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 EngAs 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:
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. ...more
Clarice Lispector may well have been a genius – indeed I think it likely given both her reputation in Latin America and the reactions of readers I res Clarice Lispector may well have been a genius – indeed I think it likely given both her reputation in Latin America and the reactions of readers I respect here on Goodreads – but so far, over four books, my experience has been one of, mostly, not feeling up to the task of reading her, I suspect because I lack the necessary trust to follow her on her seemingly mapless flights. The Passion of G.H. I liked, because, being wedded to a described external reality, it seemed less mapless, and its lurches into cosmic depths more resonant for having as their foil that reality. But A Breath of Life, to me, is all lurch, all cosmic; in it the quotidian is long-forgotten. And for this reader (who reads each sentence with care, who tries not to progress to the next sentence until I have understood the last) its invitation to dive into those depths is frankly not inviting. I try: I surrender to flow, give up on “meaning”, try even not to consider or assess the significance of what unfolds. But pages later I’m none the wiser. And things bother me: this whole AUTHOR/ANGELA dichotemy, for eg. At one point the “AUTHOR” says he doesn’t write like Angela, yet to me they sound virtually (if not entirely) the same. And why is the author “he” anyway? This device (used, to me bafflingly, in The Hour of the Star too) felt artificial and arbitrary. A simple way of differentiating Lispector and her fictional author? If so, I can’t help thinking, isn’t it too simple? And this technical decision of Lispector’s, which impacts (it seems) little on the text, bugs me for precisely that reason: it seems pointless, and undermines my trust.
As I say, great and instinctive readers have fallen head over heels for Clarice Lispector, and I’m sure they’re onto something. But for now, I’m tired. Possibly never has an author so eluded me. Usually if I don’t like something I at least know why. In Lispector’s case I don’t even know if I like her. I just know her words don’t stick to me; too often, they float over/around/through me, seeds that never take root. Or do they? If the point is to evade my rational mind, perhaps to reach the centre by less (or more) direct means, then who’s to say? If the point is her prose aspires to music, maybe it does. Maybe I just don’t know how to hear it, how to let go. Maybe. But for now, I’m putting her aside. ...more
The Passion According to G.H. is something like a miracle, so uniquely potent that you wonder how a human being could have conjured it. It’s poetry:
Th
The Passion According to G.H. is something like a miracle, so uniquely potent that you wonder how a human being could have conjured it. It’s poetry:
The green water of the air. I see everything through a full glass. [...] It’s eleven in the morning in Brazil. It’s now. That means exactly now. Now is time swollen to the limit. Eleven o’clock has no depth. Eleven o’clock is full of eleven hours up to the brim of the green glass. Time trembles as a motionless balloon. The air is fertilised and wheezing.
... yet also inextricably linked to the mundane:
I finally got up from the breakfast table, that woman. Not having a maid that day would give me the type of activity I wanted: arranging. I always liked to arrange things. I guess it’s my only real vocation. By putting things in order, I create and understand at the same time. [...] I looked around the apartment: where would I begin?
In between these poles – the free-associative meditation on universal laws prevalent in her later work (which, to me, does not succeed as G.H. does in making that meditation pertinent) and a solid grasp of the everyday that, in offsetting it, makes it truly luminous – is where the magic happens. And somehow this unique mode, this combination of tones never before attempted, allows Clarice Lispector – gives her the privilege – to write like this:
The first bind had already involuntarily burst, and I was breaking loose from the law, though I intuited that I was going to enter the hell of living matter – what kind of hell awaited me? but I had to go. I had to sink into my soul’s damnation, curiosity was consuming me.
So I opened my eyes all at once, and saw the full endless vastness of the room, that room that was vibrating in silence, laboratory of hell.
Histrionic? Somehow, G.H. is anything but. Somehow, this beyond-rudimentary framework of a woman in a room with a roach fully justifies the most cosmic of mind-flights. Why? Because – I hazard a guess – this is something we’ve all felt, this face-to-face with “neutral” unthinking but feeling life (the centipede writhing under the boot, the fish suffocating in the boat) that brings us up short with sudden identification, because something writhes in our guts too like the dying creature we are watching.
Still, to have captured, held and explored this revelation – to have magnified it like a novel and sung its essence like a song – is an achievement uniquely Lispector’s. A true achievement. Probably one of the great achievements in writing of the 20th century.
