispector.
Oh.
So, that's ... it?
I don't quite get it.
No no no, please! Please speak to me, Miss Lispector! Speak to me!
Hmm, no. I really don't see what all the hype is about.
"A genius on the level of Nabokov"?
"Hypnotic"?
Not unless it's the type of hypnosis that's meant to send you to sleep.
Now, to be fair, I did like several of these stories. Several. But there are 85 here, so you're bound to like something, particularly because these stories seem to span a variety of genres. Which is impressive, to be sure, but also ... frustrating, because, put all together in a single collection, they don't form anything like a rhythm. They're just ... words on a page. Sometimes the words feel like they were arranged there by someone very foreign indeed, as in alien almost, unfamiliar with the rules governing storytelling.
Yes, experimental is a word one could use to describe many of these stories, particularly the 14 in the section "Where Were You At Night" which, again, is a super sexy title, full of longing and intrigue, but the stories themselves were just sort of ... well, I'd say weird but the truth is that I understood so little of what I read that I just have to go back to experimental.
My favorite stories almost all came from the first two sections in the book, named, aptly enough, "First Stories" and "Family Ties." By this I can only gather that I loved the writer Lispector was in her 20s, but as she matured her style quickly diverged from mine.
That's not to take away from the stories I truly did savor here, like "The Escape" and "Happy Birthday," but those were far too few and far between. Most of the rest of these stories are just strange episodes that feature chickens.
Really though. Lispector loves her chickens.
So ultimately I was left heartbroken. Lispector is a "sorceress" to be sure, but it wasn't her stories that cast me under her spell, but her own biography. Had she lived a less interesting life and, dare I say it, been less attractive, would anyone know her name today?
I'm not so sure.
What I can say, though, is that the style most often on display in these stories is clearly not for me. Perhaps I ought to give one of her novels a try. Those, too, feature her likeness on their covers, her eyes gazing out at you, her lips pursed promisingly.
It's a look of daring, desire. A look of knowing you'll never be able to resist.
But, depending on your proclivities, my friend, perhaps resistance is your best move.
Errr, technically.
Because I actually read something like 500 of this book's 650 pages in 2020 ... so should that make this a 2020 read? But, though I only read around 23% of this book this year, I can only mark it as "read" this year since it was only "read" (past tense read, as in finished) yesterday.
Or was it the day before? Yes yes, it was the day before, but I wanted to let this simmer a bit before writing about it.
I suppose one could, if he or she wanted to fudge facts, have actually finished a book on December 31st but marked it as read on January 1st, and in so doing get a jump on the new year's challenge. Unless they're still short a read from their previous year's challenge, in which case it'd be in their best interest to back date it after all.
The thought had crossed my mind with my last two reads, both of which I finished in the waning days of 2020 but the reviews of which I didn't write until 2021. I had already met my 2020 challenge, after all, so why not get out to a strong start?
But no, that wouldn't be honest. In fact, I'll go out on a limb and say it'd be quite dishonest. One day you're fudging the date when you actually finished a book in order to cheat on a Goodreads challenge and then, BAM!, the next day you're looting your local bookshop.
And before you go and say that's a ridiculous jump to make, just ask yourself whether it is, really. We live in the post-truth age. Honesty, and reality itself, hangs by a thread, if it's still hanging at all.
So, upfront then, let me just say, I read only 23% of this this year but I did finish it this year, so there it is. Now you know.
And how was it, you ask?
Disappointing.
Yes, I'm sorry to say it was. I had higher hopes for my very first read of the new year. You know what they say, whatever you're reading to start the new year is what your year will be like (or something like that).
I've been reading this, a book about eels, and a biography of Hitler. I'm not entirely sure what that says about what 2021 has in store for me, but I doubt it bodes well. Particularly because this particularly read was, yes, so disappointing.
I really did have high hopes. But, I have to admit this as well, I purchased this just on style points alone.
It's true. I certainly do judge a book by its cover (we all do at least a little bit if we're being honest), and this cover is fascinating.
Go on. Take a good long look at it.
See what I mean? It's just the author's face. But what you can't see, because it's on the spine, is that these hot pink lines spreading across the front cover emanate out of a sort of orb that sits between the author's lips. And on the back cover the lines continue, over an image of the author's hand lightly grasping her chin.
