Clarice Lispector
Encyclopedia
Clarice Lispector was a Brazil
ian 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) and the great mystic novel The Passion According to G.H.
(A Paixão Segundo G.H.). 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 work are common in Brazilian literature and music. Several of her works have been turned into films and she was the subject of a recent biography, Why This World, by Benjamin Moser
.
, Podolia
, a shtetl
in what is today Ukraine
. She was the youngest of three daughters of Pinkhas Lispector and Mania Krimgold Lispector. Her family suffered terribly in the pogrom
s during the Russian Civil War
that followed the dissolution of the Russian Empire
, circumstances later dramatized by her older sister Elisa Lispector
's autobiographical novel No exílio (In Exile, 1948). They eventually managed to flee to Romania
, from where they emigrated to Brazil
, where her mother Mania had relatives. They sailed from Hamburg
and arrived in Brazil in the early months of 1922, when Chaya was little more than a year old.
The Lispectors changed their names upon arrival. Pinkhas became Pedro; Mania became Marieta; Leah became Elisa
, and Chaya became Clarice. Only the middle daughter, Tania (April 19, 1915 - November 15, 2007), kept her name. They first settled in the small northeastern city of Maceió
, Alagoas
. After three years, during which Marieta's health deteriorated rapidly, they moved to the larger city of Recife
, Pernambuco
, settling in the neighborhood of Boa Vista.
In Recife, where her father continued to struggle economically, her mother finally died on September 21, 1930, aged 42. Clarice attended the Colégio Hebreo-Idisch-Brasileiro, which taught Hebrew and Yiddish in addition to the usual subjects. In 1932, she gained admission to the Ginásio Pernambucano, then the most prestigious secondary school in the state. A year later, she "consciously claimed the desire to write,", under much influence from Hermann Hesse
's Steppenwolf
.
In 1935, Pedro Lispector decided to move with his daughters to the then-capital, Rio de Janeiro
, where he hoped to find more economic opportunity. The family lived in the neighborhood of São Cristóvão
, north of downtown Rio, before moving to Tijuca
. In 1937, she entered the Law School of the University of Brazil
, then one of the most prestigious institutions of higher learning in the country. Her first known story, "Triunfo," was published in the magazine Pan on May 25, 1940. Soon afterwards, on August 26, 1940, as a result of a botched gall-bladder operation, her beloved father died, age 55.
While still in law school, Clarice began working as a journalist, first at the official government press service the Agência Nacional and then at the important newspaper A Noite. The American translator Gregory Rabassa
recalled being "flabbergasted to meet that rare person [Lispector] who looked like Marlene Dietrich
and wrote like Virginia Woolf
". Lispector would come into contact with the younger generation of Brazilian writers, including Lúcio Cardoso
, with whom she fell in love. Cardoso was homosexual, however, and she soon began seeing a law school colleague named Maury Gurgel Valente, who had entered the Brazilian Foreign Service, known as Itamaraty. In order to marry a diplomat, she had to be naturalized, which she did as soon as she came of age. On January 12, 1943, she was granted Brazilian citizenship. Eleven days later she married Gurgel.
. “For the first time, a Brazilian author goes beyond simple approximation in this almost virgin field of our literature; for the first time, an author penetrates the depths of the psychological complexity of the modern soul.”
This novel, like all of her subsequent works, was marked by an intense focus on interior emotional states. When the novel was published, many claimed that her stream-of-consciousness writing style was heavily influenced by Virginia Woolf
or James Joyce
, but she only read these authors after the book was ready. The epigraph from Joyce and the title, which is taken from Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
, were both suggested by Lúcio Cardoso
.
Shortly afterwards, Clarice and Maury Gurgel left Rio for the northern city of Belém
, in the state of Pará
, at the mouth of the Amazon
. There, Maury served as a liaison between the Foreign Ministry and the international visitors who were using northern Brazil as a military base in World War II
.
, where Maury was posted to the Brazilian Consulate. Naples
was the staging ground for the Brazilian troops of the Brazilian Expeditionary Force
whose soldiers were fighting on the Allied side against the Nazis. She worked at the military hospital in Naples taking care of wounded Brazilian troops In Rome
, she met the Italian
poet Giuseppe Ungaretti
, who translated parts of Near to the Wild Heart, and had her portrait painted by Giorgio de Chirico
. In Naples she completed her second novel, O Lustre (The Chandelier, 1946), which like the first focused on the interior life of a girl, this time one named Virgínia. This longer and more difficult book also met with an enthusiastic critical reception, though its impact was less sensational than Near to the Wild Heart. “Possessed of an enormous talent and a rare personality, she will have to suffer, fatally, the disadvantages of both, since she so amply enjoys their benefits”, wrote Gilda de Souza e Mello. After a short visit to Brazil in 1946, Clarice and Maury returned to Europe in April 1946, where Maury was posted to the embassy in Bern, Switzerland
. This was a time of considerable boredom and frustration for Lispector, who was often depressed. “This Switzerland,” she wrote her sister Tania, “is a cemetery of sensations.” Her son Pedro Gurgel Valente was born in Bern on September 10, 1948, and in the city she wrote her third novel, A cidade sitiada (The Besieged City, 1946).
The book Lispector wrote in Bern, The Besieged City, tells the story of Lucrécia Neves, and the growth of her town, São Geraldo, from a little settlement to a large city. The book, which is full of metaphors of vision and seeing, met with a tepid reception and was “perhaps the least loved of Clarice Lispector’s novels”, according to a close friend of Lispector's. Sérgio Milliet concluded that “the author succumbs beneath the weight of her own richness.” And the Portuguese critic João Gaspar Simões wrote: “Its hermeticism has the texture of the hermeticism of dreams. May someone find the key.”
