Name: Água Viva
Rating: 4.265432098765432 (81 reviews)
ISBN: 9780811219907

Clarice Lispector

Benjamin Moser

Stefan Tobler

Lispector at her most philosophically radical.

Água Viva

maia

I know you all over because I have lived you all over.

smile??

Alma

I am before, I am almost, I am never. And all of this I won when I stopped loving you.

Dora Tominic

My secret body tells you: dinosaurs, ichthyosaurs, and pleisosaurs, meaning nothing but their sound, though this doesn't dry them out like straw but moistens them instead.

The day seems like the smooth stretched skin of a fruit that in a small catastrophe the teeth tear, its liquor drains. I'm afraid of the accursed Sunday that liquidifies me.

dima

the manuscript seems to capture an everyday voice utterly unrefined by literary or fictional artifice.

Loud Object's direct and confessional tone, the sense it offers of Clarice's unfiltered conversational voiceshe frequently pauses to answer the phone, light a cigarette, or pour herself a drink of water—can distract the reader from the reality that it, too, is a fiction.

She apparently did not like the truth enough to refrain from retouching it in the second draft.

It does not particularly matter whether Clarice took her newspaper articles and stitched them into a manuscript or whether she plundered a manuscript for material for her jour- nalism. Yet the two conficting explanations emphasize that in Loud Object she is still wrestling, and somewhat guiltily, with fictionalization.

As she writes in Loud Object, "Art is not purity: it is purification. Art is not liberty: it is liberation.”

"The foreignness of her prose is one of the most overwhelming facts of our literary history, and even of the history of our language,"

The punctuation I employed in the book is not accidental and does not result from an ignorance of the rules of grammar. You will agree that the elementary principles of punctuation are taught in every school. I am fully aware of the reasons that led me to choose this punctuation and insist that it be respected.

Clarice Lispector's weird word choices, strange syntax, and lack of interest in conventional grammar produces sentences—often fragments of sentences—that veer toward abstraction without ever quite reaching it. Her goal, mystical as well as artistic, was to rearrange conventional language to find meaning—never to discard it completely.

In Agua Viva, Clarice pushed her language as far as it could go without risking incoherence. 

 "This is not a book because this is not how one writes, she announces at the beginning. It does not, in fact, resemble anything written at the time, in Brazil or anywhere else. Its closest cousins are visual or musical,

As Borelli understood, this'spineless" writing is not random, or even abstract. Instead, its consistency more properly belongs to the realm of dreams, in which ideas and images connect with a logic that may not be immediately apparent but is nonetheless real. This was the writing Clarice described when she wrote in The Foreign Legion,"In painting as in music and literature, what is called abstract so often seems to me the figurative of a more delicate and more difficult reality, less visible to the naked eye.”

In Água Viva she would discover a means of writing about herself and that "delicate and more difficult reality" in a way that transformed her individual experience into a universal poetry.

Am I one of the weak? A weak woman possessed by incessant and mad rhythm? if I were solid and strong would I even have heard the rhythm? I find no answer: I am. This is all that comes to me from life. But what am l? the answer is just: what am I. Though I sometimes scream: lI no longer want to be l! but I stick to myself and inextricably there forms a tessitura of life.

Who will come to gather the fruit of my life? If not you and I myself? Why is it that things an instant before they happen already seem to have happened? It's because of the simultaneity of time. And so ask you questions and these will be many. Because I am a question.

There's a love song monotonously the lament I make my own: why do I Love you if you don't return my love? I send messengers in vain: when I greet you you hide your face from me: why do I love you if you don't even notice me? 

 gives the strongest impression of having been spontaneously committed to paper. Yet perhaps none was as painstakingly composed.

En el vibrante mundo de la melancolía, encontré palabras para cuestionar la vida.

Una lectura en movimiento como las aves volando y las rocas rodando a la orilla del río.

Soneto de Otoño

En el vibrante mundo de la melancolía, encontré palabras para cuestionar la vida.
Una lectura en movimiento como las aves volando y las rocas rodando a la orilla del río.




ame 

Through at first nonsensical—though nonetheless beautifully written—passages, Lispector meanders into a perfect depiction of the human experience.

