Clarice Lispector

The passion according to G.H.

Benjamin Moser

Idra Novey

The Passion According to G.H.

smile??

Reality is the raw material, language is the way I go in search of it—and the way I do not find it. But it is from searching and not finding that what I did not know was born, and which I instantly recognize. Language is my human effort. My destiny is to search and my destiny is to return empty-handed. But—I return with the unsayable. The unsayable can only be given to me through the failure of my language. Only when the construction fails, can I obtain what it could not achieve.

Everything that characterizes me is just the way that I am most easily visible to others and how I end up being superficially recognizable to myself.

When living comes to pass, one wonders: but was that it? And the answer is: that is not only it, that is exactly it.

I then understood that, in whatever fashion, living is a goodness toward others. Living is enough, and that itself ends up in the great goodness. He who lives totally is living for others, he who lives his own largeness is making an offering, even if his life takes places within the incommunicability of a cell.

I don't want pretty love. I don't want dusk, I don't want the well-made face, I don't want the expressive. I want the inexpressive. I want the inhuman inside the person; no, it isn't dangerous, since people are human anyway, you don't have to fight for that: wanting to be pretty sounds too pretty to me.

You were the oldest person I ever met. You were the monotony of my eternal love, and I didn't know it. I had for you the tedium I feel on holidays. [...]

Ah, how I wanted pain then: it would distract me from the great divine void that I had with you. I, the goddess resting: you, upon Olympus. The great yawn of happiness? Distance following distance, and another distance and another—the abundance of space that the holiday has. That unfolding of calm energy, which I did not even understand. That already thirstless kiss upon the distracted forehead of the beloved man resting, the pensive kiss upon the already beloved man. It was a national holiday. Flags raised.

Needing is always the supreme moment. As the most daring joy between a man and a woman comes when the greatness of needing is such that we feel in agony and fright: without you I could not live. The revelation of love is a revelation of neediness—blessed be the poor in spirit for theirs is the lacerating kingdom of life.

If I abandon hope, I am celebrating my neediness, and that is the greatest weight of living.

I did not have the courage to stop being a promise, and I was promising myself, like an adult who lacks the courage to see she is already an adult and keeps promising herself maturity.

They gave me everything, and just look what everything is! it's a roach that is alive and that is about to die.

Ah, people put the idea of sin in sex. But how innocent and childish that sin is. The real hell is that of love. Love is the experience of a danger of greater sin—it is the experience of the mud and the degradation and the worst joy. Sex is the fright of a child. 

Men praise highly what they feel. Which is as dangerous as detesting what one feels.

What did we do, we who trot in the hell of joy? [...] Yet the trotting carries on inside me. I chat, tidy the house, smile, but I know that the trot is inside me. I miss it like one who dies. I can no longer not go.

"healed my shame! became an orb" at 21:27

 The mystery of human destiny is that we are inevitable, but we have the freedom to carry out or not our inevitability: it depends on us to carry out our inevitable destiny. While inhuman beings, like the roach, carry out their own complete cycle, without ever erring because they do not choose. But it depends on me to freely become whatever I inevitably am. I am the mistress of my inevitability, and, if I decide not to carry it out, I shall remain outside my specifically living nature. But if I carry out my neutral and living nucleus, then, within my species, I shall be being specifically human.

If I manage to return from the kingdom of life I shall take your hand again, and kiss it gratefully because it waited for me, and waited for my path to go by, and for me to return thin, ravenous and humble: hungry only for the little hungry only for the less.

Because, sitting and unmoving there, I had started wanting to live my own remoteness as the only way of living my present. And that, which is apparently innocent, that was once again a pleasure that resembled a horrendous and cosmic delight.

Ah, if I could transmit the memory to you, the memory that's just now come alive, of what the two of us had lived without being aware of it. Do you want to remember with me? oh, I know it's hard: but let's go toward ourselves. [...]

It's that, when we loved, I didn't know that love was happening much more exactly when the thing we were calling love wasn't there. The neutral of love, that was what we were living and despising.

