2025 author focus: clarice lispector

 

photographer: Paulo Gurgel Valente

Reasons I chose Clarice Lispector for 2025

I've written about how 2025 has to be a reading of deep, intense literature because I've returned to two graduate programs. I'm the sole caregiver for my family members and I need literature to help me heal. Clarice Lispector is an author that wrote from the marrow of her bones. There are sentences that I have had to read 5 times in order to process and understand and inhabit. Either you love her or hate her. I love love her. 

I didn't get on with her short stories very much, but it was because the collection was of seemingly ordinary stories without the witchcraft storytelling that she normally writes with. It felt like the stories of the upper class having ordinary experiences, and I loathe that lens. 

I am hopeful that my focus on Lispector this year will not disappoint and will open up a new world for me inside of Brazilian literature.

beginnings of my author focus page in my simple book journal

Author summary from Goodreads:

Clarice Lispector was a Brazilian writer. Acclaimed internationally for her innovative novels and short stories, she was also a journalist. Born to a Jewish family in Podolia in Western Ukraine, she was brought to Brazil as an infant, amidst the disasters engulfing her native land following the First World War.

She grew up in northeastern Brazil, where her mother died when she was nine. The family moved to Rio de Janeiro when she was in her teens. While in law school in Rio she began publishing her first journalistic work and short stories, catapulting to fame at age 23 with the publication of her first novel, 'Near to the Wild Heart' (Perto do Coração Selvagem), written as an interior monologue in a style and language that was considered revolutionary in Brazil.

She left Brazil in 1944, following her marriage to a Brazilian diplomat, and spent the next decade and a half in Europe and the United States. Upon return to Rio de Janeiro in 1959, she began producing her most famous works, including the stories of Family Ties (Laços de Família), the great mystic novel The Passion According to G.H. (A Paixão Segundo G.H.), and the novel many consider to be her masterpiece, Água Viva. Injured in an accident in 1966, she spent the last decade of her life in frequent pain, steadily writing and publishing novels and stories until her premature death in 1977.

She has been the subject of numerous books and references to her, and her works are common in Brazilian literature and music. Several of her works have been turned into films, one being 'Hour of the Star' and she was the subject of a recent biography, Why This World, by Benjamin Moser.

Novels

I hope that if you have time for an author focus this year that you chose someone who calls to your heart. I find it to be so immersive, and don't forget... if you start with one author and the project isn't providing what you are seeking... just pic a new author focus. 

No rules. All freedom. Read what calls you to it.

Happy reading ☕️