Clarice Lispector

'How did I so unwittingly transform the joy of living into the great luxury of being alive?' Between 1967 and 1977, Clarice Lispector wrote weekly dispatches from her desk in Rio for the Jornal do Brasil. Already famous for her revolutionary, interior, metaphysical novels, in her Chronicles she turns her attention to the everyday, turning the material of her life into profound, touching and funny, tiny revelations. Observing the world around her, small encounters like hearing tales of the lost loves of a taxi driver, or the bitterness lurking beneath the prettiness of an old friend, become an exposition of the currents and foibles that define our lives. Everything from the meaning of cosmonauts to the new ideas, writers and artists that populate the sparkling international world of the sixties and seventies are considered and transformed into jewels of insight, delight and devastation. Sincere and playful, exhilarating and contemplative, Too Much of Life: Complete Chronicles opens up a new way of seeing the world.

Complete Chronicles

Too Much of Life

Who among us has not, by chance, looked in the mirror and felt surprised? For a fraction of a second we see ourselves as an object to be looked at. Some might call this narcissism, but I would call it: the joy of being. The joy of finding in our external face echoes of our internal face: ah, so it’s true, I didn’t just imagine myself, I actually exist.

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