After leaving Switzerland in 1949 and spending almost a year in Rio, Clarice and Maury Gurgel Valente traveled to Torquay
, Devon
, where Maury was a delegate to the on the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
(GATT). They remained in England
from September, 1950, until March, 1951. Lispector liked England, though she suffered a miscarriage on a visit to London
.
In 1952, back in Rio, where the family would stay about a year, Lispector published a short volume of six stories called Alguns contos (Some Stories) in a small edition sponsored by the Ministry of Education and Health. These stories formed the core of the later Laços de família (Family Ties), 1961. She also worked under the pseudonym Teresa Quadros as a women's columnist at the short-lived newspaper Comício.
In September, 1952, the family moved to Washington, D.C.
, where they would live until June 1959. They bought a house at 4421 Ridge Street in the suburb of Chevy Chase
, Maryland
. On February 10, 1953, her second son Paulo was born. She grew close to the Brazilian writer Érico Veríssimo
, then working for the Organization of American States
, and his wife Mafalda, as well as to the wife of the ambassador, Alzira Vargas do Amaral Peixoto, daughter of the former Brazilian dictator Getúlio Vargas
. She also began publishing her stories in the new magazine Senhor, back in Rio. But she was increasingly discontented with the diplomatic milieu. “I hated it, but I did what I had to […] I gave dinner parties, I did everything you’re supposed to do, but with a disgust …” She increasingly missed her sisters and Brazil, and in June 1959, she left her husband and returned with her sons to Rio de Janeiro
, where she would spend the rest of her life.
wrote her, was “exactly, sincerely, indisputably, and even humbly, the best book of stories ever published in Brazil.” And Érico Veríssimo
said: “I haven’t written about your book of stories out of sheer embarrassment to tell you what I think of it. Here goes: the most important story collection published in this country since Machado de Assis”, Brazil's classic novelist.
, had been ready since 1956 but was repeatedly rejected by publishers, to Lispector's despair. Her longest novel and perhaps her most complex, it was finally published in 1961 by the same house that had published Family Ties, the Livraria Francisco Alves in São Paulo
. Driven by interior dialogue rather than by plot, its purported subject is a man called Martim, who believes he has killed his wife and flees deep into the Brazilian interior, where he finds work as a farm laborer. The real concerns of the highly allegorical novel are language and creation. In 1962, the work was awarded the Carmen Dolores Barbosa Prize for the best novel of the previous year. Around this time she began a relationship with the poet Paulo Mendes Campos
, an old friend. Mendes Campos was married and the relationship did not endure.
On September 14, 1966, she suffered a terrible accident in her apartment. After taking a sleeping pill, she fell asleep in her bed with a lit cigarette. She was badly wounded and her right hand almost had to be amputated.
The next year, she published her first children's book, O Mistério do coelho pensante, (The Mystery of the Thinking Rabbit, 1967), a translation of a book she had written in Washington
, in English
, for her son Paulo. In August, 1967, she began writing a weekly column ("crônica") for the Jornal do Brasil
, an important Rio newspaper, which greatly expanded her fame beyond the intellectual and artistic circles that had long admired her. These pieces were later collected in the posthumous work A Descoberta do mundo (The Discovery of the World, 1984).
. She began working on the book that many would consider her finest, Água viva (The Stream of Life), though she struggled to complete it. Olga Borelli, a former nun who entered her life around this time and became her faithful assistant and friend, recalled: When the book came out in 1973, it was instantly acclaimed as a masterpiece. “With this fiction,” one critic wrote, “Clarice Lispector awakens the literature currently being produced in Brazil from a depressing and degrading lethargy and elevates it to a level of universal perennity and perfection.”
, Oscar Wilde
, and Edgar Allan Poe
.
In 1975 she was invited to the First World Congress of Sorcery in Bogotá
, an event which garnered wide press coverage and increased her notoriety. At the conference, her story "The Egg and the Hen", first published in The Foreign Legion, was read in English.
, the state where Lispector's family first arrived, lost in the metropolis of Rio de Janeiro
. Macabéa's name refers to the Maccabees
, and is one of the very few overtly Jewish references in Lispector's work. Its explicit focus on Brazilian poverty and marginality was also new.
, though she was not told the diagnosis. She died on the eve of her 57th birthday and was buried on December 11, 1977, at the Jewish Cemetery of Caju, Rio de Janeiro
.
Brazil
Brazil , officially the Federative Republic of Brazil , is the largest country in South America. It is the world's fifth largest country, both by geographical area and by population with over 192 million people...
ian writer
Brazilian literature
Brazilian literature is written in the Portuguese language by Brazilians or in Brazil, even if prior to Brazil's independence from Portugal, in 1822...
. Acclaimed internationally for her innovative novels and short stories, she was also a journalist. Born to a Jewish family in Podolia
Podolia
The region of Podolia is an historical region in the west-central and south-west portions of present-day Ukraine, corresponding to Khmelnytskyi Oblast and Vinnytsia Oblast. Northern Transnistria, in Moldova, is also a part of Podolia...
in Western Ukraine
Ukraine
Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...
, 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
Brazil
Brazil , officially the Federative Republic of Brazil , is the largest country in South America. It is the world's fifth largest country, both by geographical area and by population with over 192 million people...
