Clarice Lispector

Benjamin Moser

Stefan Tobler

Lispector at her most philosophically radical.

Água Viva

Clarice Lispector's first novel, Near to the Wild Heart (Perto do coracao selvagem), was published in 1944, when ts author was only nineteen years old."

Near to the Wild Heart

A disoriented and confused young woman looks back on her life and her place in the world."

The Passion According to G.H.

A love story by the great Clarice Lispector that asks: Just how might two people be joined?

The Apprenticeship, Or the Book of Pleasures

Johnny Lorenz

"A mystical mediation on creation and death in which a man (a thinly disguised Clarice Lispector) infuses the "breath of life" into his creation [and] forms a dialogue between the god-like author and the speaking, breathing, dying creature herself: Angela Pralini"--P. [4] of cover.

A Breath of Life

Clarice Lispector's Complete Stories, 85 in all, are an epiphany, among the important books of this—or any—year

The Complete Stories

Alison Entrekin

This new translation of Clarice Lispector's sensational first book tells the story of a middle class woman's life from childhood through an unhappy marriage and its dissolution to transcendence. Near to the Wild Heart, published in Rio de Janeiro in 1943, introduced Brazil to what one writer called “Hurricane Clarice”: a twenty-three-year-old girl who wrote her first book in a tiny rented room and then baptized it with a title taken from Joyce: “He was alone, unheeded, near to the wild heart of life.” The book was an unprecedented sensation — the discovery of a genius. Narrative epiphanies and interior monologue frame the life of Joana, from her middle-class childhood through her unhappy marriage and its dissolution to transcendence, when she proclaims: “I shall arise as strong and comely as a young colt.”

In Água Viva Clarice Lispector aims to 'capture the present'. Her direct, confessional and unfiltered meditations on everything from life and time to perfume and sleep are strange and hypnotic in their emotional power and have been a huge influence on many artists and writers, including one Brazilian musician who read it one hundred and eleven times. Despite its apparent spontaneity, this is a masterly work of art, which rearranges language and plays in the gaps between reality and fiction. Translated by Stefan Tobler With an Introduction by Benjamin Moser 'An emblematic twentieth-century artist who belongs in the same pantheon as Kafka and Joyce.' Edmund White 'Lispector stands at the pinnacle of Brazil's impressive literary achievement.' Washington Post Book World

Agua Viva

The morning became a long, drawn-out afternoon that became depthless night dawning innocently through the house' Tales of desire and madness from this giant of Brazilian literature.

Daydream and Drunkenness of a Young Lady

Último livro escrito por Clarice Lispector, A hora da estrela é também uma despedida. Lançada pouco antes de sua morte em 1977, a obra conta os momentos de criação do escritor Rodrigo S. M. (a própria Clarice) narrando a história de Macabéa, uma alagoana órfã, virgem e solitária, criada por uma tia tirana, que a leva para o Rio de Janeiro, onde trabalha como datilógrafa. Em A hora da estrela Clarice escreve sabendo que a morte está próxima e põe um pouco de si nas personagens Rodrigo e Macabéa. Ele, um escritor à espera da morte; ela, uma solitária que gosta de ouvir a Rádio Relógio e que passou a infância no Nordeste, como Clarice. A despedida de Clarice é uma obra instigante e inovadora. Como diz o personagem Rodrigo, "estou escrevendo na hora mesma em que sou lido". É Clarice contando uma história e, ao mesmo tempo, revelando ao leitor seu processo de criação e sua angústia diante da vida e da morte. Macabéa, a nordestina, cumpre seu destino sem reclamar. Feia, magra, sem entender muito bem o que se passa à sua volta, é maltratada pelo namorado Olímpico e pela colega Glória. Os dois são o seu oposto: o metalúrgico Olímpico sonha alto e quer ser deputado, e Glória, carioca da gema e gorda, tem família e hora certa para comer. Os dois acabam juntos, enquanto Macabéa, sozinha, continua a viver sem saber por que está vivendo, sem pensar no futuro nem sonhar com uma vida melhor. Até que um dia, seguindo uma recomendação de Glória, procura a cartomante Carlota, uma ex-prostituta do Mangue, que revela a Macabéa toda a inutilidade de sua vida. Mas também enche-a de esperança, prevendo a paixão por um estrangeiro rico, com quem ela iria se casar.