What I'm talking about is when nothing was happening, and, we called that nothing-happening an interval. But what was the interval like?

It was the enormous flower opening, all swollen with itself, my great and trembling vision. [...]

And time wasn't totally liquid because, for me to gather things with my hands, things had to coagulate like fruits. In the intervals we called empty and calm, and when we thought that the love had stopped...

[...] Like glaciers in summertime, and liquefied the rivers run. Every word of ours—in the time we called empty—each word was as light and empty as a butterfly: the word from inside fluttering out to meet the mouth, the words were said but we didn't even hear them because the melting glaciers made so much noise as they ran. Amidst the liquid din, our mouths were moving speaking, and in fact we only saw the moving mouths but didn't hear them—we each looked at the mouth of the other, seeing it speak, and it hardly mattered that we didn't hear, oh, in the name of God it hardly mattered.

And in our name, it was enough to see the mouth speaking, and we laughed because we were hardly paying attention. And yet we were calling that not-listening indifference and lack of love. [...]

In those intervals we were thinking of ourselves as resting from one being the other. Really it was the great pleasure of not being the other: since that way each of us had two. Everything was going to end, when what we called the interval of love ended; and because it was going to end, it weight tremulous beneath the very weight of its ending already in itself.

We are creatures that must plunge into the depth in order to breath there, as the fish plunges in the water in order to breath, except my depths are in the air of the night.

Error is one of my inevitable ways of working.

The truth must be exactly in what I shall never be able to understand. And, later, could I understand myself afterward? I don't know. Will the man of the future understand us as we are today?

Could I be living, not the truth, but the myth of the truth? Every time I lived the truth it was through an impression of inescapable dream: the inescapable dream is my truth.

Identity is forbidden to me but my love is so great that I won't resist my will to enter the mysterious fabric, into the plasma from which I may never again be able to depart.

I was afraid of the face of God, I was afraid of my final nudity on the wall. Beauty, that new absence of beauty that had nothing to do with whatever I used to call beauty, horrified me.

And me—who would want me today? who had already become as mute as I was? who, like me, was calling fear love? and want, love? and need, love?

[...] I don't want the other species! I just want people.

- a book about the self, and the selves we find within us and within others. the disgusting parts of ourselves that only others can see, the beautiful parts of others that only we can see, the acceptance of both and the letting go of something larger

- truly, this feels like the book i've spent my entire life preparing for

- i will come back to these pages for the rest of my days

- a book about the self, and the selves we find within us and within others. the disgusting parts of ourselves that only others can see, the beautiful parts of others that only we can see, the acceptance of both and the letting go of something larger

- truly, this feels like the book i've spent my entire life preparing for

- i will come back to these pages for the rest of my days

A disoriented and confused young woman looks back on her life and her place in the world."

lispector has absolutely no concern for the rules of genre, form, even language. what a weird, haunting read this was. 

biddy

Ngl, her book was tough to get through, especially when you’re just getting back into reading after a slump. It’s under 200 pages, but it still took me a whole month to finish. I felt like I understood what she was trying to say, but I couldn’t fully grasp all of it. 

The story follows a wealthy sculptor from Rio who enters her ex-maid’s empty room. There, she sees a cockroach crawling out of the wardrobe. She panics and slams the door on it. But instead of moving on, her disturbing fascination with the dying insect becomes a gateway into a deeper, disorienting confrontation with the self, with God, and with the unknowable nature of existence. She begins to question her identity, her place in the universe, and what it even means to be human. Where does identity begin—within, or in how we are seen by others?

And yes, that’s the entire plot. After that, the book just pulls you into her relentless, often dizzying inner monologue as she spirals deeper into a crisis of meaning. It explores how much of being human is shaped by the way we’re perceived by others.

Ngl, her book was tough to get through, especially when you’re just getting back into reading after a slump. It’s under 200 pages, but it still took me a whole month to finish. I felt like I understood what she was trying to say, but I couldn’t fully grasp all of it. 