Dália 

gigi

Isn't strange how a book with little to no plot could comfort me in a sense that I feel like someone crawls out the book just to pat my head and tell me that it is okay to slow down?

this is like meditation. this is how I awakened my third eye

SARA

all of lispector's works can be considered avant-garde by modern and contemporary standards: with água viva and the passions according to gh especially so. lispector challenges readers with her unmakeout-able, trance-like, stream of conscious on paper. though, for more coherency, see the apprenticeship or the book of pleasures. 

i especially appreciate her prose as dictation of what my heart desires to share yet cannot find my own words to do so.

soochie

all of lispector's works can be considered avant-garde by modern and contemporary standards: with água viva and the passions according to gh especially so. lispector challenges readers with her unmakeout-able, trance-like, stream of conscious on paper. though, for more coherency, see the apprenticeship or the book of pleasures. 

i especially appreciate her prose as dictation of what my heart desires to share yet cannot find my own words to do so.

“when i think of what i already lived through it seems to me i was shedding my bodies along the paths.”

- a series of short and meditative "instants" (as the author describes them) about living, writing, creating, loving, thinking, and, most of all, time. esp. living in the present and immortalizing it

- i like to describe àgua viva as the clarice lispector sample platter: sort of a mixing bowl of all of her most unique traits as a writer in a very short (88 pages) package. because of this, àgua viva is my personal recommended starting point for clarice’s body of work, as you can read this book in a short amount of time and draw a solid conclusion on if the rest of her writing is worth your time or not

- another reason this is such a great introduction to clarice as a writer is because of.... well, the introduction (at least in the new directions edition, which is what i have). since this was my first full read from clarice, the introduction taught me so much about her reputation with bending the rules of language and sentence structure

- not to contradict myself, but i have to admit this is my least favorite book i’ve read from clarice so far. this isn’t saying much though: àgua viva is still an incredible read, just not quite at the same level as the other three i’ve read

- the narrator’s discussion of time is, to me, a little boring? and i just prefer the themes from her other books

- àgua viva is also her most abstract and fragmented book, which makes it hard for me to really be invested in the character and her narration the same way i am with her other novels

- i really enjoy the narrator in àgua viva, and i really wish i got to learn more about her. similar to some of clarice lispector’s other protagonist’s (namely g.h.), you can tell she is recovering from some big Event with a capital E. she’s often addressing a person (usually in second person) that she loved and lost in some significant way. there are some really beautiful paragraphs in àgua viva that kinda graze over this, but i wanted this conflict to take more of the spotlight

- “when i think of what i already lived through it seems to me i was shedding my bodies along the paths.” (p.66)

- a series of short and meditative "instants" (as the author describes them) about living, writing, creating, loving, thinking, and, most of all, time. esp. living in the present and immortalizing it

- i like to describe àgua viva as the clarice lispector sample platter: sort of a mixing bowl of all of her most unique traits as a writer in a very short (88 pages) package. because of this, àgua viva is my personal recommended starting point for clarice’s body of work, as you can read this book in a short amount of time and draw a solid conclusion on if the rest of her writing is worth your time or not

- another reason this is such a great introduction to clarice as a writer is because of.... well, the introduction (at least in the new directions edition, which is what i have). since this was my first full read from clarice, the introduction taught me so much about her reputation with bending the rules of language and sentence structure

- not to contradict myself, but i have to admit this is my least favorite book i’ve read from clarice so far. this isn’t saying much though: àgua viva is still an incredible read, just not quite at the same level as the other three i’ve read

- the narrator’s discussion of time is, to me, a little boring? and i just prefer the themes from her other books

- àgua viva is also her most abstract and fragmented book, which makes it hard for me to really be invested in the character and her narration the same way i am with her other novels

- i really enjoy the narrator in àgua viva, and i really wish i got to learn more about her. similar to some of clarice lispector’s other protagonist’s (namely g.h.), you can tell she is recovering from some big Event with a capital E. she’s often addressing a person (usually in second person) that she loved and lost in some significant way. there are some really beautiful paragraphs in àgua viva that kinda graze over this, but i wanted this conflict to take more of the spotlight

Paradoxalmente, me encontro sem palavras, para descrever um livro que sinto que me deu minhas palavras de volta. Finalizei esse livro sabendo nunca mais serei a mesma. 