It's compelling and, if I'm being honest, a bit hot. It puts me in mind of the types of CDs I used to buy when I was 13 or so. I remember going into the store and seeing Kylie Minogue or Celine Dion posed seductively on the album cover — Kylie Minogue significantly more so, as you'd imagine — and, without knowing what either actually sounded like, I'd buy it just because, well, they looked pretty good!
I left one out. Charlotte Church. Voice of an Angel. She was 12, I was 13, and she looked like someone I had a crush on at the time. I bought the album, positively trembling with anticipation, only to get home and put it on to find that it was ... opera?
I was taken aback, but she was still attractive, I couldn't deny that.
But let me get back to Clarice. As in Lispector, not the "Clarice" you hear in Anthony Hopkins' creepy Hannibal Lecter voice.
What a great name! Clarice Lispector. So it's a compelling cover and a truly great name. And it helps that she's quite attractive. Sells more books to be sure. She's Brazilian, with Eastern European roots, so that makes sense.
So I bought the book. At The Tattered Cover Book Store in Denver, Colorado back in March 2019. Lovely place. And that's how long this book sat on the shelf for, nearly two years.
But I brought it with me places. You know how it goes. You think you're going to get through eight books on your two-week vacation but you don't. And this is 650 pages, so it's not going to be the first one you pick up on your trip. You want to read a couple of those shorter ones first to feel as though you're actually making some progress toward your reading challenge.
So this has been with me to a lot of places before, one day, I finally cracked the cover. Except it's a paperback so it didn't really crack, per se, but anyway.
Wow! The introduction of this thing! It's only 13 pages or so, written by Benjamin Moser, who apparently wrote an entire book on Clarice Lispector, but just those 13 or so pages make it clear that she was quite a woman. Her husband was in the foreign service or something, so she was always jetting off to this or that country.
In my mind, I imagine Lispector as a sort of cross between James Bond and Marilyn Monroe. She's stylish, unquestionably glamorous, quite the looker, and, when she's not meeting foreign dignitaries, she's off sipping cappuccinos in Rome or shopping for gloves in Paris.
AND she writes??
Where have you been all my life, Clarice Lispector?
She's supposed to be a great writer too! The New York Times says that Lispector is a "Sphinx, sorceress, sacred monster" and, for good measure, throws in that she's "hypnotic," "glittering," and "savage."
Wow wow wow!
Slate's Book Review says she's a "genius on the level of Nabokov." Whaaaaa!!
Publisher's Weekly says "The Complete Stories is bound to become a kind of bedside Bible."
Yessss! Convert me, my dear Miss Lispector, I will keep you by my bedside!
So for nearly two years I have semi-idolized Clarice Lispector. I would pull the book off the shelf every once in a while just to look at before putting it back down again, my mouth watering in anticipation of one day reading all of the scandalous, sensational tales Miss Lispector was no doubt eager to tell me.
"Clarice Lispector! Isn't she just great?" I wanted to say. "Three cheers for world literature and Clarice Lispector!"
And then one day I finally read Clarice Lispector.
Oh.
So, that's ... it?
I don't quite get it.
No no no, please! Please speak to me, Miss Lispector! Speak to me!
Hmm, no. I really don't see what all the hype is about.
"A genius on the level of Nabokov"?
"Hypnotic"?
Not unless it's the type of hypnosis that's meant to send you to sleep.
Now, to be fair, I did like several of these stories. Several. But there are 85 here, so you're bound to like something, particularly because these stories seem to span a variety of genres. Which is impressive, to be sure, but also ... frustrating, because, put all together in a single collection, they don't form anything like a rhythm. They're just ... words on a page. Sometimes the words feel like they were arranged there by someone very foreign indeed, as in alien almost, unfamiliar with the rules governing storytelling.
Yes, experimental is a word one could use to describe many of these stories, particularly the 14 in the section "Where Were You At Night" which, again, is a super sexy title, full of longing and intrigue, but the stories themselves were just sort of ... well, I'd say weird but the truth is that I understood so little of what I read that I just have to go back to experimental.
