Clarice Lispector

Benjamin Moser

Stefan Tobler

Lispector at her most philosophically radical.

Água Viva

maia

I know you all over because I have lived you all over.

smile??

Alma

I am before, I am almost, I am never. And all of this I won when I stopped loving you.

Dora Tominic

My secret body tells you: dinosaurs, ichthyosaurs, and pleisosaurs, meaning nothing but their sound, though this doesn't dry them out like straw but moistens them instead.

The day seems like the smooth stretched skin of a fruit that in a small catastrophe the teeth tear, its liquor drains. I'm afraid of the accursed Sunday that liquidifies me.

dima

the manuscript seems to capture an everyday voice utterly unrefined by literary or fictional artifice.

Loud Object's direct and confessional tone, the sense it offers of Clarice's unfiltered conversational voiceshe frequently pauses to answer the phone, light a cigarette, or pour herself a drink of water—can distract the reader from the reality that it, too, is a fiction.

She apparently did not like the truth enough to refrain from retouching it in the second draft.

It does not particularly matter whether Clarice took her newspaper articles and stitched them into a manuscript or whether she plundered a manuscript for material for her jour- nalism. Yet the two conficting explanations emphasize that in Loud Object she is still wrestling, and somewhat guiltily, with fictionalization.

As she writes in Loud Object, "Art is not purity: it is purification. Art is not liberty: it is liberation.”

"The foreignness of her prose is one of the most overwhelming facts of our literary history, and even of the history of our language,"

Água Viva quotes

Join the club