Reviews
the immediacy of the prose is disconcerting to me. im as latin for "not" and media as latin for "middle". i wanted to like this a lot as a whole but i found it grating to read, despite how earnestly it is written. there are some great lines in there and honestly this is a great exercise in style, but this just isnt for me. i do have to say that it is excellently written. not verbose and despite its stream-of-consciousness style, lispector takes great care to pause and breathe and ramble and pause and do it over and over again
i do appreciate the central message of the book: NEVER KILL YOURSELF! lispector's treatise is a deeply buddhist text, without the asceticism. take a sip from the water of life (agua viva) go for a stroll. experience life as it is.
where i went wrong is probably in my strategy to read the book. i had wanted to use this as a breather almost, a companion to the dry and academic deluge by tooze that i tried to read concurrently. i suspect that if the reader commits 1-2 hours to this and really sit down with it, the experience will be far more positive. instead, i was pulled in and out of this work abruptly as i read this on my commutes
also this is ~80 pages too, so not a large commitment
Everything comes to an end but what she write will goes on.
caótico, simplemente bello. nueva autora favorita.
[reread, personal copy]
THOUGHT DAUGHTER FINAL BOSS
Es una novela acuática, que fluye, calma como un río, pero potente como un mar bravo. Breve, juega con los límites de las palabras y las emociones.
"My candour was crushed underfoot by you. You didn’t love me, only I know that. I was alone. Yours alone. I write to no one and a riff is being made that doesn’t exist. I unglued myself from me."
holy shit
“my essence is unconscious of itself and that’s why i obey myself blindly”
i ❤️ vulnerable female writers (they just like me fr)
unserious review cuz i need to go to sleep byeeeeee
(if you know you know) i'm convinced lispector wrote this book for us 12th house placements girlies. unbelievable, impeccable book. extremely goated writer...5 stars is not enough. this has become my favorite book of all time. what can't she do man!!!!! i love you ma'am clarice lispector.
"La creación se me escapa. Y no quiero saber tanto. Me basta con que el corazón me lata en el pecho."
honest. messy. new favorite author
for two third of the book i was immensely enthralled by everything then couple of pages nearing the coda it sort of fizzled. perplexing thought-feeling :)
Lispector at her most philosophically radical, her attempt to capture her thoughts about intense, philosophical topics such as time, life and death. The prose gushes with unfiltered emotion so that you don’t know where to look. And yet, there is a thrill in reading these breathless, fitfully coherent fragments, each deployed in a vain quest to capture the living moment of naked existence, the “now-instant”. Love the duality of her thoughts when facing deeply conceptual topics and how she goes back to intertwining it with self, and how seemingly vivid her conveyance, her conceptualization of her "beyond thoughts". "My only salvation is joy. An atonal joy inside the essential it. Because it's too cruel to know that life is just one time and that we have no guarantee outside our faiths in shadows - because it's too cruel, so I respond with the purity of an untamable happiness. I refuse to be sad. Let us be joyful. Whoever isn't afraid to be joyful and to and to experience even a single time the mad and profound joy will have the best part of our truth. I am - despite everything - am being joyful in this instant-now that passes if I don't capture it in words. I am being joyful in this very instant because I refuse to be defeated : so I love. As an answer."
difficult to pick a rating out of 5 stars for a book that evokes the exact feeling of waking up in the morning and reading for the first time with lucid eyes the ALMOST incomprehensible thoughts and 'prose' that u dumped in ur notes app while u were between dreams & wakefulness the previous night. everything about this was, while it lasted, very surreal, very fleeting, very magical and transcendent, somehow very true "What I’m saying is that the thought of the man and the way this thinking-feeling can reach an extreme degree of incommunicability— that, without sophism or paradox, is at the same time, for that man, the point of greatest communication. He communicates with himself."
I had same issues with this book as I had with The Breath of Life. It felt like Lispector just rambled on and on about nothing. There were some nice, imaginative paragraphs within, but they were diluted between empty fillers that caused no emotions in me. I think self-exploratory books like this are just not for me. I like artsy writing, but I also need some kind of plot - at least a thin thread to hold on to, - that would justify me spending time on somebody's personal reflections. I am looking forward to The Passion According to G.H. that apparently has a definite "backbone". But so far its 2 out and only 1 in for Lispector.
if anyone ever asked me what having a pisces mercury feels like i’d just give them this book
It took me longer than I expected to finish this, I feel like it's been on my list since the previous year and I didn't get the chance to finish it. It revolves mostly around the narrative of life, the instant-now, the present. Mostly throughout it didn't really have a plot but it just flows and somewhat afloat on how growth works and the nature of life.
you must drive yourself to surrender each time before reading any of her.
Disclaimer: this is not a review.
But I thought I would love it.