(I wrote the above halfway through G.H.; I presume my impression was true but can’t entirely confirm it, since soon I was distracted by life and other more addictive reading, and maybe from over-confidence in Lispector I put her down and never regained the same immersion. To re-read.)...more
Pretty good. A bit too obvious, a bit unsubtle, but gripping, and musical in the bargain. Granted I'm in a strange place with my reading lately - attePretty good. A bit too obvious, a bit unsubtle, but gripping, and musical in the bargain. Granted I'm in a strange place with my reading lately - attention diverted by cacophonous stepkids on the one hand and imperative to write my own stuff in my few solitary hours on the other - but a book like this, solid with soft heart and hint of fire, which hasn't let me down once since I started relying on it, is welcome sustenance for now, experimental/iconoclastic or otherwise. For years I scanned past Amado's better-known (in English) works on my father's shelves when he was feeding me Marquez and Grass and Rushdie, and chances are I won't be reading Gabriella, Clove and Cinnamon in a hurry, but this first novel justifies his popularity. I just noticed Penguin reissued it this year. ...more
Sorry Clarice, no dice. I wanted to like it, and I'm not opposed to structureless rhapsody per se, but Leaves of Grass (or even its introverted modernSorry Clarice, no dice. I wanted to like it, and I'm not opposed to structureless rhapsody per se, but Leaves of Grass (or even its introverted modernist reflection) this ain't. At first, it's true, the fact that it didn't actually annoy me - when it so easily could have - was a selling point. And I appreciated the suggestion that it should be read quickly, from afar, without too intense a focus. For a while, it kind of worked. Maybe a rereading will help. Maybe its having inspired zero excitement, interest or emotion in me is part of its magic; maybe it must sneak in unannounced to do its work. But I tend to doubt it. Apparently the one book that she herself seriously doubted, this is Clarice Lispector overcooked, undernourished and far less radical/experimental than its proponents would have as believe. Or so it seems to me on first viewing....more
Lately I find myself in the frustrating position (not uncommon among booksellers) of being surrounded by far more books than I can read. Not only are Lately I find myself in the frustrating position (not uncommon among booksellers) of being surrounded by far more books than I can read. Not only are there books in the shop, but in my spare moments at work I browse Goodreads, Abebooks and my local library system, and so have a constant stream of books passing through my hands, many of which I can do no more than glance at before returning them or putting them away for later. Into this deluge has flowed this novella by Clarice Lispector, a book which I hear tell was scribbled on scraps of paper at intervals of months or years before coalescing into its current form, and which is - on one level - as evanescent and difficult to grasp as this technique suggests, even while being - on another - as direct as a bullet to the heart at ten paces. Imagine that famous Goya painting with the white shirt and the firing squad, but focus on the victim's face until you're so close the ridges in the paint are as important - as moving - as his expression. Ever read the Borges story 'The Secret Miracle'? When the raindrop which has hit Jaromir Hladik's face just as time stopped starts sliding again, that's maybe something like the little self-conscious 'explosions' with which Lispector riddles her narrative. Structurally, strip Beckett's Malone Dies to the bone - the fictional writer who tells the story as much the protagonist as s/he whose story he tells - and you've got a rough outline of The Hour of the Star. I say rough because either this is a book to read two or three times before knowing anything certain about it or my current white-water reading technique is just not up to the task. Whatever the case, this is a hard book to comprehend, coming as it does so directly from a place beyond comprehension, and I presume Lispector made a habit, like Beckett, of gazing intently on things beyond comprehension. Still, it's not a 'difficult' book - not on the level of language, anyway - and reports of the strangeness of its prose have, to my mind, been exaggerated. To me it reads quite naturally, especially in the new translation, and from what few pages I saw of the old translation I suggest forgetting that relic immediately and getting your hands on this one. It's modern, that's for damn sure - I doubt there is much else out there as sleek and arresting and asymmetrical as this. And it's haunting: Lispector speaks through her (male) narrator who speaks through his character Maccabea. I had just read (on the train to and from work, as perhaps readers of the Brazilian newspaper which published them might have read them) Lispector's Chronicas when I started the novella, and consequently had a vivid, if oblique, impression of her in mind as I read this. Unfortunately I don't have a copy of The Hour of the Star with me as I write, but perhaps these lines from one of her Chronicas ('Creating Brasilia') will help suggest the kind of writer she is or can be:
Brasilia is built on the line of the horizon.
When I died, I opened my eyes one day and there was Brasilia.
The two architects who planned Brasilia were not interested in creating something beautiful. That would be too simple; they created their own terror, and left that terror unexplained.
Besides the wind, there is another thing that blows. It can only be recognised in the supernatural rippling of the lake. - Wherever you stand, you have the impression of being on the edge of a dangerous precipice.
Its founders tried to ignore the importance of human beings. The dimensions of the city's buildings were calculated for the heavens.
It is a shore without any sea.
How I should love to set white horses free here in Brasilia. At night, they would become green under the light of the moon - I know what those two men wanted: that slowness and silence which are also my idea of eternity.
Fear has always guided me to the things I love; and because I love, I become afraid.
What kind of writer is Clarice Lispector? The rarest kind. The fact that her Chronicas ever made it into a newspaper at all - let alone week after week - is, to this Australian, astonishing. That The Hour of the Star is a bestseller and its author a household name in her own country is even moreso. Judging from what little I've read, Lispector's ruthless stripping away of everything but the visionary/intuitive/paradoxical is unmatched by any prose writer except Beckett, and when and if I ever have the time and resources to do so I will approach her ouevre as I once approached his: piece by piece, in a quiet room in the country with her biography close at hand.
This is a work so elemental it seems hewn from rock, or washed up on the shore in Brasilia from that non-existent sea. If I don't give it a perfect score it's only because I don't yet know if she speaks directly to my heart. But her example, her aesthetic determination, is unsurpassed.
Clarice Lispector: this woman, our contemporary, a Brazilian woman… it is not books that she gives us, but the act of living saved by books, narratives, constructions that make us step back. And then, through her window-writing, we enter into the frightening beauty of learning how to read: and we pass, through the body, to the other side of the I. To love the truth of what is alive,... to love the origin, to be personally interested in the impersonal, in the animal, in the thing.
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