Clarice Lispector

A love story by the great Clarice Lispector that asks: Just how might two people be joined? What to make of a writer who follows the metaphysical heights of her great Passion According to GH with a book that looks suspiciously like a romance novel? In An Apprenticeship, or The Book of Pleasures, Clarice Lispector tries to discover how to bridge the gap between people, or how to even begin to try. A woman struggles to emerge from solitude and sadness into love, including sexual love: her guide on this journey is Ulisses, who (yes) leads her patiently into the fullness of life. An Apprenticeship was a bestseller and, as her biographer Benjamin Moser writes, "This accessible love story surprised many readers. When it came out, an interviewer said: 'I thought The Book of Pleasures was much easier to read than any of your other books. Do you think there’s any basis for that?' Clarice answered: 'There is. I humanized myself, the book reflects that.'”

An Apprenticeship, or The Book of Pleasures

Brianna Hawkins

Noreen Farsai

Was protection a presence? If she were protected by Ulisses even more than she already was, she'd immediately aim for the maximum: to be so protected that she wouldn't fear being free: since from her Aights of freedom she'd always have somewhere to return.

For a fraction of a second the person saw herself as an object to be looked at, which could be called narcissism but, already influenced by Ulisses, she'd call: pleasure in being, To find in the external figure the echoes of the internal figure: ah, so it's true I wasn't just imagining it: I exist.

But she didn't fear the moon because she was more lunar than solar and could see with wide-open eyes in the dark dawns the sinister moon in the sky. So she bathed all over in the lunar rays, as there are others who sunbathed. And was becoming profoundly limpid.

We haven't accepted what we don't understand because we don't want to look stupid. We've hoarded things and reassurances because we dont have each other. We dont have any joy that hasn't already been caralogued. We've built cathedrals, and stayed outside because the cathedrals we ourselves built, were afraid they're traps. We havent surendered to ourselves, because that would be the start of a long life and were afraid of that. Weve avoided falling to our knees in front of the first one of us who says, out of love: you're afraid. 

Patricia K

In the past she didn't go to the beach out of idleness and also because she didn't like crowds. Now she went without any laziness at five in the morning, when the smell of the still unused sea would make her dizzy with joy. The tangy salt air -maresia, a feminine word, though for Lóri the salty smell was masculine. Shed go at five in the morning because that was the hour of the sea's great solitude. Sometimes on the side walk shed pass a man walking his dog, no one else. How to explain that the sea was her maternal cradle but that the smell was all masculine? Maybe it was the perfect fusion. Moreover, at dawn, the caps of the waves looked much whiter.

soochie

“Lóri put on perfume and this was one of her imitations of the world, she who was trying so hard to learn life with perfume, somehow she was intensifying what she was and that's why she couldn't use perfumes that contradicted her: perfuming herself was an instinctive knowledge, come from millennia of apparently passive women learning, and, like any art, it demanded a minimum of self- knowledge … because it was hers, it was her, since for Lóri putting on perfume was a secret and almost religious act.”

“It was then that Ulisses had turned up in her life. He, who had been interested in Lóri only because of desire, was now seeming to see how out of reach she was. And more than that: not just out of reach for him but for herself and for the world. She was living off a tightness in her chest: life.”

“With me you'll speak your whole soul, even in silence. One day I’ll speak my whole soul, and we wont run dry because the soul is infinite. And besides we have two bodies which will be a joyful, mute, deep pleasure for us.”

An Apprenticeship, or The Book of Pleasures quotes

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