There was a time, in my early twenties, when I teetered on the edge: I was living in Harlem like a squatter; I was drifting between magazine jobs (publications all seemed to fold soon after I joined); I was looking for signs—signs of meaning and depth, something deeper, at least, than the rattling, old, C local train running below my apartment. I hungered for books and literary voyages, and I found a few to feast on: Julio Cortázar’s
Around the Day in Eighty Worlds, García Lorca’s
A Poet in New York (his paean to the city and Harlem). And then, between jobs, I returned to Columbia University and audited a class called “Female Sexuality in the Twentieth-Century Latin American Novel.” Everything about that course title intrigued me, how can I deny it? And that’s where I discovered her, the Brazilian-Jewish writer Clarice Lispector.
Clarice Lispector
Had I been preparing myself for Lispector? Had I been waiting for her, inventing her? Whatever the answers, there she was, staring out from the book jacket of her first novel,
Near to the Wild Heart, published in 1944 when she was just 24 (or thereabouts), her gaze looking right through me. As the translator Gregory Rabassa famously put it: “I was flabbergasted to meet that rare person who looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf.” My infatuation was total: the name—Clarice Lispector—the pure, icy alliteration of it; the eyes, with their magnetic, almost clairvoyant intensity; the title itself, which echoed my own mood, my reckless longing.
But it was the writing that froze me in my tracks. The story of a middle-class girl’s cloistered childhood and loveless marriage,
Near to the Wild Heart shimmers with a rich interior life, a bursting, exuberant explosion of language and imagery. With each new passage in Joana’s life, each inch of self-realization she achieves, it thrums, it levitates. “She fell silent once more, peering into herself,” Lispector writes. “She remembered: I am the tiny wave that has no other region except the sea, I tussle with myself, I glide, I fly, laughing, giving, sleeping, but alas, always within myself, always within myself.” Her writing struck a chord in me. The language she spoke—stripped-down, breathless, soul-baring, poised at the brink of breakdown or revelation—was mine. Was I projecting? Was I reaching for her books with the desperation, the hunger, of a lover? Of course I was.
And so I carried on, and was bewitched by the rest of her fiction as well—eerie, existential vignettes, savant-like parables and prophesies of modern angst seared by the Brazilian sun. Her work called to mind a tropical, female Kafka with sensory overload. As the French literary critic and philosopher
Hélène Cixous put it: “I discovered an immense writer, the equivalent for me of Kafka, with something more: This was a woman, writing as a woman. I discovered Kafka and it was a woman.” Unlike Kafka’s however, Lispector’s work—though obsessed with Brazilianness and a sense of belonging—had little to say about its own Jewishness. As
Grace Paley writes in the introduction to Lispector’s book of stories,
Soulstorm: “I thought at one point in my reading that there was some longing for Europe, the Old World; but decided I was wrong. It was simply longing.” And according to
Moacyr Scliar, Brazil’s foremost Jewish writer, Lispector “didn’t deny her Jewishness, but she didn’t push it. The reason why this happened is still the subject of discussion here in Brazil.” Perhaps this, too, fueled my fascination with Lispector: What traces of my own Jewishness did I find there, reflected by the dazzling surfaces of her work?
I was hooked; I sought out all of her works in translation. And yet, the more I read and learned of her, the more the mystery of her grew. Who exactly was Clarice Lispector, this strange, iconoclastic figure of Brazilian letters, this woman who wrote as if in a trance, her words burning off the page? Here is where I should delve into her biography, I know, and describe it for you—her immigration, when she was just two months old, from a Ukrainian shtetl to Recife, in the northeast of Brazil; her teenage years in Rio de Janeiro; her marriage to a diplomat, with postings around Europe in the 1940s and 1950s; her divorce and solitary writing life, again in Rio; her death from cancer in 1977.
But, the truth is, each time I read of it, it’s different. Was it in 1920, or 1924, that the family made their voyage to Brazil? Was their home village called Tchechelnik, Checkelnik, or something else? Was her first language Yiddish, which the Lispectors (Pedro and Marietta and their three daughters, Clarice, Elisa, and Tanya) spoke at home—or Portuguese, as Clarice insisted? (“It was the Portuguese language which influenced my spiritual life and innermost thoughts, and this was the language I used to utter words of love,” she wrote.) “She told different people different things about what town she lived in and when she was born,” the scholar Earl Fritz has said. “She wore a lot of masks, and when she would take one off you’d think she was revealing something, but all she was revealing was another mask.”
And so I formed a hazy picture of her from her books and their varying prefaces and afterwords. There were the collections of stories,
Soulstorm and
Family Ties: short, precise character studies—of daughters, wives, lonely and rebellious women—pierced with fleeting epiphanies, glimpses of life caught askew, unhinged, refracted as if in shards of glass and mirrors. The novels, full of rambling metaphysics and streams and streams of consciousness, ranged from the slim and whispery, like
An Apprenticeship or The Book of Delights and
The Hour of the Star, to the dense and unwieldy, like
The Apple in the Dark (her magnum opus). And then there were the unclassifiable, the pastiches of fiction and reverie:
The Stream of Life,
The Passion According to G.H. “This is not simply a narrative,” Lispector writes in
The Hour of the Star, “but above all primary life that breathes, breathes, breathes.”
The Hour of the Star, in fact, manages to compress most of Lispector’s obsessions into one tiny thumbnail of a book. Macabéa, a driftless immigrant from the northeast, shuttles to and from her job as a typist, her boarding house, and a soulless love affair in Rio, while slowly gaining inklings of her own freedom and ultimately finding redemption. In Macabéa, too, one can find perhaps a touch of Jewish symbolism: Does the name refer to the Maccabees, the Jewish warriors who recaptured Jerusalem from the Greeks in 164 BCE? There are few overt references to Judaism in her work—rather, she gives us priests, cathedrals, angels, and the almost divine powers of writing and “the word” itself. In the hallucinatory story “Where Were You at Night,” however, Lispector writes of a “poor Jew” who lives in a “dirt-cheap boarding house” surrounded by prostitutes and cockroaches. But he is just one of the collection’s many characters—teachers, seamstresses, architects, transvestites, erotic dancers—searching for salvation in cities real and imagined.
Love Story
The Minimalist
Temple Seeker
“Paint It Jewish!”
Speculative Friction