Larissa Campos

Paradoxalmente, me encontro sem palavras, para descrever um livro que sinto que me deu minhas palavras de volta. Finalizei esse livro sabendo nunca mais serei a mesma. 



FIRST READ: didn’t like it as much as i thought…i think because her work is so internal it may come off as cringe sometimes. i guess im in that stage of life where i dont respond to her work that well. let me read this again when i have a crush on someone lol

SECOND READ: rereading it now that i have a crush on someone and FUCKKK. i get it now

Patricia K

FIRST READ: didn’t like it as much as i thought…i think because her work is so internal it may come off as cringe sometimes. i guess im in that stage of life where i dont respond to her work that well. let me read this again when i have a crush on someone lol

SECOND READ: rereading it now that i have a crush on someone and FUCKKK. i get it now

personal copy

Clarice lê-se para se sentir. A sinceridade da sua prosa e a liberdade com que usa e abusa das palavras para explicar sentimentos, pensamentos, gestos, ..., são o que tornam este livro tão especial. Se há alguém no mundo que me compreende, que descreve, palavra por palavra, o que sinto, é ela. 

Cada livro dela é único, diferente, uma experiência por si só. Água Viva é dolorosamente curto, mas reconforto-me em saber que ele existe para lá do tempo; que, apesar de já estar escrito e terminado com ponto final, a fluidez do pensamento e do que ele transmite transcende o passado, presente e futuro juntos. Belíssimo.  

Um adendo: Durante todo o livro, Clarice fala do “instante-já”, do “momento único”,… Enfim, algo que seja permanente no presente, nem antes, nem depois. E todo o livro possui essa mesma sensação de permanência, eu diria; ele existe por si só no tempo em que criou, num universo onde não existe nem passado, nem presente, nem futuro; afinal se o tempo foi construído pelo Homem também por ele pode ser desconstruído. Já no final do livro Clarice refere este mesmo desejo de querer que o livro continue, para lá do ponto final. E ele continua, pelo menos, eu imagino-o assim; é um livro que existe, que respira, que é tão fluído quanto o pensamento: é Água Viva.

dyonisos.

Clarice lê-se para se sentir. A sinceridade da sua prosa e a liberdade com que usa e abusa das palavras para explicar sentimentos, pensamentos, gestos, ..., são o que tornam este livro tão especial. Se há alguém no mundo que me compreende, que descreve, palavra por palavra, o que sinto, é ela. 

Cada livro dela é único, diferente, uma experiência por si só. Água Viva é dolorosamente curto, mas reconforto-me em saber que ele existe para lá do tempo; que, apesar de já estar escrito e terminado com ponto final, a fluidez do pensamento e do que ele transmite transcende o passado, presente e futuro juntos. Belíssimo.  

Um adendo: Durante todo o livro, Clarice fala do “instante-já”, do “momento único”,… Enfim, algo que seja permanente no presente, nem antes, nem depois. E todo o livro possui essa mesma sensação de permanência, eu diria; ele existe por si só no tempo em que criou, num universo onde não existe nem passado, nem presente, nem futuro; afinal se o tempo foi construído pelo Homem também por ele pode ser desconstruído. Já no final do livro Clarice refere este mesmo desejo de querer que o livro continue, para lá do ponto final. E ele continua, pelo menos, eu imagino-o assim; é um livro que existe, que respira, que é tão fluído quanto o pensamento: é Água Viva.

thoughts and feelings written down are incredibly vulnerable yet so beautiful

ryan

“Only the act of love—the limpid star-like abstraction of feeling—captures the unknown moment, the instant hard as crystal and vibrating in the air and life is this untellable instant, larger than the event itself: during love the impersonal jewel of the moment shines in the air, the strange glory of the body, matter made feeling in the trembling of the instants—and the feeling is both immaterial and so objective that it seems to happen outside your body, sparkling on high, joy, joy is time’s material and the essence of the instant.”

