Name: smile??'s review of A Breath of Life by Clarice Lispector
Item: A Breath of Life
Rating: 4.5
Author: smile??

Clarice Lispector

Benjamin Moser

Johnny Lorenz

"A mystical mediation on creation and death in which a man (a thinly disguised Clarice Lispector) infuses the "breath of life" into his creation [and] forms a dialogue between the god-like author and the speaking, breathing, dying creature herself: Angela Pralini"--P. [4] of cover.

A Breath of Life

smile??

Suffering for a being deepens the heart within the heart.

I'm impersonal even in friendship, even in love. I'm an Anonymous Society. An open parenthesis. Please close me.

I read what I'd written and thought once again: from what violent chasms is my most intimate intimacy nourished, why does it deny itself so much and flee to the domain of ideas? I feel within me a subterranean violence, a violence that only comes to the surface during the act of writing.

Writing can drive a person mad. You must lead a serene life, well appointed, middle class. If you don't the madness comes. It's dangerous. You must shut your mouth and say nothing about what you know and what you know is so much, and is so glorious.

reminds me of that one quote at the start of part 3 in never let me go

When I'm alone for a long time, I suddenly don't recognize myself and I frighten myself and get chills all over.

I think I still haven't fallen into the monotony of living.

one of my favorite paragraphs... in any book? ever? this book talks so much about solitude and loneliness and struggling to "know" yourself, to know how to live, and (50 pages in) this feels like the peak of that narrator's spiral.

I try to keep myself isolated from the agony of depending on others, and that agony that seems to them a game of life and death masks another reality, a truth so extraordinary that they would keel over in fright were they to face it, as in a scandal. Meanwhile, they're studying, working, loving, growing up, struggling, feeling happy, feeling sad. Life with a capital letter can give me nothing because I'm going to confess that I too must have turned down a dead-end alley just like the others. For I notice in myself, not a pile of facts, and instead strive almost tragically to be. It's a question of survival like eating human flesh when there's no other food. I struggle not against people who buy and sell apartments and cars and try to get married and have children but I struggle with extreme anxiety for a novelty of spirit.

[...] I scream: I feel, I suffer, I am happy, I am moved. Only my enigma interests me. More than anything, I search for myself in the great void.

Angela is the vibrating tremor of a tense harp-string after it's been plucked: she stays in the air still saying, saying—until the vibration dies spreading out in froth across the sands. Afterwards—silence and stars. I know Angela's body by heart. I just didn't understand what she wants. But I gave her such shape to my life that she seems more real to me than I do.

The funniest thing is that I never learned how to live. I don't know anything. All I know is how to go on living.

To write I begin by stripping myself of words. I prefer the poor words left over.

When I think, I ruin everything. that's why I avoid thinking: all I really do is go on going on.

I have to be my friend or else I can't bear the solitude.

I love you as much as if I were always bidding you farewell.

Living is an act I did not premeditate. I blossomed from the dark.

I'm no more than a comma in life. I who am a colon. Thou, thou art my exclamation. I breathe myself thee.

I feel as though I've already secretly achieved what I wanted and I still don't know what I achieved. Could that be the somewhat dubious and elusive thing vaguely called "experience"?

so many questions... what does this say about how the narrator views angela? is this him talking down to her? why is the first sentence formed as a question and the second as a sentence? not even a sentence, but interrupted?

Maybe I created Angela in order to have a dialogue with myself? I invented Angela because I need to invent myself—

much like some of the paragraphs i had highlighted in 

 (especially the one from page 92), i think this passage gives a lot of insight of what the rest of the book is really trying to tell you. do i know what it means though? not fully. i do still have 100 pages left at the time of writing this though

How far do I go and where do I already start to be Angel? Are we fruit of the same tree? No—Angela is everything I wanted to be and never was. What is she? she's the waves of the sea. While I'm the dense and gloomy forest. I'm in the depths. Angela scatters into sparkling fragments. Angela is my vertigo. Angel is my reverberation, being an emanation of mine, she is I. I, the author: the unknown. It's by mere coincidence that I am I. Angela seems like something intimate that became exteriorized. Angela is not a "character." She's the evolution of a feeling. She's an idea incarnated in the being. In the beginning there was only an idea. Then the word came into contact with the idea. And then the word was no longer mine: it transcended me, it was everyone's, it was Angela's.

We are all sentenced to death. While I write I might die. One day I shall die amidst random facts.

Her world is only as unreal as the life of anyone who happens to read me.

