Clarice Lispector: 'Morbidly insensitive'

Nearly 40 years after her death, the Brazilian novelist is now compared to Joyce and Borges. But do her radical works deserve such praise?

Introspective: Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector  

By Nicholas Shakespeare  

Clarice Lispector (1920-1977) was not a pseudonym. Tall, bewitching, with green, almond-shaped eyes and a guttural voice, she was one of the symbols of modern Brazil, along with Pelé, the musician Caetano Veloso, the architect Oscar Niemeyer and Copacabana. She lived on her own in Leme, a quiet enclave bordered with flame trees, a writer more gossiped about than read, with a reputation as an eccentric genius – known as “the great witch of Brazilian literature”.

I was a boy living on the next beach when, in June 1968, Lispector marched with other leading intellectuals against the dictatorship. But although I grew up to be a sucker for Latin American literature, I never came across her books, largely because, in the words of one of her editors, “publishers avoided her like the plague”. Even her closest friend admitted: “Nobody sought out Clarice. There was little discussion of her work.” It wasn’t simply her prose that was tricky. A young woman who had read her obsessively begged for a meeting in the hope of “a life-changing connection”. When the devotee arrived, Lispector sat and stared at her, saying nothing until the woman finally fled the apartment.

Literary fashions change faster than carnival floats. In Brazil today, Lispector’s Egyptian-cat face is on postage stamps and adverts for luxury condos, and her books are sold on the underground. Now rediscovered, she is routinely touted as a female Kafka, as the most important woman writing in Portuguese in the 20th century, as someone who looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf, and so on. Penguin Classics have caught the Lispector bug, issuing five of her novels – with puffs from writers such as Colm Tóibín, Jonathan Franzen and Orhan Pamuk – and a worshipful but fascinating biography by her most indefatigable champion Benjamin Moser.

Pleading (in vain) with film director Pedro Almodóvar to contribute an introduction to Lispector’s last novel, A Breath of Life, Moser goes into overdrive: “This is the most important project of translation into English of a Latin American author since the complete works of Jorge Luis Borges were published a decade ago.” The American poet Elizabeth Bishop, who befriended Lispector in Rio during the Sixties and who was the first to translate her stories, went further, writing to Robert Lowell: “Actually, I think she is better than JL Borges”.

We’ll come to that later, but first a word about her life. Lispector was a myth who refused to talk about her past. Withdrawn, introspective, beautiful, she was hounded and fogged by rumours and conjecture. She was a communist, a pious Catholic, a lesbian, a man, a diplomat. “Clarice Lispector doesn’t exist,” some said. “It’s the pseudonym of someone who lives in Europe.” Her reputation as a liar didn’t help. Yet, Moser argues, “almost every lie she told has to do with the circumstances of her birth”.

 

She was born to a syphilitic mother in minus 20 degrees in the Ukrainian village of Chechelnik, a region famous for its Jewish mystics. Her elegant, intellectual mother had been raped and infected by a gang of Russian soldiers in one of the pogroms that killed 250,000 Jews that year in Ukraine. “According to the folk superstitions of the remote area where they lived,” writes Moser, “a woman with syphilis could be cured by pregnancy. And so that is what her parents did.” Lispector was created to save her mother, but for her first nine years she was forced to watch her exiled parent dying painfully before her eyes. On their balcony in Recife, Brazil, where the family had fled in 1922, she enacted little plays to keep her paralysed mother awake – and to generate a miracle.
The cure failed, but Lispector never lost the habit of telling stories that might repair a traumatised world through the mystic means of her ancestors, even though the horrors of her childhood would alienate her from the world of others, making it always difficult for her to connect – most notably during her stifling years of marriage to a Brazilian diplomat, living in Naples, Bern, Torquay and Washington.
She had been christened Chaya, the Hebrew word for “life” and also for “animal”. It was with animals that she most identified herself, once boasting that she came straight from the zoological gardens. Given a choice, she would have been born a horse. A dog was her closest friend. She was profoundly unliterary – the most non-literary writer I’ve ever met,” reckoned Bishop, “like a primitive painter”. Lispector’s belief that “any cat, any dog is worth more than literature” is an echo of Borges’s assertion that five minutes of anyone’s life is worth more than all of Shakespeare.
Unlike Borges, she avoided the conventional demands of narrative. It was an axiom of pride to deny the reader, for example, the satisfaction of anecdote (“Ah, I know so many interesting stories,” she writes teasingly). Her focus was to live in the moment, musing in vague, self-replicating abstractions that divide continually, like amoebas. To this end, she preferred to shave her characters of virtually all biographical trappings. Invariably, they are excessively sensitive versions of herself, a febrile middle-class housewife who glides silently through the world with a wide-open mouth, taking in the plankton (“Everything touches me – I see too much, I hear too much”).

In 1942, one month after Stefan Zweig committed suicide near Rio, she began her first novel Near to the Wild Heart, its title taken from a line of Joyce, whom she had not then read, but to whom she was instantly compared. Moser describes the furore that greeted publication as “Hurricane Clarice”. But despite a widespread recognition of her genius, she found it hard to get published. In 1964, she wrote what many regard as her masterpiece, The Passion According to GH.
What Moser believes is “one of the greatest novels of the 20th century” features yet another woman like Lispector going into the empty room of her maid, who had quit the day before, and half-crushing a cockroach in the wardrobe. The woman sees in the white pus leeching out of the roach the same divine matter that lies at her own centre (as well as her mother’s) – and is compelled to taste it in a grotesque parody of the Host. “What I was seeing was life looking back at me… a mud in which the roots of my identity were still shifting.”
Reading these novels, one can see why Clarice Lispector has never become a household name in Europe. She once overheard her maid in the laundry room singing a mournful song without words. “I asked her whose song it was, and she replied, it’s just my nonsense; it’s nobody’s.” To read Lispector is to watch a sleepwalker with eyes open groping towards an unknown destination, or a woman at a seance practising automatic writing in order to discover what she actually thinks. “Now I’m going to write wherever my hand leads… I’ll take my freedom into my hands and write I-don’t-care-what?, truly awful, but me.” At its most effective, it’s the sort of writing, especially appealing to anyone susceptible to poltergeists, which, if read at a certain age, can hurl you into writing yourself. The Brazilian singer Cazuza claims to have read Agua Viva 111 times, and the 17-year-old Caetano Veloso was swept away by what he interpreted as “the unspeakable luminosity of madness”. Alfred Knopf, though, spoke for a majority of more mature readers when he declared, after finishing Lispector’s novel The Apple in the Dark, that he “didn’t understand a word of it”.
It grieves me to find myself tilting with some reluctance in Knopf’s direction. After approaching Lispector with a delicious sense of anticipation and then feasting on her for a fortnight, I have to report that the result is wildly hit and miss, producing a lot of what Evelyn Waugh called “gibberish”, and morbidly insensitive to readers who thirst for plot, character development, lucidity, precision, irony, excitement and humour (“the funniest thing is that I never learned how to live”). If Clarice Lispector is indeed to be placed on a shelf alongside Kafka, Woolf and Joyce, as her champions stridently demand, it’s also to serve as a reminder of what they are not.
Why This World: a Biography of Clarice Lispector by Benjamin Moser is published by Penguin Classics (£12.99). The novels Near to the Wild Heart, Hour of the Star, The Passion According to GH, Agua Viva and A Breath of Life have been reissued by Penguin Classics (£8.99 & £ 7.99)