In Água Viva, there is no order—only the transcendental nakedness of thought. A meditation without anchor, a narrative that dares to name the unnameable. This is a dialogue with the self, unfolding in fragments, pauses, and sudden illuminations, as if consciousness itself were speaking aloud with no need to justify its leaps. Every line feels on the edge of revelation, trembling with an intensity that refuses closure.

Reading this feels like slipping underneath language into the silence it tries to hold. This book is definitely a hallmark of Lispector's fearless dismantling of form. Água Viva is a living text that is not meant to be understood in the traditional sense.

Rien

“Only the act of love—the limpid star-like abstraction of feeling—captures the unknown moment, the instant hard as crystal and vibrating in the air and life is this untellable instant, larger than the event itself: during love the impersonal jewel of the moment shines in the air, the strange glory of the body, matter made feeling in the trembling of the instants—and the feeling is both immaterial and so objective that it seems to happen outside your body, sparkling on high, joy, joy is time’s material and the essence of the instant.”

In Água Viva, there is no order—only the transcendental nakedness of thought. A meditation without anchor, a narrative that dares to name the unnameable. This is a dialogue with the self, unfolding in fragments, pauses, and sudden illuminations, as if consciousness itself were speaking aloud with no need to justify its leaps. Every line feels on the edge of revelation, trembling with an intensity that refuses closure.

Reading this feels like slipping underneath language into the silence it tries to hold. This book is definitely a hallmark of Lispector's fearless dismantling of form. Água Viva is a living text that is not meant to be understood in the traditional sense.

“feeling”— that’s the closest i can get to describing this book. reading it felt like being inside someone’s raw, unfiltered thoughts. there’s no clear plot, no characters in the traditional sense, but somehow it speaks so deeply. i didn’t always understand it, but i 𝘧𝘦𝘭𝘵 it.

lispector’s words flow like music and art: abstract, poetic, and yet strangely comforting. she captures emotion and consciousness in such an intimate way that it feels like she’s talking directly to you, or even to a part of yourself you didn’t know was listening.

i loved the way she writes. it’s experimental but never cold; her language has warmth. it’s beautiful and alive. even in the confusion, there’s clarity. even in the fragments, there's connection.

agua viva isn’t a book i’ll ever fully explain. but i know it touched me. it’s the kind of book you feel more than understand, and that’s exactly why it stayed with me.

“feeling”— that’s the closest i can get to describing this book. reading it felt like being inside someone’s raw, unfiltered thoughts. there’s no clear plot, no characters in the traditional sense, but somehow it speaks so deeply. i didn’t always understand it, but i 𝘧𝘦𝘭𝘵 it.

lispector’s words flow like music and art: abstract, poetic, and yet strangely comforting. she captures emotion and consciousness in such an intimate way that it feels like she’s talking directly to you, or even to a part of yourself you didn’t know was listening.

i loved the way she writes. it’s experimental but never cold; her language has warmth. it’s beautiful and alive. even in the confusion, there’s clarity. even in the fragments, there's connection.

agua viva isn’t a book i’ll ever fully explain. but i know it touched me. it’s the kind of book you feel more than understand, and that’s exactly why it stayed with me.

the immediacy of the prose is disconcerting to me. im as latin for "not" and media as latin for "middle". i wanted to like this a lot as a whole but i found it grating to read, despite how earnestly it is written. there are some great lines in there and honestly this is a great exercise in style, but this just isnt for me. i do have to say that it is excellently written. not verbose and despite its stream-of-consciousness style, lispector takes great care to pause and breathe and ramble and pause and do it over and over again

i do appreciate the central message of the book: NEVER KILL YOURSELF! lispector's treatise is a deeply buddhist text, without the asceticism. take a sip from the water of life (agua viva) go for a stroll. experience life as it is. 

