lava from mount vesuvius

a blog about Clarice Lispector

[1920-1977]

How can the gift be given without creating the other the prisoner of the gift? This is extremely hard to do in reality, even in the strongest and most generous relationships. It is the subject of Clarice Lispector’s writing. She does not make a theory of it, she gives concrete examples. Her narratives contain the possibility of a practice. Perhaps this possibility can only exist in texts. But at least in her writing it is there, it makes itself felt, it appears.

Hélène Cixous, (tr. Deborah Jenson, modified by Susan Sellers) in a radio broadcast transmitted in 1987, “Au bon plaisir d’Hélène Cixous”—“At Hélène Cixous’ Pleasure,” featured in The Hélène Cixous Reader (ed. Susan Sellers)

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​I once tried to look at a person’s face up close—a girl selling tickets at the movies. To learn the secret of her life. In vain. The other person is an enigma. And with the eyes of a statue: blind.

— Clarice Lispector, from The Complete Stories: “Explanation”

[1920-1977]

She was, all the time, ruefully aware of the limitations that writing imposed on her. Part of her dark vision included a sad knowledge of the frailty of the very words and phrases she used, the necessary thinness of her own observations and her games with form.

Colm Tóibín on Clarice Lispector in his article “She Played Hard with Happiness”

[1920-1977]

Clarice Lispector *

[theoldestchorusgirlintheworld]

Because I was making an incorrect mathematical calculation about love: I thought that, in adding up everything I understood, I loved. I didn’t know that, adding up everything you don’t understand is the way to truly love. Because I, just from having felt affection, thought that loving is easy. It’s because I didn’t want solemn love, not understanding that solemnity ritualizes incomprehension and transforms it into an offering. And also because I’ve always tended to fight a lot, fighting everything is my way of doing things. It’s because deep down I want to love the thing I would love – and not what it is. It’s because I’m still not myself, and so the punishment is loving a world that’s not itself.

Clarice Lispector, Forgiving God (trans. Katrina Dodson)

[1920-1977]

Graduation portraits of Clarice Lispector and her sister, Tania *

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She was a fantastic figure, an extremely generous woman, but even so it was not easy to be with her. She carried a load of anxiety that I have rarely seen in my life. It’s very difficult to be around someone like that. Full-time self-centered, not because she wanted to be, out of vanity, but a real difficulty, in connecting. She couldn’t turn herself off, and when her anxiety heated up, it reached overpowering levels, and she had no rest, she could not calm down. At those times living was a torment for her. She couldn’t stand herself. And other people couldn’t stand her.

Andréa Azulay, describing Clarice Lispector, featured in Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector (via violentwavesofemotion)

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I am troubled and harsh and hopeless. Though I have love inside me. But I don’t know how to use love. Sometimes it scratches like barbs.

Clarice Lispector, tr. by Elizabeth Lowe, from Água Viva / The Stream of Life (via violentwavesofemotion)

[1920-1977]

The other day, a friend of mine, a Brazilian writer, said it took Brazil half a century to absorb her [Clarice Lispector], and they’re not done yet. I think that there’s no denying that, as much as she writes about apparently accessible subjects—all her housewives with headaches—the books are extremely strange and disconcerting. In the opening of The Passion According to G.H., she warns people away from the book unless their “souls are already formed.” And it sounds a bit melodramatic. But then you read the book and you realize that she was not at all speaking flippantly. That is a book powerful enough to destroy a human being, someone who is not prepared for it. And all her writing has a quality of spiritual rigor and emotional relentlessness that makes them far more difficult to absorb. What happened in Brazil is similar to what is happening now. She was read by a small group of the intellectual elite, mainly in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. People in a few neighborhoods. And then her passionate readers recruited others, who recruited others. Journalists, singers, critics, actresses, teachers brought her to more and more people. And then it reached a critical mass, and she became the most famous of modern Brazilian writers. That was certainly not the case in her lifetime. And in English, the more she is read and absorbed, the more apparent it will become that what I’ve always said, things that everyone thought were exaggerations, are obviously true—that she is, for example, the greatest Jewish writer since Kafka.

Benjamin Moser on the renewed interest in Clarice Lispector’s works

[1920-1977]

Since I was a little girl I had seen and felt the predominance of men’s ideas over women’s. Mama, before she got married, according to Aunt Emília, was a firecracker, a tempestuous redhead, with thoughts of her own about liberty and equality for women. But then along came Papa, very serious and tall, with thoughts of his own too, about . . . liberty and equality for women. The trouble was in the coinciding subject matter.

Clarice Lispector, Jimmy and I (from The Complete Stories, tr. Katrina Dodson)

[burningourbridges]

Things were somehow so good that they were in danger of becoming very bad because what is fully mature is very close to rotting.

Clarice Lispector (via burningourbridges)

[1920-1977]

Clarice Lispector in her Rio de Janeiro apartment, c. 1967

[1920-1977]

if you love her lms