Questions of identity and introspection

The first time I heard of the Brazilian author Clarice Lispector was in my undergrad Introduction to Literature class. Her novel, Hour of the Star, is the book I remember most vividly from that semester — a beguiling, shapeshifting novel that felt truly like nothing I’d read before.

Over the years, I would encounter Lispector again and again —in the epigraphs to books I loved, like Checkout 19 by Claire-Louise Bennett; in interviews I read with authors and artists; in conversations I had with new friends and other readers. In each of these encounters, meeting Lispector again felt like rediscovering a delightful secret — a similar experience to reading Lispector herself.

Clarice Lispector was born in a small town in Ukraine in 1920, in a period of extreme political turmoil. In the wake of anti-Semitic violence, her family fled to Brazil, where Clarice grew up, eventually studying law. But she would soon shake up the Brazilian literary world: at just 23, she published her first novel, written in Portuguese, Near to the Wild Heart.

The dreamlike, introspective novel earned her the nickname ‘Hurricane Clarice,’ and would go on to win the Graca Aranha Prize for best first novel. Over the next 30 or so years — the length of Lispector’s life — she would write nine novels, several books for children, a decade’s worth of weekly dispatches for a Brazilian newspaper, and more than 80 short stories. Lispector quickly became a well-known writer in Brazilian literature, and eventually among circles of readers of Latin American and feminist literature.

But although there were attempts by small presses to bring her work into English translation, a concerted effort to do so happened very recently, only in the last 15 years. To many of us, she is someone we’ve never heard of before — an opportunity for discovery, a hundred years after she first began writing.

Lispector is often a very surprising writer. In an introduction to a collection of short stories, Rachel Kushner writes that Lispector wants “nothing less than to uncover the bizarre mystery of consciousness, to contemplate being while being, to apprehend life while living it.”

Her novels and short stories are interested in questions of identity, introspection, meaning-making, and philosophy. Often they take the form of a stream-of-consciousness, which has earned her comparisons to Virginia Woolf. Her use of language, coming to us in translation, is frequently unexpected: sunlight “takes possession of the room”; time hurries along “happy and fleeting”; a woman hears a faraway piano “insisting on the high notes.”

In a two-page story titled “The Fifth Story,” a simple event fractures into multiple different narratives as Lispector meditates on storytelling itself: “I will tell at least three stories, all true because they don’t contradict each other.” In her books, dying cockroaches inspire spiritual crises, dreams and memories hold shimmering and elusive truths, and her characters — often women —search for meaning in language and life. In her writing, you will find lines like this: “Who has not asked himself at some time or other: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?”

In his introduction to Complete Stories, Benjamin Moser writes, “This is a record of a woman’s entire life, written over the course of a woman’s entire life.” Writing was the project of Lispector’s life: a way to make sense — or come to terms with the lack of sense — of life, and the power and failures of language. I find the changeability and the searching quality of Lispector’s writing mirrored in my experience of reading her. The ideas, questions, and even sentences that call to me today might not be the same ones that draw me in 10 years from now, or even tomorrow. Since my first encounter with Hour of the Star, I’ve only read about half of her books, because they demand attention, and I feel called to sit with them, not rush my way through her oeuvre. With Lispector, reading is not passive. Encountering her again and again in new and unexpected places, and reading and revisiting her work as I grow and change alongside it, feels like the most natural way to read her.

Piqued is a monthly column in which the staff of Champaca Bookstore bring us unheard voices and stories from their shelves. The reviewer is a writer and illustrator.