where i went wrong is probably in my strategy to read the book. i had wanted to use this as a breather almost, a companion to the dry and academic deluge by tooze that i tried to read concurrently. i suspect that if the reader commits 1-2 hours to this and really sit down with it, the experience will be far more positive. instead, i was pulled in and out of this work abruptly as i read this on my commutes

also this is ~80 pages too, so not a large commitment

Ghee

the immediacy of the prose is disconcerting to me. im as latin for "not" and media as latin for "middle". i wanted to like this a lot as a whole but i found it grating to read, despite how earnestly it is written. there are some great lines in there and honestly this is a great exercise in style, but this just isnt for me. i do have to say that it is excellently written. not verbose and despite its stream-of-consciousness style, lispector takes great care to pause and breathe and ramble and pause and do it over and over again

i do appreciate the central message of the book: NEVER KILL YOURSELF! lispector's treatise is a deeply buddhist text, without the asceticism. take a sip from the water of life (agua viva) go for a stroll. experience life as it is. 

where i went wrong is probably in my strategy to read the book. i had wanted to use this as a breather almost, a companion to the dry and academic deluge by tooze that i tried to read concurrently. i suspect that if the reader commits 1-2 hours to this and really sit down with it, the experience will be far more positive. instead, i was pulled in and out of this work abruptly as i read this on my commutes

also this is ~80 pages too, so not a large commitment

caótico, simplemente bello. nueva autora favorita.

ivanna

Saffy

Rocío de la Hera

Es una novela acuática, que fluye, calma como un río, pero potente como un mar bravo. Breve, juega con los límites de las palabras y las emociones.

"My candour was crushed underfoot by you. You didn’t love me, only I know that. I was alone. Yours alone. I write to no one and a riff is being made that doesn’t exist. I unglued myself from me." 

mari

“my essence is unconscious of itself and that’s why i obey myself blindly”

akelo 

i ❤️ vulnerable female writers (they just like me fr) 

unserious review cuz i need to go to sleep byeeeeee

i ❤️ vulnerable female writers (they just like me fr) 

unserious review cuz i need to go to sleep byeeeeee

(if you know you know) i'm convinced lispector wrote this book for us 12th house placements girlies. unbelievable, impeccable book. extremely goated writer...5 stars is not enough. this has become my favorite book of all time.  what can't she do man!!!!! i love you ma'am clarice lispector. 

nandi

"La creación se me escapa. Y no quiero saber tanto. Me basta con que el corazón me lata en el pecho."

Because there is a logic in life, in events, as there is in a book. They follow one another, they must. Since if I took a fragment and wanted to move it further ahead, there wouldn't be anywhere to put it. It was like a puzzle. I took all the fragments and collected them, kept them in an envelope. On the back of a check, a piece of paper, a napkin... I still have some of those things at home, and some of them still even smell of her lipstick. She would wipe her lips and then stick it in her purse... Suddenly she noted something down. After collecting all those fragments, I started to note, to number them. So it's not difficult to structure Clarice, or it's infinitely difficult, unless you commune with her and already are in the habit of reading her.

Only the act of love—the limpid star-like abstraction of feeling—captures the unknown moment, the instant hard as crystal and vibrating in the air and life is this untellable instant, larger than the event itself: during love the impersonal jewel of the moment shines in the air, the strange glory of the body, matter made feeling in the trembling of the instants—and the feeling is both immaterial and so objective that it seems to happen outside your body, sparkling on high, joy, joy is time's material and the essence of the instant.

I know that my phrases are crude, I write them with too much love, and that love makes up for their faults, but too much love is bad for the work. This isn't a book because this isn't how anyone writes. Is what I write a single climax? My days are a single climax: I live on the edge.

The secret harmony of disharmony: I don't want something already made but something still being tortuously made. My unbalanced words are the wealth of my silence. I write in acrobatics and pirouettes in the air—I write because I so deeply want to speak. Though writing only gives me the full measure of silence.

I'm entering a very new and genuine chapter, curious about itself, so appealing and personal that I can't paint it or write it. It's like moments I had with you, when I would love you, moments I couldn't go past because I descended into their depths. It's a state of touching the surrounded energy and I shudder. Some mad, mad harmony.

I want to write to you like someone learning. I photograph each instant. I deepen the words as if I were painting, more than an object, its shadow. I don't want to ask why, you can always ask why and always get no answer—could I manage to surrender to the expectant silence that follows a question without an answer? Though I sense that some place or time the great answer for me does exist.

