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 instructions. He was not to budge so much as a single comma. She was still “drying out the book,” she told Severino, before handing it over to her publisher. But a year later, in June 1972, the book had not appeared, and Severino wrote to ask if she still wanted him to proceed. When she answered, the manuscript had another name. “As for the book—I interrupted it—because I thought it wasn’t achieving what I wanted to achieve,” she wrote. “I can’t publish it as it is. Either I am not going to publish it or I am going to work on it. Maybe in a few months I will work on the Loud Object.” The process of “drying out,”
