Near to the Wild Heart is Clarice Lispector's first novel, written from March to November 1942 and published around her twenty-third birthday. The novel, written in a stream-of-consciousness style reminiscent of the English-language Modernists, centers around the childhood and early adulthood of ...
A first version, entitled Beyond Thought: Monologue with Life, was already complete by July 12, 1971, when Clarice met Alexandrino Severino, a Portuguese professor at Vanderbilt University. She gave him a copy of the manuscript for translation into English, along with specific procedural instruct...
I had reached the nothing, and the nothing was living and moist. It was then — it was then that as if from a tube the matter began slowly oozing out of the roach that had been crushed.The roach’s matter, which was its insides, the thick, whitish and slow matter, was coming out as from a tube of t...
One may have to find other modes, other ways of approaching it: one can sing it. One is in another world. The text does not keep, hold back, and one cannot retain it. Does this mean it is only water? Absolutely not. It is living water, full water. It escapes the first rule of text. It is not line...
I — I who exist. There’s a voluptuousness in being someone. I am no longer silence. I feel so impotent while living — life that sums up all the disparate and dissonant opposites in a single and ferocious stance: rage.I finally reached the nothing. And in my satisfaction at having reached in mysel...
Giovanni Pontiero Manchester, June 1985 Afterword Clarice Lispector died of cancer at the age of fifty-six on 9 December 1977. The Hour of the Star was published that same year and acclaimed by the critics as 'a regional allegory' of extraordinary awareness and insight...
I looked and all I saw was the sea that must have been very salty, blue sea, white houses. What about the dead man? The dead man in brine. I don’t want to die! I screamed mutely inside my dress. The dress is yellow and blue. What about me? dying of heat, not dead from the ...