Name: The Apple in the Dark
Rating: 3.333333333333333 (3 reviews)
ISBN: 9780811226752

Clarice Lispector

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

The Apple in the Dark

Lukas

That thing without a name that is the scent of the earth disquieting him hotly and recalling with insistence, who knows why, that we are born to love, and then you don't understand yourself.

if in an instant we are born, and we die in an instant, an instant is enough for a whole life 

he was a man, but there was still something that was unsettled: what is a man supposed to do? 

[…] and if we hardly fit, the truth is we do fit. What will we do? we’ll construct with the same little rocks another  definitive organization, knocking down the frst one beforehand? Or will we make up our mind sensibly to fit into the first one? It’s true that in order to fit into the first one, we can't eat much. Since if we get fat, we won’t fit, and if we grow we won't fit, and we’ll end up with trousers that are too short, looking meditatively at our exposed feet.

We don’t know where we come from and we don’t know where we’re going, but we experience, we experience! and that’s what we’ve got,[…],that‘s what we’ve got! 

Martin had fallen so far into himself that he didn’t recognize himself [..] Who was he? He had the intuitive certainty that we’re nothing like what we think we are and we are what he was being now, one day after being born we invent ourselves-but we are what he was now. 

 And the criminal felt so much fear that for the first time he understood in all its inexpressible meaning what was meant by salvation.

In a light despair of happiness she looked at the field and the weeds and the flies: and everything was making itself by itself, everything had the wisdom of living. But she - she didn’t know how to make herself. 

“I always got what I wanted.” Yes, somehow you always did. And I, what did I get? I got experience, which is that thing for which we are born; and profound freedom is in experience. 

Rosa

there were pieces and passages that i REALLY liked. i understand lispector's sentiment about this novel being her most conventionally structured, but even so, at times it felt like a chore to get through, which is never something i want from my favorite author. towards the end, though, i started to like it more.

marlisa

Described by Clarice Lispector as 'the best one', this intoxicating portrayal of a man searching for his destiny is her mystical, enigmatic masterpiece 'All I've got is hunger. And that instable way of grasping an apple in the dark-without letting it fall' Martim, believing that he has committed a murder, flees the city and escapes into the night. Wandering through the vastness of nature he arrives, in a state of fear and wonder, at a remote ranch run by two women. There Martim finds work and, as he labours in the blistering heat of the Brazilian summer, becomes transfigured; remade into something else entirely. Translated by Benjamin Moser 'The most important Brazilian woman writer of the twentieth century... The richness of The Apple in the Dark defies the explanatory power of any single interpretation' TLS

The Apple in the Dark

Reviews

Highlights