“What I’m writing to you is not for reading— it’s for being.” poetic, bewitching, divine. it puts you in a state of trance and forces you to stay there absorbing and understanding each word, each sentence, having to read almost every sentence several times, and once you grasp the meaning of them, you are overcome with ecstasy. a book i will reread plenty of times because i truly do not remember what i just read even though it has changed me. it really is like witchcraft.
What a read! It’s kind of surrealist and strange feeling, as if you’d enter a rambling mind of someone else during their many states. The author has high-level awareness of nature and feelings she experiences. But this writing is so much more. Its is an attempt to describe the indescribable. It is poetic, ethereal, but so human. Philosophical considerations are being mixed with poetic thought-feelings, which throws you in some kind of neurotic ease (as paradoxical as it sounds). At moments, she tries to celebrate what IS, but suddenly acknowledges that the death is unescapable. At the same time she holds this mystical hope. But death is certain, and as we think about it, it creates an unease. But unease she created, is kind of pleasant. But at the end, all of this writing is not for the reader, it is to understand herself better. As she writes: “what I am writing to you it is not for reading- it’s for being.” It is a splendid read from the style perspective.
we love you clarice lispector “what i’m writing to you goes on and i am bewitched.”
Highlights
Is my theme the instant? the theme of my life. I try to keep up with it, I divide thousands of times into as many times as the number of instants running by, fragmented as I am and the moments so fragile—my only vow is to life born with time and growing along with it: only in time itself is there room enough for me.
I want to possess the atoms of time. And to capture the present, forbidden by its very nature: the present slips away and the instant too, I am this very second forever in the now.
But no passion suffered in pain and love is not followed by a hallelujah.
This SPEAKS.
Dying must be a mute internal explosion. The body can no longer stand being a body. And what if dying had the taste of food when you’re very hungry? And what if dying were a pleasure, selfish pleasure?
This is not a story because I don’t know any stories like this but all I know how to do is go along saying and doing: it is the story of instants that flee like fugitive tracks seen from the window of a train.
“my essence is unconscious of itself and that’s why i obey myself blindly”
I am before, I am almost, I am never. And all of this I won when I stopped loving you.
Listen: I let you be, therefore let me be.
I am being joyful in this very instant because I refuse to be defeated: so I love. As an answer. Impersonal love, it love, is joy: even the love that doesn’t work out, even the love that ends.
de onde vêm os ecos de domingo?
<3
My story is living. And I have no fear of failure. Let failure annihilate me, I want the glory of falling.
I’m tired. My tiredness comes often because I’m an extremely busy person: I look after the world. Every day I look from my terrace at a section of beach and sea and see the thick foam is whiter and that during the night the waters crept forward uneasy. I see this by the mark which the waves leave upon the sand. I look at the almond trees on the street where I live. Before going to sleep I look after the world and see if the night sky is starry and navy blue because on certain nights instead of being black the sky seems to be an intense navy blue, a color I’ve painted in stained glass. (...) With my glance I must look after thousands of plants and trees and especially the giant water lily.
And may it rebel, that nerve of life, and may it contort and throb. And may sapphires, amethysts and emeralds spill into the dark eroticism of abundant life: because in my darkness quakes at last the great topaz, word that has its own light.
I who come from the pain of living. And I no longer want it. I want the vibration of happiness.
May whoever comes along with me come along: the journey is long, it is tough, but lived.
I know you all over because I have lived you all over.
As for me, I own up to my solitude that sometimes falls into ecstasy as before fireworks. I am alone and must live a certain intimate glory that in solitude can become pain. And the pain, silence. I keep its name secret. I need secrets in order to live.
No, I was never modern. And this happens: when I think a painting is strange that's when it's a painting. And when I think a word is strange that's where it achieves the meaning. And when I think life is strange that's where life begins. I great take care not to surpass myself.
I am the one listening to the whistling in the dark. I who am sick with the human condition. I revolt: I no longer want to be a person. Who? who has mnercy on us who know about Life and death where an animal I envy profoundly— is unconscious of its condition? Who takes pity on us? Are we abandoned? given over to despair? No, there must be a possible consolation. I swear: there must be. What I don't have is the courage to say the truth that we know. These are forbidden words.
I'm not going to die, you hear, God? I don't have the courage, you hear? Don't kill me, you hear? Because it's a disgrace to be born in order to die without knowing when or where. I'm going to stay very happy, you hear?
What l'm writing to you goes on and I am bewitched.
so it's not difficult to structure Clarice, or it's infinitely difficult, unless you commune with her and already are in the habit of reading her.
Água Viva gives the strongest impression of having been spontaneously committed to paper. Yet perhaps none was as painstakingly composed.
intro
There's a love song monotonously the lament I make my own: why do I Love you if you don't return my love? I send messengers in vain: when I greet you you hide your face from me: why do I love you if you don't even notice me?