- clarice at her strangest and most abstract (based on the four i've read so far). so many questions about the relationship between angela and the author and how the author's perception of angela changes throughout the book... this was hard to get a grip on at times

- i will admit, i think there are statements being made about gender and the changing perception of women that might've gone over my head in this first read through. i wasn't sure what the takeaway was supposed to be about how the writer was sometimes a man and sometimes clarice herself, and how the writer's opinion + demands of angela were constantly shifting

- your interest in angela as an entity and as a thing being born and growing will very likely determine whether or not you like this book. angela is the WHOLE book, and the more i've thought about it the more beautiful that is... like, a book that i expected to be about dying is mostly focused on the birth and growth of a woman. not sure if that was clarice herself making that choice, or the editors who put this together, but either way my GOD what a stellar direction for this book to go in

- considered this my least favorite from lispector for a while but now it's impossible to say. the more i think about this one, the better it gets. unlike some of my other favorites from clarice, a breath of life lives and speaks to you beyond the pages themselves... it's kind of magical that way

- for the record, a breath of life is NOT a good starting point for clarice. it's kind of weird that new directions publishing doesn't put more emphasis on the fact that this is her final (and unfinished) novel, because that's a very important piece of context and definitely influences your experience of the novel. if you go into a breath of life knowing it is the ending of clarice's body of work, and basically her final words to her audience, then you will enjoy it MUCH more

- clarice at her strangest and most abstract (based on the four i've read so far). so many questions about the relationship between angela and the author and how the author's perception of angela changes throughout the book... this was hard to get a grip on at times

- i will admit, i think there are statements being made about gender and the changing perception of women that might've gone over my head in this first read through. i wasn't sure what the takeaway was supposed to be about how the writer was sometimes a man and sometimes clarice herself, and how the writer's opinion + demands of angela were constantly shifting

- your interest in angela as an entity and as a thing being born and growing will very likely determine whether or not you like this book. angela is the WHOLE book, and the more i've thought about it the more beautiful that is... like, a book that i expected to be about dying is mostly focused on the birth and growth of a woman. not sure if that was clarice herself making that choice, or the editors who put this together, but either way my GOD what a stellar direction for this book to go in

- considered this my least favorite from lispector for a while but now it's impossible to say. the more i think about this one, the better it gets. unlike some of my other favorites from clarice, a breath of life lives and speaks to you beyond the pages themselves... it's kind of magical that way

- for the record, a breath of life is NOT a good starting point for clarice. it's kind of weird that new directions publishing doesn't put more emphasis on the fact that this is her final (and unfinished) novel, because that's a very important piece of context and definitely influences your experience of the novel. if you go into a breath of life knowing it is the ending of clarice's body of work, and basically her final words to her audience, then you will enjoy it MUCH more

“I don’t want to be only myself. I also want to be what I am not.” / “I want to re-inaugurate myself. And for that I’ll have to renounce my whole body of work and begin humbly, without deificaton, from a beginning in which there are no traces of any habit, foibles or abilities.” / “Angela, as I create you, I taste blood in my mouth.”

a meditation to the make-up of existence (creation v. creator, nature, language, organisms, culture, the void in the act of writing, escapism through another); not without its failings, exactly what you would expect from a philosophical fiction

shen

“I don’t want to be only myself. I also want to be what I am not.” / “I want to re-inaugurate myself. And for that I’ll have to renounce my whole body of work and begin humbly, without deificaton, from a beginning in which there are no traces of any habit, foibles or abilities.” / “Angela, as I create you, I taste blood in my mouth.”

a meditation to the make-up of existence (creation v. creator, nature, language, organisms, culture, the void in the act of writing, escapism through another); not without its failings, exactly what you would expect from a philosophical fiction

4.5 ⭐

a difficult text to read but mad. insane. genius. wise. existential. philosophical. brilliant. powerful.

jess

the perfusion, the justification, the separation, the acceptance, the reluctance - of a duality of human. occasionally we are Angela, a character full of luminescence, of life, of embracing as a whole, and some days we are the author, the exact opposite, the very slap-back-to-reality; sanctity of fatal darkness. some days we lie between both side of the spectrum, some days we exist as one. it is a book to read when you're ready to receive intensity; a dialogue of death and particulars, a crossing of two inextricable creations: author and text. she writes narrative epiphany, and you're carried; either in acceptance, or in reluctance; it affects you inevitably.

