Name: smile??'s review of The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector
Item: The Passion According to G.H.
Rating: 5
Author: smile??

Clarice Lispector

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 qualities — and the beautiful ones — about ourselves that must be observed, accepted, and cherished

- this is a big question (perception + identity) that clarice loves to yap about, which makes 

 a perfect follow-up read. takes the same topics and twists them into the rooms of happiness and romance and desire. i am a lover of finding companion reads, and these two novels are excellent examples

- quick storytime: this is the book that made me fall in love with clarice lispector. savannah brown mentions the book very briefly in her video about 

. she only reads a fraction of a paragraph but it was love at first sight. at the time (this was at the start of 2025) i'd never even heard of clarice's name, but when i searched the book and read the first page i knew i had to read everything she'd ever put to paper

- still in my early days of exploring classics, but i'm quite confident in my belief that this IS a masterpiece. i don't see that as my opinion, i see that as an objective fact. like truly if you read this book and your reaction isn't 

wow those were some tremendous paragraphs

, then you need to take a long hard look in the mirror

- if i could only pick one clarice book for every human on earth to read, it would probably be either 

, but if i could convince them to pick up a second book, it would be this one, and that duology (whether it's água viva or an apprenticeship as the first choice) would be life altering

- i think about this book at least twice a day and almost a year has passed since i read it for the first time

- cockroach x human enemies to lovers

- a book about the self, and the selves we find within us and within others. the disgusting qualities — and the beautiful ones — about ourselves that must be observed, accepted, and cherished

- this is a big question (perception + identity) that clarice loves to yap about, which makes an apprenticeship a perfect follow-up read. takes the same topics and twists them into the rooms of happiness and romance and desire. i am a lover of finding companion reads, and these two novels are excellent examples

- quick storytime: this is the book that made me fall in love with clarice lispector. savannah brown mentions the book very briefly in her video about shame. she only reads a fraction of a paragraph but it was love at first sight. at the time (this was at the start of 2025) i'd never even heard of clarice's name, but when i searched the book and read the first page i knew i had to read everything she'd ever put to paper

- still in my early days of exploring classics, but i'm quite confident in my belief that this IS a masterpiece. i don't see that as my opinion, i see that as an objective fact. like truly if you read this book and your reaction isn't wow those were some tremendous paragraphs as a bare minimum, then you need to take a long hard look in the mirror

- if i could only pick one clarice book for every human on earth to read, it would probably be either água viva or an apprenticeship, but if i could convince them to pick up a second book, it would be this one, and that duology (whether it's água viva or an apprenticeship as the first choice) would be life altering

- i think about this book at least twice a day and almost a year has passed since i read it for the first time

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.



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

Alex Noble

I'm searching, I'm searching. I'm trying to understand. Trying to give what I've lived to someone else and I don't know to whom, but I don't want to keep what I lived. I don't know what to do with what I lived, I'm afraid of that profound disorder.

How could I explain that my greatest fear is precisely of: being? and yet there is no other way. How can I explain that my greatest fear is living whatever comes? how to explain that I can't stand seeing, just because life isn't what I thought but something else—as if I knew what!

I don't know if I'll have the courage just to go. It's hard to get lost.

But was I happy while imprisoned? or was there, and there was, something restless and sly in my happy jailhouse routine? or was there, and there was, that throbbing thing I was so used to that I thought that throbbing was being a person.

Maybe all that happened to me was a slow and great dissolution? And that this is my struggle against that disintegration: trying now to give it a form? A form shapes the chaos, a form gives construction to the amorphous substance—the vision of an infinite piece of meat is the vision of the mad, but if I cut that meat into pieces and parcel them out over days and over hungers—then it would no longer be perdition and madness: it would once again be humanized life.

But I'm so little prepared to understand. Before, whenever I tried, my limitations gave me a physical sensation of discomfort, any beginning of thought immediately banged into my forehead. Early on I had to recognize, without complaint, the limits of my small intelligence, and I strayed from the path. I knew I was destined to think little, reasoning kept me confined inside my own skin. So how was I supposed to inaugurate thinking within me now? and maybe only thought can save me. I'm afraid of passion.

This effort I'm making now to let a meaning surface, any meaning, this effort would be easier if I pretended to write to someone.

Each moment of finding is a getting lost.

To learn it again, I would now have to re-die. And knowing might be the murder of my human soul.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

[...] 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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 [...]

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 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.

I remembered you, when I kissed your man face, slow, slowly kissed it, and when the time came to kiss your eyes—I remembered that then I had tasted the salt in my mouth, and that the salt of tears in your eyes was my love for you. But, what bound me most of all in a fight of love, had been, in the depth of the depths of the salt, your saltless and innocent and childish substance: with my kiss your deepest insipid life was given to me, and kissing your face was the saltless and busy patient work of love, it was woman weaving a man, just as you had woven me, neutral crafting of life.

[...] love is much more than love: love is something before love: it's plankton struggling, and the great living neutrality struggling.

one of my favorite paragraphs, and for me this questioning of self and truth and perception is the key to understanding the entire novel. puts g.h.'s fear of the roach's disgusting appearance in a whole new lens

Did it feel inside itself something like what my gaze saw in it? how much did it take advantage of itself and take advantage of what it was? even somehow indirectly, did it know that it crawled? or is crawling something we ourselves don't know is happening? What did I know about whatever it was that others obviously saw in me? how would I know if I went around with my stomach pressed into the dust of the ground. Truth has no witness? being isn't knowing? If a person doesn't look and doesn't see, does the truth exist anyway? The truth that doesn't transmit itself even to those who can see. Is that the secret of being a person?

smile?? &
The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector

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The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector