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 graduate school. 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 ☕️ 

Should I Read Clarice Lispector on a Long Train Ride?

Perhaps this isn't a question worth pondering to some, but if you've been swept under the "witchcraft" that is Lispector's writing, then you'll respect why I ask myself the question.

I've been holding onto The Hour of the Star by Clarice and I have a long train ride into the city today. 

The Hour of the Star 100th Anniversary Edition

I want to go deeply into the experience that only Clarice Lispector can create, but I'm afraid that when I emerge from the bowels of the earth and step into New York City, I'll feel spaced out and melancholic. 

As I think about it, perhaps it's best if I save this reading for Monday afternoon when I can sink into it, and at the close of the book just lay down in bed and ponder all that I know she will conjure up from the farthest recesses of my mind.

She did say, "I write as if to save somebody's life. Probably my own life." This is a woman who poured her soul onto the page. To pretend that I can enjoy her work as I would a romance novel was foolish thinking on my part. I know better than this.

Well, thanks for listening. That answers the question of whether or not I should read The Hour of the Star on a train ride into New York City... and the answer is no. 

Save her for when you can savor her is the advice I give to myself and to you dear readers.

Happy intense and deep reading.

An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasure by Clarice Lispector: A Review

What can I say? I'm a devoted worshipper of Clarice Lispector.

If you think that's a bit much... she definitely won't be the author for you. 

This novel was absolutely mesmerizing. She has a way with words that is unparalleled. I honestly feel like you either get her or you don't. 

Her writing DEMANDS to be reread while reading. The amount of sentences that I go back and read over and over until they settle right down into my spirit.

I realize that I need to start her novels when I have a long day or an uninterrupted night so that I can consume it from beginning to end in ONE sitting. 

Reading her works feel like a metaphysical experience and much like deep reading Proust, I am almost annoyed by the realization that I am still in the world existing and things actually make me leave the deep space and energy that is created when one reads her work.

whatever she was, was only a small part of herself. Her immeasurable soul. For she was the World and yet she was living so little. This was one of the sources of her humility and forced acceptance and also kept her weak in the face of any possibility of action.

In this novel, I found myself along this exploration of what it means to be a whole person, while thinking of how to combine your "self" with someone else.

Is this important to do? Is it necessary? Is a person capable of doing this? What does it mean to be "I"; therefore how can you entertain the thought of combining yourself or your life with someone else's?

The theme of love was pervasive throughout this novel, but it was about so so so much more than that. This quest we go on with Lorí into herself... this exploration of space and sea, and night, and rain, and loss, and love, and depression- only amalgamate into this gumbo pot of intense emotion that finalizes in a way that left me without breath.

I adore Clarice Lispector. I am a lifelong devoted fan and I will read and reread everything that she's written for the rest of my living days. Like an apprentice, I am always seeking to know more.

I suggest (if you haven't already), you pick up her entire ouvre and devour her page by page.

Happy deep reading my slow living friends. 

Interview With Clarice Lispector: I Love Her

I watched this Clarice Lispector interview and my love for her grows and grows.

I will forever be grateful to my local librarian, who after speaking with me for about 15 minutes about my bookish interests said, "You seem like the type of young lady (I'm not that young) who would love the deep writing of this woman."

I picked up The Hour of The Star.. flipped through... read a few lines and walked out of the library. It was the pandemic and I wasn't ready for Lispector, but I got her.

I have read The Passion According to G.H. now and I purchased ALL of her novels. Watch this documentary if you want to learn a little bit about how she is as an author.... not who, but how. 
 

Happy viewing my slow living friends.

The Passion According to G.H. - I'll Never Be The Same

Well... there you have it.

Some authors have the ability to pull the veil back on the lived experience of being a human and craft (via language) expressions that call forth something we didn't even know was inside of us.

Clarice Lispector is such an author.

The Passion According to G.H. is the first novel that I've finished by her and it will not be the last.

I savored this work.

I literally saturated myself with every word.

--- To otherwise is to do yourself a disservice. Like Proust, Lispector HAS to be slowly digested. Instantly paragraphs must be reread. You have to allow your subconscious and conscious mind time enough to understand what is happening. 

I oftentimes shy away from telling anyone how they should do anything (especially reading), but I feel compelled to say it.

Lispector's work gives one the sense that if you just read the words, somehow at the end of the paragraph you'll grasp it. This isn't true.

It's that mystical element to her writing that transfixes you.

hot organic coffee everyday of my life

In The Passion According to G.H., Lispector helps us to contemplate our our existence as we ponder with G.H. her own place in the balance of things.

We are confronted with the awareness of the "I" in which we present ourselves to the world may be an unreflected upon self and therefore invalid. False. 

I know that this is a work I will be rereading for the rest of my life.

I LOVE that about great literature. It helps me to remember one of my favorite things to remind readers, "If it isn't worth reading twice, it isn't worth reading once".

I pray that you will pick up Lispector's work. I am sure to buy every one of her translated works for my kindle and then for my physical library.

THIS is a bold statement. I only own 25 books, so the digital plus physical editions of her novels tell you dear reader, just how special and infinitely rereadable Lispector is.

I'm off to further contemplate the meaning of my existence. Thank you Clarice for putting your work into the world. And bless the translators all of whom (after decades of only being available in Portuguese) have provided them for English readers.

With a grateful heart.

Happy reading my slow living friends. 

 

Clarice Lispector Peering Into My Soul: Quick Quote

Because, you see, I knew I was entering the crude and raw glory of nature. Seduced, I was still fighting as best I could against the quicksand that was swallowing me: and each movement I was making toward "no, no!", each movement pushed me inevitably on; not having the strength to fight was my only forgiveness.

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.