Wynter

- The book is obviously written by a dying person as reflection of life, which makes it hard for a reader like me, who lacks worldly experience to relate to it.
- The book has no plot, it is a book about nothing. instead, the narrative is pure stream of consciousness about feelings and associations.
- There is some interesting gender confusion when it comes to narrator. The "author" is implied to be a man, but Lispector's own voice sometimes breaks through and occasional feminine pronouns are used.
- I really liked "The Jewel" part, where Angela draws associations between precious stones and emotions. 
- The author states in the beginning, quite straight-forward, that the book is not for everyone to enjoy. In fact it was specifically written very confusing and full of personal references to weed out curious onlookers. Only selected few are supposed to really "get it". 
- I'm gonna be honest about it - I didn't get it. 
- I wonder why the New Directions editors elected to publish this book second in the series, since logically it should come forth and last.

Aksara

marceline

Alana Matheus de Jesus Andrade 

ella amani

Mikee

aemouh

mik 

alexis

Elena Kuran

Teddy Calavera

Vladimir

Jessie Kronke

Alithea

Gustav Vallin

The people I love, in my experience, always end up loving one another.

a passage in the introduction about clarice's mother, and the context in which clarice was born into

[...] in that period of war, starvation, and racial persecution, her mother had been raped in a pogrom by Russian soldiers, and that she had consequentially contracted syphilis, which was then incurable.

According to the folk superstitions of the remote area where they lived, a woman with syphilis could be cured by pregnancy. And so that's what her parents did.

The result of this attempt to save her mother was Clarice Lispector herself. For her mother, however, the pregnancy cured nothing. And Clarice, for the first nine years of her life, was forced to watch her mother agonizing, paralyzed, exiled, dying.

Feeling the guilt of having failed in her attempt to cure her mother, the girl started telling stories in which an angel, a saint, a god, came to cure her. These stories failed.

The tragedy is the origin of one of the twentieth century's greatest writers. And until the very end of her life—until 

—she never lost the hope of repairing the world through mystic means.

from the introduction. some of clarice's last words before she died

"Let's pretend that we're not going to the hospital, that I'm not sick, and that we're going to Paris."

[...] Needless to say, she never went to Paris: she died six weeks later.

I write as if to save somebody's life. Probably my own. Life is a kind of madness that death makes. Long live the dead because we live in them.

Today is today. I'm stunned and at the same time suspicious that I've been given so much. And tomorrow I shall once again have a today.

I wanted to write a book. But where are the words? all the meanings have been exhausted.

To know when to quit. Whether to give up—this is often the question facing the gambler. No one is taught the art of walking away. And the anguish of deciding if I should keep playing is hardly unusual. Will I be able to quit honorably? or am I the type who waits stubbornly for something to happen? something like, for instance, the end of the world? or whatever it might be, maybe my own sudden death, in which case my decision to give up would be beside the point.

I'm afraid to write. It's so dangerous. Anyone who's tried knows.

I want every sentence of this book to be a climax.

I don't make literature: I simply live in the passage of time. The act of writing is the inevitable result of my being alive.

Writing is that search for the intimate truth of life.

Living is magical and wholly inexplicable. I understand death better.

I wonder: why does God demand our love? possible answer: so that we might love ourselves and in loving ourselves, forgive ourselves. And how we need forgiveness. Because life itself already comes muddled with error.

[...] solitude, the same that exists in every one, makes me invent. And is there another way to be saved? besides creating one's own realities? I have the strength for this like anybody else—isn't it true that we ended up creating a fragile and mad reality that is civilization? this civilization guided only by dreams.

I wanted to initiate an experiment and not just be the victim of an experiment I never authorized, that merely happened.

What is written here, mine or Angela's are the remains of a demolition of soul, they are lateral cuts of a reality that constantly escapes me.

I know t hat this book isn't easy, but it's easy only for those who believe in the mystery. As I write it I do not know myself, I forget myself. The I who appears in this book is not I. It is not autobiographical, you all know nothing of me. I never have told you and never shall tell you who I am. I am all of yourselves.

bit curious about the implications of this later on... not really sure what it's mean to be saying about the dialogue between the writer and angela?

I am making a really bad book on purpose in order to drive off the profane who want to "like". But a small group will see that this "liking is superficial and will enter inside what I am truly writing, which is neither "bad" nor "good."

[...] I am already in the future. This future of mine that shall be for you the past of someone dead. When you have finished this book cry a hallelujah for me. When you close the last page of this frustrated and dauntless and playful book of life then forget me. May God bless you then and this book ends well. That I might at last find respite. May peace be upon us, upon you, and upon me. Am I falling into discourse? may the temple's faithful forgive me: I write and that way rid myself of me and then at last I can rest.

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A Breath of Life by Clarice Lispector

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