, where her mother died when she was nine. The family moved to Rio de Janeiro
Rio de Janeiro
Rio de Janeiro , commonly referred to simply as Rio, is the capital city of the State of Rio de Janeiro, the second largest city of Brazil, and the third largest metropolitan area and agglomeration in South America, boasting approximately 6.3 million people within the city proper, making it the 6th...
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
Near to the Wild Heart
Near to the Wild Heart is Clarice Lispector's first novel, written from March to November 1942 and published around her twenty-third birthday in December, 1943...
(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
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
and the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
. Upon return to Rio de Janeiro
Rio de Janeiro
Rio de Janeiro , commonly referred to simply as Rio, is the capital city of the State of Rio de Janeiro, the second largest city of Brazil, and the third largest metropolitan area and agglomeration in South America, boasting approximately 6.3 million people within the city proper, making it the 6th...
in 1959, she began producing her most famous works, including the stories of Family Ties (Laços de Família) and the great mystic novel The Passion According to G.H.
The Passion According to G.H.
The Passion According to G.H. is a mystical novel by the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, published in 1964. The work takes the form of a monologue by a woman, identified only as G.H., telling of the crisis that ensued the previous day after she crushed a cockroach in the door of a wardrobe...
(A Paixão Segundo G.H.). 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 work are common in Brazilian literature and music. Several of her works have been turned into films and she was the subject of a recent biography, Why This World, by Benjamin Moser
Benjamin Moser
Benjamin Moser is an American writer who lives in Utrecht, Netherlands with Arthur Japin and Lex Jansen since 2002.-Biography:...
.
Early life and emigration
Chaya Lispector was born in ChechelnykChechelnyk
Chechelnyk or Chechelnik is a town on the Savranka River in Vinnytsia Oblast, Ukraine , near Odessa Oblast. In 2001 it had 5,590 inhabitants...
, Podolia
Podolia
The region of Podolia is an historical region in the west-central and south-west portions of present-day Ukraine, corresponding to Khmelnytskyi Oblast and Vinnytsia Oblast. Northern Transnistria, in Moldova, is also a part of Podolia...
, a shtetl
Shtetl
A shtetl was typically a small town with a large Jewish population in Central and Eastern Europe until The Holocaust. Shtetls were mainly found in the areas which constituted the 19th century Pale of Settlement in the Russian Empire, the Congress Kingdom of Poland, Galicia and Romania...
in what is today Ukraine
Ukraine
Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...
. She was the youngest of three daughters of Pinkhas Lispector and Mania Krimgold Lispector. Her family suffered terribly in the pogrom
Pogrom
A pogrom is a form of violent riot, a mob attack directed against a minority group, and characterized by killings and destruction of their homes and properties, businesses, and religious centres...
s during the Russian Civil War
Russian Civil War
The Russian Civil War was a multi-party war that occurred within the former Russian Empire after the Russian provisional government collapsed to the Soviets, under the domination of the Bolshevik party. Soviet forces first assumed power in Petrograd The Russian Civil War (1917–1923) was a...
that followed the dissolution of the Russian Empire
Russian Empire
The Russian Empire was a state that existed from 1721 until the Russian Revolution of 1917. It was the successor to the Tsardom of Russia and the predecessor of the Soviet Union...
, circumstances later dramatized by her older sister Elisa Lispector
Elisa Lispector
Elisa Lispector was a Brazilian novelist....
's autobiographical novel No exílio (In Exile, 1948). They eventually managed to flee to Romania
Romania
Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeastern Europe, on the Lower Danube, within and outside the Carpathian arch, bordering on the Black Sea...
, from where they emigrated to Brazil
Brazil
Brazil , officially the Federative Republic of Brazil , is the largest country in South America. It is the world's fifth largest country, both by geographical area and by population with over 192 million people...
, where her mother Mania had relatives. They sailed from Hamburg
Hamburg
-History:The first historic name for the city was, according to Claudius Ptolemy's reports, Treva.But the city takes its modern name, Hamburg, from the first permanent building on the site, a castle whose construction was ordered by the Emperor Charlemagne in AD 808...
and arrived in Brazil in the early months of 1922, when Chaya was little more than a year old.
The Lispectors changed their names upon arrival. Pinkhas became Pedro; Mania became Marieta; Leah became Elisa
Elisa
Elisa Toffoli is an Italian singer-songwriter, performing under the mononym Elisa. She is one of few Italian musicians to write and record mainly in English. She draws inspiration from many genres such as pop, alternative rock, electronica and trip hop...
, and Chaya became Clarice. Only the middle daughter, Tania (April 19, 1915 - November 15, 2007), kept her name. They first settled in the small northeastern city of Maceió
Maceió
Maceió is the capital and the largest city of the coastal state Alagoas, Brazil. The name "maceió" is of Indian origin, and designates the natural spontaneously courses of water which flow out of the soil...
, Alagoas
Alagoas
Alagoas is one of the 27 federative units of Brazil and is situated in the eastern part of the Northeast Region. It borders: Pernambuco ; Sergipe ; Bahia ; and the Atlantic Ocean . It occupies an area of 27,767 km², being slightly larger than Haiti...
. After three years, during which Marieta's health deteriorated rapidly, they moved to the larger city of Recife
Recife
Recife is the fifth-largest metropolitan area in Brazil with 4,136,506 inhabitants, the largest metropolitan area of the North/Northeast Regions, the 5th-largest metropolitan influence area in Brazil, and the capital and largest city of the state of Pernambuco. The population of the city proper...
, Pernambuco
Pernambuco
Pernambuco is a state of Brazil, located in the Northeast region of the country. To the north are the states of Paraíba and Ceará, to the west is Piauí, to the south are Alagoas and Bahia, and to the east is the Atlantic Ocean. There are about of beaches, some of the most beautiful in the...
, settling in the neighborhood of Boa Vista.
In Recife, where her father continued to struggle economically, her mother finally died on September 21, 1930, aged 42. Clarice attended the Colégio Hebreo-Idisch-Brasileiro, which taught Hebrew and Yiddish in addition to the usual subjects. In 1932, she gained admission to the Ginásio Pernambucano, then the most prestigious secondary school in the state. A year later, she "consciously claimed the desire to write,", under much influence from Hermann Hesse
Hermann Hesse
Hermann Hesse was a German-Swiss poet, novelist, and painter. In 1946, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature...
's Steppenwolf
Steppenwolf (novel)
Steppenwolf is the tenth novel by German-Swiss author Hermann Hesse. Originally published in Germany in 1927, it was first translated into English in 1929. Combining autobiographical and psychoanalytic elements, the novel was named after the lonesome wolf of the steppes...
.
In 1935, Pedro Lispector decided to move with his daughters to the then-capital, Rio de Janeiro
Rio de Janeiro
Rio de Janeiro , commonly referred to simply as Rio, is the capital city of the State of Rio de Janeiro, the second largest city of Brazil, and the third largest metropolitan area and agglomeration in South America, boasting approximately 6.3 million people within the city proper, making it the 6th...
, where he hoped to find more economic opportunity. The family lived in the neighborhood of São Cristóvão
São Cristóvão (Rio de Janeiro neighborhood)
São Cristóvão is a traditional neighborhood located in the northern zone of Rio de Janeiro city.-History:The first inhabitants were the Tamoio Indians. After Brazil was discovered and colonized by Portugal, the Jesuits inhabited the place...
, north of downtown Rio, before moving to Tijuca
Tijuca
Tijuca is a neighbourhood of the Northern Zone of the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It comprises the region of Saens Peña and Afonso Pena squares. According to the 2000 Census, the district has close to 150,000 inhabitants...
. In 1937, she entered the Law School of the University of Brazil
Federal University of Rio de Janeiro Faculty of Law
The Federal University of Rio de Janeiro Faculty of Law , also known as the National Faculty of Law , is a law school located in downtown Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.Founded in 1920, from the merger of two law schools created in the 1880s, it is the...
, then one of the most prestigious institutions of higher learning in the country. Her first known story, "Triunfo," was published in the magazine Pan on May 25, 1940. Soon afterwards, on August 26, 1940, as a result of a botched gall-bladder operation, her beloved father died, age 55.
While still in law school, Clarice began working as a journalist, first at the official government press service the Agência Nacional and then at the important newspaper A Noite. The American translator Gregory Rabassa
Gregory Rabassa
Gregory Rabassa is a renowned literary translator from Spanish and Portuguese to English who currently teaches at Queens College.-Life and career:Rabassa was born in Yonkers, New York, U.S., into a family headed by a Cuban émigré...
recalled being "flabbergasted to meet that rare person [Lispector] who looked like Marlene Dietrich
Marlene Dietrich
Marlene Dietrich was a German-American actress and singer.Dietrich remained popular throughout her long career by continually re-inventing herself, professionally and characteristically. In the Berlin of the 1920s, she acted on the stage and in silent films...
and wrote like Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf
Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English author, essayist, publisher, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century....
". Lispector would come into contact with the younger generation of Brazilian writers, including Lúcio Cardoso
Lúcio Cardoso
Joaquim Lúcio Cardoso Filho, known as Lúcio Cardoso was a Brazilian novelist, playwright, and poet....
, with whom she fell in love. Cardoso was homosexual, however, and she soon began seeing a law school colleague named Maury Gurgel Valente, who had entered the Brazilian Foreign Service, known as Itamaraty. In order to marry a diplomat, she had to be naturalized, which she did as soon as she came of age. On January 12, 1943, she was granted Brazilian citizenship. Eleven days later she married Gurgel.
Near to the Wild Heart
In December 1943, she published her first novel, Perto do coração selvagem (Near to the Wild Heart). The novel, which tells of the inner life of a young woman named Joana, caused a sensation. In October 1944, the book won the prestigious Graça Aranha Prize for the best debut novel of 1943. One critic, the poet Lêdo Ivo, called it "the greatest novel a woman has ever written in the Portuguese language.” Another wrote that Clarice had “shifted the center of gravity around which the Brazilian novel had been revolving for about twenty years.” “Clarice Lispector’s work appears in our literary world as the most serious attempt at the introspective novel,” wrote the São Paulo critic Sérgio MillietSérgio Milliet
Sérgio Milliet da Costa e Silva, generally known as Sérgio Milliet was a Brazilian writer, painter, poet,essayist, literary and art critic, and sociologist.-External links:* in...
. “For the first time, a Brazilian author goes beyond simple approximation in this almost virgin field of our literature; for the first time, an author penetrates the depths of the psychological complexity of the modern soul.”
This novel, like all of her subsequent works, was marked by an intense focus on interior emotional states. When the novel was published, many claimed that her stream-of-consciousness writing style was heavily influenced by Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf
Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English author, essayist, publisher, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century....
or James Joyce
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...
, but she only read these authors after the book was ready. The epigraph from Joyce and the title, which is taken from Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a semi-autobiographical novel by James Joyce, first serialised in the magazine The Egoist from 1914 to 1915, and published first in book format in 1916 by B. W. Huebsch, New York. The first English edition was published by the Egoist Press in February 1917...
, were both suggested by Lúcio Cardoso
Lúcio Cardoso
Joaquim Lúcio Cardoso Filho, known as Lúcio Cardoso was a Brazilian novelist, playwright, and poet....
.
Shortly afterwards, Clarice and Maury Gurgel left Rio for the northern city of Belém
Belém
Belém is a Brazilian city, the capital and largest city of state of Pará, in the country's north region. It is the entrance gate to the Amazon with a busy port, airport and bus/coach station...
, in the state of Pará
Pará
Pará is a state in the north of Brazil. It borders the Brazilian states of Amapá, Maranhão, Tocantins, Mato Grosso, Amazonas and Roraima. To the northwest it also borders Guyana and Suriname, and to the northeast it borders the Atlantic Ocean. The capital is Belém.Pará is the most populous state...
, at the mouth of the Amazon
Amazon River
The Amazon of South America is the second longest river in the world and by far the largest by waterflow with an average discharge greater than the next seven largest rivers combined...
. There, Maury served as a liaison between the Foreign Ministry and the international visitors who were using northern Brazil as a military base in World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
.
Europe and the United States
On July 29, 1944, Clarice left Brazil for the first time since she had arrived as a child, destined for NaplesNaples
Naples is a city in Southern Italy, situated on the country's west coast by the Gulf of Naples. Lying between two notable volcanic regions, Mount Vesuvius and the Phlegraean Fields, it is the capital of the region of Campania and of the province of Naples...
, where Maury was posted to the Brazilian Consulate. Naples
Naples
Naples is a city in Southern Italy, situated on the country's west coast by the Gulf of Naples. Lying between two notable volcanic regions, Mount Vesuvius and the Phlegraean Fields, it is the capital of the region of Campania and of the province of Naples...
was the staging ground for the Brazilian troops of the Brazilian Expeditionary Force
Brazilian Expeditionary Force
The Brazilian Expeditionary Force or BEF was a force about 25,700 men and women arranged by the Army and Air Force to fight alongside the Allied forces in the Mediterranean Theatre of World War II...
whose soldiers were fighting on the Allied side against the Nazis. She worked at the military hospital in Naples taking care of wounded Brazilian troops In Rome
Rome
Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...
, she met the Italian
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
poet Giuseppe Ungaretti
Giuseppe Ungaretti
Giuseppe Ungaretti was an Italian modernist poet, journalist, essayist, critic and academic. A leading representative of the experimental trend known as Ermetismo , he was one of the most prominent contributors to 20th century Italian literature. Influenced by symbolism, he was briefly aligned...
, who translated parts of Near to the Wild Heart, and had her portrait painted by Giorgio de Chirico
Giorgio de Chirico
Giorgio de Chirico was a pre-Surrealist and then Surrealist Italian painter born in Volos, Greece, to a Genovese mother and a Sicilian father. He founded the scuola metafisica art movement...
. In Naples she completed her second novel, O Lustre (The Chandelier, 1946), which like the first focused on the interior life of a girl, this time one named Virgínia. This longer and more difficult book also met with an enthusiastic critical reception, though its impact was less sensational than Near to the Wild Heart. “Possessed of an enormous talent and a rare personality, she will have to suffer, fatally, the disadvantages of both, since she so amply enjoys their benefits”, wrote Gilda de Souza e Mello. After a short visit to Brazil in 1946, Clarice and Maury returned to Europe in April 1946, where Maury was posted to the embassy in Bern, Switzerland
Switzerland
Switzerland name of one of the Swiss cantons. ; ; ; or ), in its full name the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in Western Europe,Or Central Europe depending on the definition....
. This was a time of considerable boredom and frustration for Lispector, who was often depressed. “This Switzerland,” she wrote her sister Tania, “is a cemetery of sensations.” Her son Pedro Gurgel Valente was born in Bern on September 10, 1948, and in the city she wrote her third novel, A cidade sitiada (The Besieged City, 1946).
The book Lispector wrote in Bern, The Besieged City, tells the story of Lucrécia Neves, and the growth of her town, São Geraldo, from a little settlement to a large city. The book, which is full of metaphors of vision and seeing, met with a tepid reception and was “perhaps the least loved of Clarice Lispector’s novels”, according to a close friend of Lispector's. Sérgio Milliet concluded that “the author succumbs beneath the weight of her own richness.” And the Portuguese critic João Gaspar Simões wrote: “Its hermeticism has the texture of the hermeticism of dreams. May someone find the key.”
After leaving Switzerland in 1949 and spending almost a year in Rio, Clarice and Maury Gurgel Valente traveled to Torquay
Torquay
Torquay is a town in the unitary authority area of Torbay and ceremonial county of Devon, England. It lies south of Exeter along the A380 on the north of Torbay, north-east of Plymouth and adjoins the neighbouring town of Paignton on the west of the bay. Torquay’s population of 63,998 during the...
, Devon
Devon
Devon is a large county in southwestern England. The county is sometimes referred to as Devonshire, although the term is rarely used inside the county itself as the county has never been officially "shired", it often indicates a traditional or historical context.The county shares borders with...
, where Maury was a delegate to the on the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade was negotiated during the UN Conference on Trade and Employment and was the outcome of the failure of negotiating governments to create the International Trade Organization . GATT was signed in 1947 and lasted until 1993, when it was replaced by the World...
(GATT). They remained in England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
from September, 1950, until March, 1951. Lispector liked England, though she suffered a miscarriage on a visit to London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
.
In 1952, back in Rio, where the family would stay about a year, Lispector published a short volume of six stories called Alguns contos (Some Stories) in a small edition sponsored by the Ministry of Education and Health. These stories formed the core of the later Laços de família (Family Ties), 1961. She also worked under the pseudonym Teresa Quadros as a women's columnist at the short-lived newspaper Comício.
In September, 1952, the family moved to Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....
, where they would live until June 1959. They bought a house at 4421 Ridge Street in the suburb of Chevy Chase
Chevy Chase, Maryland
Chevy Chase is the name of both a town and an unincorporated census-designated place in Montgomery County, Maryland. In addition, a number of villages in the same area of Montgomery County include "Chevy Chase" in their names...
, Maryland
Maryland
Maryland is a U.S. state located in the Mid Atlantic region of the United States, bordering Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia to its south and west; Pennsylvania to its north; and Delaware to its east...
. On February 10, 1953, her second son Paulo was born. She grew close to the Brazilian writer Érico Veríssimo
Erico Verissimo
Erico Verissimo was an important Brazilian writer, born in the State of Rio Grande do Sul. His father, Sebastião Veríssimo da Fonseca, heir of a rich family in Cruz Alta, Rio Grande do Sul, met financial ruin during his son's youth...
, then working for the Organization of American States
Organization of American States
The Organization of American States is a regional international organization, headquartered in Washington, D.C., United States...
, and his wife Mafalda, as well as to the wife of the ambassador, Alzira Vargas do Amaral Peixoto, daughter of the former Brazilian dictator Getúlio Vargas
Getúlio Vargas
Getúlio Dornelles Vargas served as President of Brazil, first as dictator, from 1930 to 1945, and in a democratically elected term from 1951 until his suicide in 1954. Vargas led Brazil for 18 years, the most for any President, and second in Brazilian history to Emperor Pedro II...
. She also began publishing her stories in the new magazine Senhor, back in Rio. But she was increasingly discontented with the diplomatic milieu. “I hated it, but I did what I had to […] I gave dinner parties, I did everything you’re supposed to do, but with a disgust …” She increasingly missed her sisters and Brazil, and in June 1959, she left her husband and returned with her sons to Rio de Janeiro
Rio de Janeiro
Rio de Janeiro , commonly referred to simply as Rio, is the capital city of the State of Rio de Janeiro, the second largest city of Brazil, and the third largest metropolitan area and agglomeration in South America, boasting approximately 6.3 million people within the city proper, making it the 6th...
, where she would spend the rest of her life.
Family Ties
In Brazil, Lispector struggled financially and tried to find a publisher for the novel she had completed in Washington several years before, as well as for her book of stories, Laços de família (Family Ties) This book incorporated the six stories of Some Stories along with seven new stories, some of which had been published in Senhor. It was published in 1960. The book, her friend Fernando SabinoFernando Sabino
Fernando Sabino was a Brazilian writer and journalist.Sabino was born in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, where he lived until he was twenty, when he moved to Rio de Janeiro....
wrote her, was “exactly, sincerely, indisputably, and even humbly, the best book of stories ever published in Brazil.” And Érico Veríssimo
Erico Verissimo
Erico Verissimo was an important Brazilian writer, born in the State of Rio Grande do Sul. His father, Sebastião Veríssimo da Fonseca, heir of a rich family in Cruz Alta, Rio Grande do Sul, met financial ruin during his son's youth...
said: “I haven’t written about your book of stories out of sheer embarrassment to tell you what I think of it. Here goes: the most important story collection published in this country since Machado de Assis”, Brazil's classic novelist.
The Apple in the Dark
A Maçã no escuro (The Apple in the Dark), which she had begun in TorquayTorquay
Torquay is a town in the unitary authority area of Torbay and ceremonial county of Devon, England. It lies south of Exeter along the A380 on the north of Torbay, north-east of Plymouth and adjoins the neighbouring town of Paignton on the west of the bay. Torquay’s population of 63,998 during the...
, had been ready since 1956 but was repeatedly rejected by publishers, to Lispector's despair. Her longest novel and perhaps her most complex, it was finally published in 1961 by the same house that had published Family Ties, the Livraria Francisco Alves in São Paulo
São Paulo
São Paulo is the largest city in Brazil, the largest city in the southern hemisphere and South America, and the world's seventh largest city by population. The metropolis is anchor to the São Paulo metropolitan area, ranked as the second-most populous metropolitan area in the Americas and among...
. Driven by interior dialogue rather than by plot, its purported subject is a man called Martim, who believes he has killed his wife and flees deep into the Brazilian interior, where he finds work as a farm laborer. The real concerns of the highly allegorical novel are language and creation. In 1962, the work was awarded the Carmen Dolores Barbosa Prize for the best novel of the previous year. Around this time she began a relationship with the poet Paulo Mendes Campos
Paulo Mendes Campos
Paulo Mendes Campos , was a Brazilian writer and journalist.Born in Minas Gerais, was the son of the physician and writer Mario Mendes Campos and D...
, an old friend. Mendes Campos was married and the relationship did not endure.
The Passion According to G.H. and The Foreign Legion
In 1964, she published one of her most shocking and famous books, A paixão segundo G.H., about a woman who, in the maid's room of her comfortable Rio penthouse, endures a mystical experience that leads to her eating part of a cockroach. In the same year, she published another book of stories and miscellany, The Foreign Legion.On September 14, 1966, she suffered a terrible accident in her apartment. After taking a sleeping pill, she fell asleep in her bed with a lit cigarette. She was badly wounded and her right hand almost had to be amputated.
The next year, she published her first children's book, O Mistério do coelho pensante, (The Mystery of the Thinking Rabbit, 1967), a translation of a book she had written in Washington
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....
, in English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
, for her son Paulo. In August, 1967, she began writing a weekly column ("crônica") for the Jornal do Brasil
Jornal do Brasil
Jornal do Brasil, widely known as JB, is a daily newspaper published by Editora JB in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It was founded in 1891 and is the third oldest existent Brazilian paper, after the Diário de Pernambuco and O Estado de São Paulo....
, an important Rio newspaper, which greatly expanded her fame beyond the intellectual and artistic circles that had long admired her. These pieces were later collected in the posthumous work A Descoberta do mundo (The Discovery of the World, 1984).
The Woman Who Killed the Fish and An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures
In 1968, Lispector participated in the political demonstrations against Brazil's hardening military dictatorship, and also published two books: her second work for children, A Mulher que matou os peixes (The Woman Who Killed the Fish), in which the narrator, Clarice, confesses to having forgotten to feed her son's fish; and her first novel since G.H., Uma Aprendizagem ou O Livro dos Prazeres, a love story between a primary teacher, Lóri, and a philosophy teacher, Ulisses. The book drew on her writings in her newspaper columns. She also intensified her journalistic activity, conducting interviews for the glossy magazine Manchete.Covert Joy and The Stream of Life
In 1971, Lispector published another book of stories, Felicidade clandestina, (Covert Joy), several of which hearkened back to memories of her childhood in RecifeRecife
Recife is the fifth-largest metropolitan area in Brazil with 4,136,506 inhabitants, the largest metropolitan area of the North/Northeast Regions, the 5th-largest metropolitan influence area in Brazil, and the capital and largest city of the state of Pernambuco. The population of the city proper...
. She began working on the book that many would consider her finest, Água viva (The Stream of Life), though she struggled to complete it. Olga Borelli, a former nun who entered her life around this time and became her faithful assistant and friend, recalled: When the book came out in 1973, it was instantly acclaimed as a masterpiece. “With this fiction,” one critic wrote, “Clarice Lispector awakens the literature currently being produced in Brazil from a depressing and degrading lethargy and elevates it to a level of universal perennity and perfection.”
Where Were You at Night and The Via-Crucis of the Body
In 1974, Lispector published two books of stories, Onde estivestes de noite (Where Were You at Night)-which focuses in part on the lives of aging women-and A Via Crucis do corpo (The Via-Crucis of the Body). Though her previous books had often taken her years to complete, the latter was written in three days, after a challenge from her publisher, Álvaro Pacheco, to write three stories about themes relating to sex. Part of the reason she wrote so much may have had to do with her having been unexpectedly fired from the Jornal do Brasil at the end of 1973, which put her under increasing financial pressure. She began to paint and intensified her activity as a translator, publishing translations of Agatha ChristieAgatha Christie
Dame Agatha Christie DBE was a British crime writer of novels, short stories, and plays. She also wrote romances under the name Mary Westmacott, but she is best remembered for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections , and her successful West End plays.According to...
, Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s...
, and Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective...
.
In 1975 she was invited to the First World Congress of Sorcery in Bogotá
Bogotá
Bogotá, Distrito Capital , from 1991 to 2000 called Santa Fé de Bogotá, is the capital, and largest city, of Colombia. It is also designated by the national constitution as the capital of the department of Cundinamarca, even though the city of Bogotá now comprises an independent Capital district...
, an event which garnered wide press coverage and increased her notoriety. At the conference, her story "The Egg and the Hen", first published in The Foreign Legion, was read in English.
A Breath of Life and The Hour of the Star
Lispector worked on a book called Um sopro de vida: pulsações (A Breath of Life: Pulsations) that would be published posthumously in the mid-1970s. The book consists of a dialogue between an "Author" and his creation, Angela Pralini, a character whose name was borrowed from a character in a story in Where Were You at Night. She used this fragmentary form for her final and perhaps most famous novel, A Hora da estrela (The Hour of the Star, 1977), piecing the story together, with the help of Olga Borelli, from notes scrawled on loose bits of paper. The Hour of the Star tells the story of Macabéa, one of the iconic characters in Brazilian literature, a starving, poor typist from AlagoasAlagoas
Alagoas is one of the 27 federative units of Brazil and is situated in the eastern part of the Northeast Region. It borders: Pernambuco ; Sergipe ; Bahia ; and the Atlantic Ocean . It occupies an area of 27,767 km², being slightly larger than Haiti...
, the state where Lispector's family first arrived, lost in the metropolis of Rio de Janeiro
Rio de Janeiro
Rio de Janeiro , commonly referred to simply as Rio, is the capital city of the State of Rio de Janeiro, the second largest city of Brazil, and the third largest metropolitan area and agglomeration in South America, boasting approximately 6.3 million people within the city proper, making it the 6th...
. Macabéa's name refers to the Maccabees
Maccabees
The Maccabees were a Jewish rebel army who took control of Judea, which had been a client state of the Seleucid Empire. They founded the Hasmonean dynasty, which ruled from 164 BCE to 63 BCE, reasserting the Jewish religion, expanding the boundaries of the Land of Israel and reducing the influence...
, and is one of the very few overtly Jewish references in Lispector's work. Its explicit focus on Brazilian poverty and marginality was also new.
Death
Shortly after The Hour of the Star was published, Lispector was admitted to the hospital. She had inoperable ovarian cancerOvarian cancer
Ovarian cancer is a cancerous growth arising from the ovary. Symptoms are frequently very subtle early on and may include: bloating, pelvic pain, difficulty eating and frequent urination, and are easily confused with other illnesses....
, though she was not told the diagnosis. She died on the eve of her 57th birthday and was buried on December 11, 1977, at the Jewish Cemetery of Caju, Rio de Janeiro
Rio de Janeiro
Rio de Janeiro , commonly referred to simply as Rio, is the capital city of the State of Rio de Janeiro, the second largest city of Brazil, and the third largest metropolitan area and agglomeration in South America, boasting approximately 6.3 million people within the city proper, making it the 6th...
.
Novels
- Perto do Coração Selvagem (1943) - Near to the Wild HeartNear to the Wild HeartNear to the Wild Heart is Clarice Lispector's first novel, written from March to November 1942 and published around her twenty-third birthday in December, 1943...
published by New Directions - O Lustre (1946) - The Chandelier
- A Cidade Sitiada (1949) - The Besieged City
- A Maçã no Escuro (1961) The Apple in the Dark
- A Paixão segundo G.H. (1964) - The Passion According to G.H.The Passion According to G.H.The Passion According to G.H. is a mystical novel by the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, published in 1964. The work takes the form of a monologue by a woman, identified only as G.H., telling of the crisis that ensued the previous day after she crushed a cockroach in the door of a wardrobe...
- Uma Aprendizagem ou O Livro dos Prazeres (1969) - An Apprenticeship or the Book of Pleasures
- Água Viva (1973) - The Stream of Life
- A hora da Estrela (1977) - The Hour of the StarThe Hour of the StarThe Hour of the Star is a novella by Clarice Lispector published in 1977, shortly before the author's death. In 1985, the novel was adapted by Suzana Amaral into a film of the same name, which won the Silver Bear for Best Actress in the 36th Berlin International Film Festival of 1986...
published by New Directions - Um Sopro de Vida (1978) - A Breath of Life
Stories
- Alguns contos (1952) - Some Stories
- Laços de família (1960) - Family Ties. Includes works previously published in Alguns Contos.
- A Legião estrangeira (1964) - The Foreign Legion published by New Directions
- Felicidade clandestina (1971) - Covert Joy
- A imitação da rosa (1973) - The Imitation of the Rose. Includes previously published material.
- A Via-crucis do corpo (1974) - The Stations of the Body
- Onde estivestes de noite (1974) - Where You Were at Night
- Para não esquecer (1978) - Not to Forget
- A Bela e a fera (1979) - Beauty and the Beast
Children's Literature
- O Mistério do Coelho Pensante (1967) - The Mystery of the Thinking Rabbit
- A mulher que matou os peixes (1968) - The Woman Who Killed the Fish
- A Vida Íntima de Laura (1974) - Laura's Intimate Life
- Quase de verdade (1978) - Almost True
- Como nasceram as estrelas: Doze lendas brasileiras (1987) - How the Stars were Born: Twelve Brazilian Legends
Journalism and other shorter writings
- A Descoberta do Mundo (1984) - The Discovery of the World.(named Selected Chronicas in the English version) Lispector's newspaper columns in the Jornal do BrasilJornal do BrasilJornal do Brasil, widely known as JB, is a daily newspaper published by Editora JB in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It was founded in 1891 and is the third oldest existent Brazilian paper, after the Diário de Pernambuco and O Estado de São Paulo....
. - Visão do esplendor (1975) - Vision of Splendor
- De corpo inteiro (1975) - With the Whole Body. Lispector's interviews with famous personalities.
- Aprendendo a viver (2004) – Learning to Live. A selection of columns from The Discovery of the World.
- Outros escritos (2005) – Other Writings. Diverse texts including interviews and stories.
- Correio feminino (2006) – Ladies' Mail. Selection of Lispector's texts, written pseudonymously, for Brazilian women's pages.
- Entrevistas (2007) – Interviews.
Correspondence
- Cartas perto do coração (2001) - Letters near the Heart. Letters exchanged with Fernando SabinoFernando SabinoFernando Sabino was a Brazilian writer and journalist.Sabino was born in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, where he lived until he was twenty, when he moved to Rio de Janeiro....
. - Correspondências (2002) - Correspondence
- Minhas queridas (2007) – My dears. Letters exchanged with her sisters Elisa LispectorElisa LispectorElisa Lispector was a Brazilian novelist....
and Tania Lispector Kaufmann.
Further reading
- Benjamin MoserBenjamin MoserBenjamin Moser is an American writer who lives in Utrecht, Netherlands with Arthur Japin and Lex Jansen since 2002.-Biography:...
, Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, Oxford University Press (2009), ISBN 978-0-19-538556-4 - Earl E. Fitz, Sexuality and Being in the Poststructuralist Universe of Clarice Lispector: The Différance of Desire, University of Texas Press (2001), ISBN 0-292-72529-9
- Levilson Reis, "Clarice Lispector," in Cynthia M. Tompkins and David W. Foster (Eds.), Notable Twentieth-Century Latin American Women (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2001), pp. 165–69.
External links
- New York Times on "An Enigmatic Author Who Can Be Addictive"
- An appreciation by Anderson Tepper in Nextbook
- Clarice Lispector: An Influential and Original Brazilian Writer
- Official site (in Portuguese).
- When it all happened...
- Biography (in Portuguese)
- Video Interview in 3 parts (in Portuguese)
- Reviews of journalistic prose