Clarice Lispector

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

The Passion According to G.H.

Benjamin Moser

Idra Novey

smile??

I want to know love. And I want to know if hope was a contemporization with the impossible. Or if it was a way of delaying what's possible now—and which I only don't have out of fear.

Morality. Would it be simplistic to think the moral problem with regard to others consists in behaving as one ought to, and the moral problem with regards to oneself is managing to feel what one ought to? Am I moral to the extent that I do what I should, and feel as I should?

I want the present without dressing it up with a future that redeems it, not even with a hope—until now what hope wanted in me was just to conjure away the present. But I want much more than that: I want to find the redemption in today, in right now, in the reality that is being, and not in the promise, I want to find joy in this instant [...]

I knew that entering is not a sin. But it's risky as dying. Just as one dies without knowing where to, and that is the greatest courage of a body. Entering was only a sin because it was the damnation of my life, to which I later might never be able to regress. I might have already known that, beyond the gates, there would be no difference between me and the roach. Not in my own eyes or in the eyes of what is God.

Now is time swollen to the limit. Eleven o'clock has no depth. Eleven o'clock is full of eleven hours up to the brim of the green glass.

The time to live, my love, was being so right now that I leaned my mouth on the matter of life. The time to live is a slow uninterrupted creaking of doors continuously opening wide. Two gates were opening and had never stopped opening. But they were continuously opening onto—onto the nothing?

But hell had already taken me, my love, the hell of unhealthy curiosity. I was already selling my human soul, because seeing had already begun to consume me in pleasure, I was selling my future, I was selling my salvation, I was selling us.

In every case of madness something came back. The possessed are not possessed by what is coming but by what is coming back.

And I'd ended up, I too completely filthy, emerging through the cockroach into my past that was my continuous present and my continuous future—and that today and always is on the wall, and my fifteen million daughters, from them up to myself, were there too. My life was as continuous as death. Life is so continuous that we divide it into stages, and we call one of them death. I had always been in life, and it matters little that it wasn't I properly speaking, not what I'd usually call I. I was always in life.

Life, my love, is a great seduction in which all that exists seduces.

[...] I had to believe in myself—my whole life just like everybody else I'd been in danger—but now, in order to leave, I had the delirious responsibility of having to know it.

The room was so different from the rest of the apartment that going in there was as if I had first left my house and slammed the door. The room was the opposite of what I'd created in my home, the opposite of the soft beauty I'd made from my talent for arrangement, my talent for living, the opposite of my serene irony, of my sweet and absentminded irony: it was a violation of my quotation marks, the quotation marks that made me a citation of myself. The room was the portrait of an empty stomach.

At the breakfast table I was framed by my white robe, my clean and well-sculpted face, and a simple body. I exuded the kind of goodness that comes from indulging one's own pleasures and those of others. I ate delicately what was mine, and delicately wiped my mouth with the napkin.

This her, G.H. in the leather of her suitcases, was I: is it I—still? No. I immediately figure that the hardest thing my vanity will have to face is the judgment of myself: I'll have every appearance of a failure, and only I will know if that was the failure I needed.

Is photography the picture of a hollow, of a lack, of an absence?

There's a bad taste to the disorder of love.

Maybe it was that tone of pre-climax that I saw in the smiling haunted photograph of a face whose word is an inexpressive silence, every picture of a person is a picture of Mona Lisa.

Perhaps I was in some kind of rush to live everything there was to live all at once so I'd have time left over to... to live without facts? to live. Early on I satisfied the duties of my senses, early and quickly I had my sorrows and joys—in order to be quickly freed from my minor human destiny? and be free to go in search of my tragedy.

My tragedy was somewhere. Where was my greater destiny? one that wasn't just the story of my life. Tragedy—which is the greatest adventure—would never happen to me.

Sometimes, looking at a snapshot taken on the beach or at a party, I noted with light ironic dread what that smiling, darkened face revealed to me: a silence. A silence and a destiny that escaped me, I, hieroglyphic fragment of an empire dead or alive. Looking at the picture I saw the mystery. No. I'm going to lose the rest of my fear of bad taste, I'm going to begin my exercise in courage, courage isn't being alive, knowing that you're alive is courage—and say that in my photograph I saw The Mystery. The surprise crept up gently, I'm only realizing now that it was the surprise that was creeping up upon me: for in those beaming eyes there was a silence that I'd only seen in lakes, and that I'd only heard in silence itself.

I'd never then imagined that one day I'd go off to encounter that silence. To the shattering of the silence. I glanced at the photographed face and, for a second, in that inexpressive face the world peered back at me just as inexpressive. Was that—just that—my closest contact with myself? the greatest mute depth I could reach, my blindest and most direct link with the world.

What I probably asked for and finally got, left me needy as a child wandering the earth alone. So needy that only the love of the entire universe for me could console me and overwhelm me, only a love that trembled the very egg-cell of things with what I am calling a love. With what I can really only call but without knowing its name.

Could what I saw have been love? But what love is as blind as that of an egg-cell? was that it? that horror, was that love?

Helpless, I give you everything—so you can make a joyous thing of it. Will speaking to you scare you and make me lose you? but if I don't speak I'll be lost, and in losing myself lose you.

For now I am inventing your presence, just as one day I won't know how to risk dying alone, dying is the greatest risk of all, I won't know how to enter death and take the first step into the first absence of me—just as in this last and so primary hour I shall invent your unknown presence and with you shall begin to die until I learn all by myself not to exist, and then I shall let you go. For now I cling to you, and your unknown and warm life is my only intimate organization, I who without your hand would feel set loose into the enormous vastness I discovered.

Listen, I'm going to have to speak because I don't know what to do with having lived. Even worse: I don't want what I saw. What I saw smashes my daily life. Sorry for giving you this, I'd much rather have seen something better. Take what I saw, deliver me from my useless vision, and from my useless sin.

- 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

- 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

- 10/10

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.



The passion according to G.H.

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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