A hora da estrela

Complete Chronicles

Too Much of Life

Clarice Lispector’s best-selling masterpiece—“her finest book” (The Nation)—now in a special hardcover edition to celebrate the centenary of her birth, with an illuminating new afterword by her son The Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector’s consummate final novel, may well be her masterpiece. Narrated by the cosmopolitan Rodrigo S.M., this brief, strange, and haunting tale is the story of Macabéa, one of life’s unfortunates. Living in the slums of Rio and eking out a poor living as a typist, Macabéa loves movies, Coca-Cola, and her rat of a boyfriend; she would like to be like Marilyn Monroe, but she is ugly, underfed, sickly, and unloved. Rodrigo recoils from her wretchedness, and yet he cannot avoid the realization that for all her outward misery, Macabéa is inwardly free. She doesn’t seem to know how unhappy she should be. As Macabéa heads toward her absurd death, Lispector employs her pathetic heroine against her urbane, empty narrator—edge of despair to edge of despair—and, working them like a pair of scissors, she cuts away the reader’s preconceived notions about poverty, identity, love, and the art of fiction. In her last book she takes readers close to the true mystery of life and leaves us deep in Lispector territory indeed.

The Hour of the Star: 100th Anniversary Edition

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

Hour of the Star

In paperback, Clarice Lispector’s explosive and surprising second novel The Chandelier, written when Lispector was only twenty-three, reveals a very different author from the college student whose debut novel, Near to the Wild Heart, announced the landfall of “Hurricane Clarice.” Virginia and her cruel, beautiful brother, Daniel, grow up in a decaying country mansion. They leave for the city, but the change of locale leaves Virginia's internal life unperturbed. In intensely poetic language, Lispector conducts a stratigraphic excavation of Virginia's thoughts, revealing the drama of Clarice’s lifelong quest to discover “the nucleus made of a single instant”—and displaying a new face of this great writer, blazing with the vitality of youth.

The Chandelier

Written in flight from Lispector's 'shipwreck of introspection' it is a book unlike any other in the Lispector canon, a novel about simply seeing the external world. Its heroine Lucrecia is utterly mute and unreflective. She may have no inner life. The plot itself is utterly unlike any other Lispector narrative- small-town girl marries rich man, sees the world, and lives happily ever after. But there are miraculous horses, linguistic ecstasies, catty remarks, minor characters' visions and music from unknown sources. There is Lucrecia, the heroine free of the burden of thought, who 'leaned over without any individuality, trying merely to look at things directly'. And yet her 'mere' looking leads, as Lispector's biographer Benjamin Moser notes, 'paradoxically but inevitably, to Clarice's own metaphysical concerns. As it turns out, not being profound is simply another way of being profound'. Translated by Johnny Lorenz

The Besieged City

"The best one," as Clarice Lispector called The Apple in the Dark, her famously intense 1961 novel

The Apple in the Dark

Perto do coração selvagem

A mystical dialogue between a male author and his creation, this posthumous work has never before been translated, and is a book of particular beauty and strangeness. A mystical dialogue between a male author (a thinly disguised Clarice Lispector) and his/her creation, a woman named Angela, this posthumous work has never before been translated. Lispector did not even live to see it published. At her death, a mountain of fragments remained to be “structured” by Olga Borelli. These fragments form a dialogue between a god-like author who infuses the breath of life into his creation: the speaking, breathing, dying creation herself, Angela Pralini. The work’s almost occult appeal arises from the perception that if Angela dies, Clarice will have to die as well. And she did.

The small incidents of life become moments of inner revelation in the luminous writing of Clarice Lispector. A woman contemplating a vase of roses after a nervous breakdown; a tangled mother-daughter relationship; a man's abandonment of a dog; an animal in a zoo- each one leads to mystery and self-discovery, delight and devastation.

The Imitation of the Rose

One of Elena Ferrante's Top 40 Books by Women G.H., a well-to-do Rio sculptress, enters the room of her maid, which is as clear and white 'as in an insane asylum from which dangerous objects have been removed'. There she sees a cockroach - black, dusty, prehistoric - crawling out of the wardrobe and, panicking, slams the door on it. Her irresistible fascination with the dying insect provokes a spiritual crisis, in which she questions her place in the universe and her very identity, propelling her towards an act of shocking transgression. Clarice Lispector's spare, deeply disturbing yet luminous novel transforms language into something otherworldly, and is one of her most unsettling and compelling works. Clarice Lispector was a Brazilian novelist and short story writer. Her innovation in fiction brought her international renown. References to her literary work pervade the music and literature of Brazil and Latin America. She was born in the Ukraine in 1920, but in the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Civil War, the family fled to Romania and eventually sailed to Brazil. She published her first novel, Near to the Wildheart in 1943 when she was just twenty-three, and the next year was awarded the Graça Aranha Prize for the best first novel. Many felt she had given Brazillian literature a unique voice in the larger context of Portuguese literature. After living variously in Italy, the UK, Switzerland and the US, in 1959, Lispector with her children returned to Brazil where she wrote her most influential novels including The Passion According to G.H. She died in 1977, shortly after the publication of her final novel, The Hour of the Star.

Clarice Lispector

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