Name: Agua Viva
Rating: 4.391304347826087 (23 reviews)
ISBN: 9780141197364

Clarice Lispector

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

a lyrical prose! the mind, the voice, the music to the imageries of the nowness in being alive! i ca feel the sensations of how her words are developing me

a breathing of life that swallows you whole with the way she writes and the texts that immerses you to feel with your body. dissolves the self into breathing,  being, sensing the water that flows through the words with what she writes. just magical, immersive. i’m in awe

a lyrical prose! the mind, the voice, the music to the imageries of the nowness in being alive! i ca feel the sensations of how her words are developing me

a breathing of life that swallows you whole with the way she writes and the texts that immerses you to feel with your body. dissolves the self into breathing,  being, sensing the water that flows through the words with what she writes. just magical, immersive. i’m in awe

un libro sin trama, su principal conflicto es la mujer que lo escribe

Santiago Alejandro Crime

cracked this open, finally!!!, at ritual kopi sanur. (this was such a long overdue read - first encounter was through sfpc spring 2024 class wayward sentences: "What is a window if not air framed by right angles?" "So writing is the method of using the word as bait: the word fishing for whatever is not word.") that night felt mundane but I knew i was transforming & am transformed by reading this - I was given a language that enriched the vocabulary to explain the interiority of my own self. 

outside of the actual wondrous ideas enraptured within it, I really felt like Agua Viva's actual form 

 the way Lispector's words & sensation-thoughts meander, hopping and jumping from one topic to another, & then suddenly becomes self-conscious of itself & what it is doing, is how my perception works as someone with aphantasia (no inner-monologue specifically). i go through experiencing life just absorbing and drinking from the world & then there comes a criticality where my consciousness contracts -- & yet inevitably, so seamlessly, after the recognition & addressing of that Instant-Now, I sublimate off and disappear from my own mind. Until this constriction, this awareness, pins me to the ground again: a butterfly in examination of its own body.

madina

cracked this open, finally!!!, at ritual kopi sanur. (this was such a long overdue read - first encounter was through sfpc spring 2024 class wayward sentences: "What is a window if not air framed by right angles?" "So writing is the method of using the word as bait: the word fishing for whatever is not word.") that night felt mundane but I knew i was transforming & am transformed by reading this - I was given a language that enriched the vocabulary to explain the interiority of my own self. 

outside of the actual wondrous ideas enraptured within it, I really felt like Agua Viva's actual form is the instante-já. the way Lispector's words & sensation-thoughts meander, hopping and jumping from one topic to another, & then suddenly becomes self-conscious of itself & what it is doing, is how my perception works as someone with aphantasia (no inner-monologue specifically). i go through experiencing life just absorbing and drinking from the world & then there comes a criticality where my consciousness contracts -- & yet inevitably, so seamlessly, after the recognition & addressing of that Instant-Now, I sublimate off and disappear from my own mind. Until this constriction, this awareness, pins me to the ground again: a butterfly in examination of its own body.

Agua Viva

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