Clarice Lispector

In paperback, Clarice Lispector’s explosive and surprising second novel The Chandelier, written when Lispector was only twenty-three, reveals a very different author from the college student whose debut novel, Near to the Wild Heart, announced the landfall of “Hurricane Clarice.” Virginia and her cruel, beautiful brother, Daniel, grow up in a decaying country mansion. They leave for the city, but the change of locale leaves Virginia's internal life unperturbed. In intensely poetic language, Lispector conducts a stratigraphic excavation of Virginia's thoughts, revealing the drama of Clarice’s lifelong quest to discover “the nucleus made of a single instant”—and displaying a new face of this great writer, blazing with the vitality of youth.

The Chandelier

Emma Bose

stream of consciousness shards that illuminate an interiority. epiphanic.

'She found the best clay that one could desire- white, supple, sticky, cold . . . She would get a clear and tender material from which she could shape a world' Like the clay from which she sculpts figurines as a girl, Virginia is constantly shifting and changing. From her dreamlike childhood on Quiet Farm with her adored brother Daniel, through an adulthood where the past continues to pull her back and shape her, she moves through life, grasping for the truth of existence. Illuminating Virginia's progress through intense flashes of image, sensation and perception, The Chandelier, Lispector's landmark second novel, is a disorienting and exhilarating portrait of one woman's inner life. Translated by Benjamin Moser and Magdalena Edwards

Prashant Prasad

this was tough to get through bc of how dense it is and the protagonist is very self-centred but there were some great passages on emotion and the inner life but overall it was tedious and overwhelming :/ 

have her other books otw though

The Chandelier

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