A More Delicate & Difficult Reality
By: James Mustich
Tags: Literatura Brasileira, Book Review, Literature, Books, Reading

A More Delicate & Difficult Reality

On the stories of Clarice Lispector.

Today — December 10, 2020 — marks the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Clarice Lispector, whose fictions have proved abiding in their apprehensive eloquence. Colm Tóibín called her “one of the hidden geniuses of the twentieth century,” and her Complete Stories, translated from the Portuguese by Katrina Dodson and edited by Lispector’s biographer, Benjamin Moser, puts that genius in plain sight.

Some writers occupy chairs, some rooms, some houses — some whole neighborhoods of affect and action. Others of singular inspiration, such as Joyce, compose entire cities with their words, or, like Kafka, create strange dominions entirely their own; still others of capacious imagination — think Proust or Virginia Woolf — conjure from psychology and social relations a superreality as shifting and encompassing as the weather, thereby describing with revelatory attention the climate of our lives. While the work of Clarice Lispector puts her in the same league as such extraordinary literary magicians, what’s most remarkable about it is the way it moves, with grace and no little glamour, from humdrum domestic scenes to ominous visionary realms to streams of feeling as stealthy, dangerous, and exhilarating as the wind. (No kidding: Commenting on a new translation of Lispector’s novel Hour of the Star for the Financial Times, Katherine Boo wrote, “I felt physically jolted by genius.” Exactly.)

Take Lispector’s story “Love,” first published in 1952. It starts out as a woman named Ana, carrying groceries she just purchased, boards a tram in Rio de Janeiro to take her home, where she is expecting to prepare dinner for her family and some company. We are made privy to her thoughts, which revolve around her daily life with a kind of desperate sensitivity to what its normality encloses:

The only thing she worried about was being careful during that dangerous hour of the afternoon, when the house was empty and needed nothing more from her, the sun high, the family members scattered to their duties. As she looked at the clean furniture, her heart would contract slightly in astonishment. But there was no room in her life for feeling tender toward her astonishment — she’d smother it with the same skill the household chores had given her.

And then, provoked by her observation of a fellow passenger — a blind man chewing gum — her consciousness grows dizzy with uneasiness, compassion, fear, and benevolence as she navigates her bus ride, her arrival home, her preparation of dinner, and her cleaning up afterward with her husband. The tale is a marvel of concentration and expression, not so much terrifying as it is alert to the wonder and its furtive uncertainty (which is what, after all, makes it wonderful); it is like an episode from the lives of the saints, grounded in mundane reality yet filled with danger and grace and the palpable evidence of things unseen.

Born in Ukraine in 1920, Lispector came to Brazil as an infant and moved to Rio de Janeiro as a teenager. At the age of twenty-three, she published her first novel, Near to the Wild Heart (1943), to sensational acclaim. Soon after, she married a diplomat and spent the next period of her life in Europe and the United States, returning to Brazil in 1959. All the while, she was writing, as she would until her death in 1977, creating a body of fiction that is singular, mysterious, and worth reading in its entirety. If her Complete Stories stands out above her novels, it is because, as Moser suggests in his introduction to the volume, the book is “a record of woman’s entire life” — from adolescence to adulthood, from solitude to marriage and back again, from motherhood to loneliness, from beauty and youthful vigor to the blemishes and physical frailty of age — “written over a woman’s entire life.” Before Lispector, Moser continues, “a woman who wrote throughout her life — about that life — was so rare as to be previously unheard-of. The claim seems extravagant, but I have not identified any predecessors.”

“In painting as in music and literature,” Lispector once argued, “what is called abstract so often seems to me the figurative of a more delicate and difficult reality, less visible to the naked eye.” It is that more delicate and difficult reality that Lispector captures in these stories, a reality not hung on a plotline or conforming to a conventional narrative, but following the inspirations and intuitions, the rhythms and hesitancies, the anxieties and epiphanies of unfolding experience. They are as truthful and electrifying as any an inner life has ever spun.