Clarice Lispector Overview

For most of the twentieth century, even as Latin American writers began to achieve world renown for their cutting-edge work, Brazil found itself without a laureate. That is, until Clarice Lispector joined the fray. Born in the Ukraine, Lispector was raised... [more]

For most of the twentieth century, even as Latin American writers began to achieve world renown for their cutting-edge work, Brazil found itself without a laureate. That is, until Clarice Lispector joined the fray. Born in the Ukraine, Lispector was raised in northeastern Brazil, where she was exposed to the region's ritualistic story-telling methods and traditional folklore. Her work is deeply informed by these traditions, and she transfers the beauty of her adopted culture to the deeply introspective nature of her texts. As a writer, she understood the fragility of language in matters of human relations -- she employed an arsenal of linguistic tricks in order to highlight this innate instability and to expose its potential to strangle human connections. Lispector was primarily preoccupied with characters' internal struggles, and she excelled at bringing out these tensions in her short stories. With "Alguns Contos" (1952), a collection of several lyrical stories, she initiated her artistic attempt to comprehend human relationships from the perspective of Brazilian women. However, critical and popular success didn't come until the publication of "Lacos de Familia" (1960), a study of familial and romantic love that earned laudatory comparisons to the works of Modernist masters Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. Lispector, determined to expand her repertoire, published "A Maca no Escuro" (1961), an award-winning, exceedingly sophisticated novel that probes the effect of language on reality and earned a space for its author on the global literary map. In "gua Viva" Lispector let her linguistic talents flourish completely. Casting narrative structure aside, she focused on capturing the living event in language, as an Abstract Expressionist like de Kooning might do in paint. Her sentences literally move like water; rhythm and sound take precedent over meaning; every utterance maintains an intimate relation to the immediate state of the writer's body. Ultimately, Lispector vacillated between basking in the adequate expression of immediate experience, and relinquishing herself to incomplete, unsatisfactory utterances. Mastering the intricacies of middle-class existence and experimental lyricism, Clarice Lispector spearheaded a cultural revolution that demonstrated Brazil's artistic activity and literary potential to a global audience. [show less]