Clarice Lispector- My New Love

 

Source: Wikipedia

I adore Clarice Lispector.

The Ukrainian-born Brazilian novelist has stolen my heart.

I am having my first reading experience, but suffice it to say it is love at first word.

I started The Passion According to G.H. and much like Proust, I realized that Lispector doesn't allow you to rush through her words.

I am lulled into a mystical experience with her work. I am meeting with a new and different part of myself. 

Her words allow you to sink so deeply into a version of your lived experience that is almost unreachable. 

I emerge from a paragraph only finding myself needing to read it again to see if I can recreate what I felt when I first read it. 

There was a great article in The New Yorker about Clarice Lispector in 2015. Here's a quote from the article that felt very fitting:

What matters is the magnetic love she inspires in those susceptible to her. For them, reading Clarice Lispector is one of the great emotional experiences of their lives. But her glamour is dangerous. “Be careful with Clarice,” a friend told a reader decades ago, using the single name by which she is universally known. “It’s not literature. It’s witchcraft.”

This is how I feel while reading her... spellbound. Entranced.

I feel like I am privy to some secret knowing.

It's like I am aware that a bewitching is taking place and I am here for the journey.

Her oeuvre is extensive if you include her short stories, but I am dedicated to reading every word that she ever wrote.

I will be purchasing most in digital format (true to my minimalist style), but I couldn't help but order the 100 year anniversary edition (of Clarice's birth) of The Hour of the Star. 

I will surely blog my experience while reading it.

100 year edition of The Hour of the Star in hardback

Lispector Novels on my "will purchase soon list"

1. Near to the Wild Heart
2. Aqua Viva
3. The Besieged City
4. The Chandelier
5. The Complete Stories

I am going to get them all digitally and take my time with each one. I want to keep a Lispector novel going in the background of my reading. She provides something to my literary life that I didn't know that I needed.

Consider adding her to your reading life if you are reading to plunge deeply into yourself.

Happy reading my slow living friends.

 Quotes from The Passion According to G.H.

Was that- just that- my closes contact with myself? the greatest mute depth I cold reach, my blindest and most direct link with the world.

The more sincere I was, the more I'd be tempted to praise my occasional bouts of nobility and especially my occasional nastiness.

I respect other people's pleasure, and delicately I consume my own pleasure, tedium nourishes me and delicately consumes me...

What surprised me was that it was a kind of detached hatred, the worst kind: indifferent hatred...

And it was as if that solitude was called glory, and I too knew it was a glory, and was shivering all over in that divine prial glory that I not only didn't understand, but deeply didn't want.