My favorite stories almost all came from the first two sections in the book, named, aptly enough, "First Stories" and "Family Ties." By this I can only gather that I loved the writer Lispector was in her 20s, but as she matured her style quickly diverged from mine.
That's not to take away from the stories I truly did savor here, like "The Escape" and "Happy Birthday," but those were far too few and far between. Most of the rest of these stories are just strange episodes that feature chickens.
Really though. Lispector loves her chickens.
So ultimately I was left heartbroken. Lispector is a "sorceress" to be sure, but it wasn't her stories that cast me under her spell, but her own biography. Had she lived a less interesting life and, dare I say it, been less attractive, would anyone know her name today?
I'm not so sure.
What I can say, though, is that the style most often on display in these stories is clearly not for me. Perhaps I ought to give one of her novels a try. Those, too, feature her likeness on their covers, her eyes gazing out at you, her lips pursed promisingly.
It's a look of daring, desire. A look of knowing you'll never be able to resist.
But, depending on your proclivities, my friend, perhaps resistance is your best move.
September 16, 2020
4.50-star
This middleweight 650-page volume translated by Katrina Dodson is my third encounter with Clarice Lispector (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarice... her Family Ties (University of Texas Press 2008) translated by Giovanni Pontiero being the second one. Literarily, I think her two key typical writing styles would follow either the traditional or the stream of consciousness. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stream_...) For instance:
Pig Latin
("A lingua do 'p'")
MARIA APARECIA -- CIDINHA, AS THEY CALLED HER at home, -- was an English teacher. Neither rich nor poor: she got by. But she dressed impeccably. She looked rich. Even her suitcases were high quality.
She lived in Minas Gerais and was taking the train to Rio, where she'd spend three days, and then catch a plane to New York.
She was a highly sought-after teacher. She prized perfection and was affectionate, yet strict. She wanted to perfect her skills in the United States.
. . . (p. 562)
Brasilia
BRASILIA IS CONSTRUCTED ON THE LINE OF THE HORIZON. Brasilia is artificial. As artificial the world must have been when it was created. When the world was created, a man had to be created especially for that world. We are all deformed by our adaptation to the freedom of God. We don't know how we would be if we had been created first and the world were deformed after according to our requirements. Brasilia does nor yet have the Brasilia man. If I said that Brasilia was pretty they would immediately see that I liked the city. But if I say that Brasilia is the image of my insomnia they would see this as an accusation. But my insomnia is neither pretty nor ugly, my insomnia is me myself, it is lived, it is my astonishment. It is a semicolon. . . . (p. 575)
Therefore, if we decide to enjoy reading her stories, we should find them with traditional style after browsing each within a page or two, I think; however, if we opt for something innovative or hypnotic, we should be brave to try with the stream of consciousness long since famously penned by Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, etc. Moreover, coming to reflect more on her writing some 100 stories in this paperback, I suspected the two mentioned above probably could be mixed, blended into the hybrid, that is, she has applied the traditional and the stream of consciousness in some stories in which I would randomly explore and post its excerpts in this review.
I first read her Near to the Wild Heart (Penguin 2014) translated by Alison Entrekin after coming across a copy at the DaSa BookCafe in Bangkok in September 2017, three years ago; I had a difficult and lengthy decision on the question of to read or not to read since I have never heard her fame or read any of her works, in fact originally written in Portuguese. To find some information on her books and herself, I gradually gained more and more interesting data on the novel's first page, its synopsis on the back cover and her Wikipedia website in which today I found its dramatically modernized especially in terms of her composed and younger photograph instead of her frail and elderly one.
In conclusion, reading some, nearly all or all of her translated stories famously acclaimed as the winner of 2016 PEN Translation Prize would help us gain more confidence, familiarity and preparedness in reading her other novels with more understanding, enjoyment and admiration. As for the query why we should read her, some recommendations at the back cover could be our tip of thought as a timely decision:
A genius on the level of Nabokov.
- Jeff Vandermeer, Slate Book Review
THE COMPLETE STORIES is bound to become kind of bedside Bible or I Ching for readers of Lispector, both old and new.
- Valeria Luiselli, Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
This compendium of tales by the great Brazilian weaves a spell so narcotic it lends credence to the belief that the author, long dead, still speaks.
- The Boston Globe
One of the hidden geniuses of the twentieth century -- utterly original and brilliant, haunting and disturbing.
- Colm Toibin
This middleweight 650-page volume translated by Katrina Dodson is my third encounter with Clarice Lispector (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarice... her Family Ties (University of Texas Press 2008) translated by Giovanni Pontiero being the second one. Literarily, I think her two key typical writing styles would follow either the traditional or the stream of consciousness. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stream_...) For instance:
Pig Latin
("A lingua do 'p'")
MARIA APARECIA -- CIDINHA, AS THEY CALLED HER at home, -- was an English teacher. Neither rich nor poor: she got by. But she dressed impeccably. She looked rich. Even her suitcases were high quality.
She lived in Minas Gerais and was taking the train to Rio, where she'd spend three days, and then catch a plane to New York.
She was a highly sought-after teacher. She prized perfection and was affectionate, yet strict. She wanted to perfect her skills in the United States.
. . . (p. 562)
Brasilia
BRASILIA IS CONSTRUCTED ON THE LINE OF THE HORIZON. Brasilia is artificial. As artificial the world must have been when it was created. When the world was created, a man had to be created especially for that world. We are all deformed by our adaptation to the freedom of God. We don't know how we would be if we had been created first and the world were deformed after according to our requirements. Brasilia does nor yet have the Brasilia man. If I said that Brasilia was pretty they would immediately see that I liked the city. But if I say that Brasilia is the image of my insomnia they would see this as an accusation. But my insomnia is neither pretty nor ugly, my insomnia is me myself, it is lived, it is my astonishment. It is a semicolon. . . . (p. 575)
Therefore, if we decide to enjoy reading her stories, we should find them with traditional style after browsing each within a page or two, I think; however, if we opt for something innovative or hypnotic, we should be brave to try with the stream of consciousness long since famously penned by Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, etc. Moreover, coming to reflect more on her writing some 100 stories in this paperback, I suspected the two mentioned above probably could be mixed, blended into the hybrid, that is, she has applied the traditional and the stream of consciousness in some stories in which I would randomly explore and post its excerpts in this review.
I first read her Near to the Wild Heart (Penguin 2014) translated by Alison Entrekin after coming across a copy at the DaSa BookCafe in Bangkok in September 2017, three years ago; I had a difficult and lengthy decision on the question of to read or not to read since I have never heard her fame or read any of her works, in fact originally written in Portuguese. To find some information on her books and herself, I gradually gained more and more interesting data on the novel's first page, its synopsis on the back cover and her Wikipedia website in which today I found its dramatically modernized especially in terms of her composed and younger photograph instead of her frail and elderly one.
In conclusion, reading some, nearly all or all of her translated stories famously acclaimed as the winner of 2016 PEN Translation Prize would help us gain more confidence, familiarity and preparedness in reading her other novels with more understanding, enjoyment and admiration. As for the query why we should read her, some recommendations at the back cover could be our tip of thought as a timely decision:
A genius on the level of Nabokov.
- Jeff Vandermeer, Slate Book Review
THE COMPLETE STORIES is bound to become kind of bedside Bible or I Ching for readers of Lispector, both old and new.
- Valeria Luiselli, Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
This compendium of tales by the great Brazilian weaves a spell so narcotic it lends credence to the belief that the author, long dead, still speaks.
- The Boston Globe
One of the hidden geniuses of the twentieth century -- utterly original and brilliant, haunting and disturbing.
- Colm Toibin
December 9, 2021
To moja książka i literacka przygoda roku, wiedziałam, że tak będzie na długo przed końcem. Dawkowałam ją sobie bardzo powoli, bo to proza wymagająca ode mnie maksymalnego skupienia i nie czyta się jej łatwo. Jest emocjonalna, hermetyczna, niekoniecznie skupiona na fabule, ma własny bardzo nieregularny rytm. Jestem oczarowana stylem Clarice Lispector, jej sposobem kreowania kobiecych postaci, dekonstruowaniem kobiecości, nieoczywistością każdego z tych opowiadań. Wspaniale było być w tym świecie, chcę zapomnieć i przeżyć to jeszcze raz.
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