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Clarice Lispector: Uma Vida (2010)

by Benjamin Moser(Favorite Author)

4.28 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

9722630946 (ISBN13: 9789722630948)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Civilização

review 1: A colorful and detailed account of the life of a prolific Brazilian writer and celebrity.“I am so mysterious that I don’t even understand myself.”“Alongside my desire to defend my privacy, I have the intense desire to confess in public and not to a priest.”Her brand of confession was concerned with the inner truths she painstakingly unearthed throughout a life of unceasing meditation.the reader of Clarice Lispector sees a soul inside out.” Le Monde wrote.The soul exposed in her work is the soul of a single woman, but within it one finds the full range of human experience. Because she described so much of her intimate experience she could credibly be everything for everyone, venerated by those who found in her expressive genius a mirror of their own souls. As sh... moree said, “I am all of yourselves.”Born 10 Dec 1920, Chaya Pinkhasovna Lispector to a syphilitic mother in temps that reached 20 deg below zero in Chechelnik, Ukraine.Chaya means ‘life’ in Hebrew. and also, connotes ‘animal’fleur de lis and pector (chest or breast) = breast-lilyI am an object loved by God. And that makes flowers blossom upon my breast. He created me in the same way I created the sentence I just wrote: “I am an object loved by God,” and he enjoyed creating me as much as I enjoyed creating the phrase. And the more spirit the human object has, the greater is God’s satisfaction.White lilies pressing against the nudity of my breast. The lilies I offer to whatever hurts inside you. Since we are beings and needy. Even because certain things -- if not given away -- wither. For example -- beside the warmth of my body the petals of the lilies would wild. I call out to the light breeze for my future death. I will have to die because otherwise my petals will wilt. And that is why I given myself to death every day. I die and am reborn.I have also already died the death of others. But now I am dying intoxicated with life. And I bless the warmth of the living body that withers the white lilies. Desire, no longer moved by hope, calms and longs for nothing…I will be the impalpable substance that has no memory of the year before.Steppenwolf is a book about the glory of art and the price the artist pays for it… a philosophical meditation hung on a fantastic, loosely constructed story, that of the ‘wolf of the steppes.’“I meant to cry on the journey, because I always get nostalgic for myself. But luckily I’m a good healthy animal and slept very well, thanks. “God” calls me to him, when required.”“My drama: is that I am free.”An Apprenticeship or the Book of Pleasures“Don’t try to make yourself perfect -- don’t copy an ideal, copy yourself -- that is the only way to live.”“hate can transform itself into love”I didn’t know how to free you from the ‘fear of not loving.”In The Hour of the Star she announces her death, and she writes: Do not mourn the dead: they know what they are doing. A few days after its publication she would be taken to the hospital.“Give me your hand, because I have to hold it so that nothing hurts this much.”Paulo Francis: She became her own fiction. It is the best possible epitaph for Clarice.Since writing is a sacred thing which no infidel can enter, I am making a really bad book on purpose in order to drive off the profane who want to ‘like.’ But a small group will see that this ‘liking’ is superficial and will enter inside what I am truly writing, which is neither bad nor good.Inspiration is like a mysterious scent of amber. I have a small piece of amber with me. The scent makes me the sister of the sacred orgies of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Blessed by your loves.This future of mine shall be for you the past of someone dead. When you have finished this book, cry a halleluiah for me.When you close the last page of this frustrated and dauntless and silly book of life, then forget me. May God bless you then and this book ends well. That I might at last find respite. May peace be upon us, upon you, and upon me. I write and that way ride myself of me and then at last I can rest. - Clarice Lispector (1920-1977)
review 2: I feel like everything I've ever read has been priming me for Clarice Lispector; not that she's my new favorite writer, but I'm able to read her books entirely without suspicion. She writes about emotion, not melodrama, writes about experience as though it were the first time ever felt. Reminds me of music. Attempts to elucidate her mystique show how transparent she really is, vulnerable even, vulnerability being such a rare and precious thing in writers. "Still alive because it was only 9 in the morning," from a short story. And something, I can't find the quote, about sorrow without anger, like looking for the seafloor from a boat and not finding it, from "Near to the Wild Heart." Love it, can't get enough. less

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