[...] where do the echoes of Sunday come from? I who loathe Sunday because it's hollow. I, who want the most primary thing because it's the source of generation—I who long to drink water at the source of the spring—I who am all of this, must by fate and tragic destiny only know and taste the echoes of me, because I cannot capture the me itself.

I plunge into the almost pain of an intense happiness—and to adorn me leaves and branches spring up in my hair.

I am rudely alive. I am leaving—says death without adding that he's taking me along. And I shiver in panting breath because I must go with him. I am death. Death takes place in my very being—how can I explain it to you? It's a sensual death.

I write to you because I don't understand myself.

And I am haunted by my ghosts, by all that is mythic, fantastic and gigantic: life is supernatural. I walk holding an open umbrella upon a tightrope. I walk to the limit of my great dream. I see the fury of the visceral impulses: tortured viscera guide me. I don't like what I just wrote—but I'm duty-bound to accept the whole section because it happened to me. And I have much respect for what I happen to myself. My essence is unconscious of itself and that's why I obey myself blindly.

What is there between never and ever that links them so indirectly and intimately?

I am making myself. I make myself until I reach the pit.

[...] why do I love you if you don't return my love? I send messages in vain; when I greet you you hide your face from me; why do I love you if you don't even notice me?

I want to be buried with the watch on my wrist so that in the earth something can pulse time.

I want to die with life. I swear that I shall only die profiting from the last instant. There is a profound prayer within me that will be born I don't know when. I would so like to die of health. Like someone exploding. Éclater is better: jéclate. For now there's dialogue with you. Then it will be monologue. Then the silence. I know that there will be an order.

What beautiful music I can hear in the depths of me.

What am I doing in writing to you? trying to photograph perfume.

I'm writing you this facsimile of a book, the book of someone who doesn't know how to write; but that's because in the lightest realm of speaking I almost don't know how to speak. Particularly speaking to you in writing, I who got used to your being the audience, however distracted, of my voice. When I paint I respect the material I use, I respect its primordial fate. So when I write you I respect the syllables.

Perhaps I'll go back to the typewriter or perhaps I'll stop right here forever. I, who am never good enough.

My voice falls into the abyss of your silence. You read me in silence. But in this unlimited silent field I unfurl my wings, free to live. So I accept the worst and enter the core of death and that is why I'm alive.

One day you said you loved me. I pretend to believe it and live, from day to day, in joyful love. But remembering with longing is like saying farewell once again.

To live this life is more an indirect remembering than a direct living.

[...] each thing that happens to me I live it here by noting it down. Because I want to feel in my probing hands the living and quivering nerve of the today.

My frightened truth is that I was always yours alone and didn't know it. Now I know: I'm alone. I an my freedom that I didn't know how to use. Great responsibility of solitude. Whoever isn't lost doesn't know freedom and love it. as for me, I own up to my solitude that sometimes falls into ecstasy as before fireworks. I am alone and must live a certain intimate glory that in solitude can become pain.

We will meet this afternoon. And I won't even talk to you about this that I'm writing and which contains what I am and which I give to you as a present though you won't read it. You will never read what I'm writing. And when I've noted down my secret of being—I shall throw it away as if into the sea. I'm writing you because you can't accept what I am. When I destroy my notes on the instants, will I return to my nothing from which I extracted an everything? I must pay the price. The price of someone who has a past that is only renewed with passion in the strange present. When I think of what I already lived through it seems to me I was shedding my bodies along the paths.

I want to have the freedom to say unconnected things as a deep way of touching you. [...]

But what can I do if you are not touched by my defects, whereas I loved yours. My candour was crushed underfoot by you. You didn't love me, only I know that. I was alone. Yours alone. I write to no one and a riff is being made that doesn't exist. I unglued myself from me.

I am being joyful in this very instant because I refuse to be defeated: so I love.

Everything comes to an end but what I'm writing to you goes on. Which is good, very good. The best is not yet written. The best is between the lines.

Água Viva

Reviews

Highlights

Join the club