Clarice Lispector

Benjamin Moser

Alison Entrekin

This new translation of Clarice Lispector's sensational first book tells the story of a middle class woman's life from childhood through an unhappy marriage and its dissolution to transcendence. Near to the Wild Heart, published in Rio de Janeiro in 1943, introduced Brazil to what one writer called “Hurricane Clarice”: a twenty-three-year-old girl who wrote her first book in a tiny rented room and then baptized it with a title taken from Joyce: “He was alone, unheeded, near to the wild heart of life.” The book was an unprecedented sensation — the discovery of a genius. Narrative epiphanies and interior monologue frame the life of Joana, from her middle-class childhood through her unhappy marriage and its dissolution to transcendence, when she proclaims: “I shall arise as strong and comely as a young colt.”

Near to the Wild Heart

Brianna Hawkins

Fasiha🌺🐧

You lie and stumble into the truth. Even in her freedom, when she chose new paths, she later recognized them. To be free was to carry on after all and there again was the beaten track.

I look through this window and the only truth, the truth I couldn't tell that man, if I went up to him, without him running away from me, the only truth is that I live. Sincerely, I live.

Eternity wasn't just a time, but something like the deeply rooted certainty that she couldn't contain it in her body because of death; the impossibility of going beyond eternity was eternity; and a feeling in absolute, almost abstract purity was also eternal. What really gave her a sense of eternity was the impossibility of knowing how many human beings would succeed her body, which would one day be far from the present with the speed of a shooting star.

dima

...the precious and precise harmony between expression and substance.

She had recently learned to braid. She went over to the little table where the books were, played with them by looking at them from a distance.

Even from a distance she possessed things.

The certainty that evil is my calling, thought Joanna.

What else was that feeling of contained force, ready to burst forth in violence, that longing to apply it with her eyes closed, all of it, with the rash confidence of a wild beast? Wasn't it in evil alone that you could breathe fearlessly, accepting the air and your lungs? Not even pleasure would give me as much pleasure as evil, she thought surprised. She felt a perfect animal inside her, full of contradictions, of selfishness and vitality.

Even suffering was good because while the lowest suffering was taking place she also existed—like a separate river. And she could also wait for the instant that was coming... coming.. and without warning plowed into present and suddenly dissolved... and another that was coming… coming…

What counted was that her question nad been accepted. it could exist.

Near to the Wild Heart quotes

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