The story follows a wealthy sculptor from Rio who enters her ex-maid’s empty room. There, she sees a cockroach crawling out of the wardrobe. She panics and slams the door on it. But instead of moving on, her disturbing fascination with the dying insect becomes a gateway into a deeper, disorienting confrontation with the self, with God, and with the unknowable nature of existence. She begins to question her identity, her place in the universe, and what it even means to be human. Where does identity begin—within, or in how we are seen by others?

And yes, that’s the entire plot. After that, the book just pulls you into her relentless, often dizzying inner monologue as she spirals deeper into a crisis of meaning. It explores how much of being human is shaped by the way we’re perceived by others.



hypnotic. definitely weird but so unique in its voice and lyricism 

marlisa

Ryan Greene

This is the most tedious book I’ve ever read. Usually I put books down when they reach a fraction of this tediousness. But there’s something great about it, about what we are beyond the thin layer we call “I”, and it kept me hooked. I kind of wish it hadn’t. It took me forever to finish it. I’d read a page and put it back down for a week. It’s so repetitive, and at times gets so self-indulgent… Maybe for some people it conjures some great trance-like state. I am very happy to be finally free from it.

Martin

Lindy

No one writes a mental breakdown like Clarice Lispector.

Luis Ponce

Desde el principio Lispector nos avisa que el lector correcto de su novela es alguien con un alma ya formada, pues sabe con creces que no cualquiera, en un sentido espiritual y reflexivo, puede ahondar en ella. Pese a que la terminé con mucho placer, maravillado por su estilo poético y un tanto místico, sigo sintiendo que no era el momento adecuado, que aún no soy esa alma predestinada a comprenderla o, como se espera, destinada a aliviarse a medida que pasan los capítulos. Por eso quizá la disfruto bastante, porque sé que en una futura lectura será posible una reconciliación y que, gracias a la puesta en escena de tópicos tan íntimos, pueda querer más (si es que se puede) todos y cada uno de los detalles de la novela, frase por frase. 

A veces también necesito una cucaracha para recordar que sigo vivo.

D D D 

meeeeehhhh 2.5 and I wish I didn't feel that way. 

I saw one of my friends on here (Hi Ian!) sum up this book as "the acceptance that you will fail to live your life and continuing to live it anyways" or something like that. I love that sentiment! a lot of lines in this book were really powerful and I love its premise. 

but the cons were overpowering for me. I went back and forth every chapter finding G.H. relatable/sympathetic and horribly annoying/pathetic. I also found the prose so tedious - there's a popular 1 star review that mimics it so perfectly it made me laugh. Objectively, though, I like the content and wouldn't dissuade anyone from reading this. Just didn't grip me.

I liked the Novey translation a little better than the Sousa. I don't particularly like when novels are overtly doing philosophical musings...

Prashant Prasad

filing this under “cockroachs which caused unexpected existential dread” right next to metamorphosis 

also in love with clarice lispector

Silje Risøy Helgerud

Kieran Wood

Excellent book with a ton of philosophical depth. Incredibly hard to parse, but worth the time necessary to understand what is being said.

Aksara

sofia 🪆

ㅤrizki

Mikee

Annie Millman

andy f

G.H. Plaag 

Noreen Farsai

G.H., a well-to-do Rio sculptress, enters the room of her maid, which is as clear and white 'as in an insane asylum from which dangerous objects have been removed'. There she sees a cockroach - black, dusty, prehistoric - crawling out of the wardrobe and, panicking, slams the door on it. Her irresistible fascination with the dying insect provokes a spiritual crisis, in which she questions her place in the universe and her very identity, propelling her towards an act of shocking transgression. Clarice Lispector's spare, deeply disturbing yet luminous novel transforms language into something otherworldly, and is one of her most unsettling and compelling works. Translated by Idra Novey With an Introduction by Caetano Veloso 'One of the twentieth century's most mysterious writers.' Orhan Pamuk 'The premier Latin American woman prose writer of this century.' The New York Times Book Review

The passion according to G.H.

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