Clarice Lispector (; Chaya Pinkhasivna Lispector; December 10, 1920December 9, 1977) was a Brazilian novelist and short story writer. Her distinctive and innovative works, which explore diverse narrative forms and themes of intimacy and introspection, have earned her international acclaim. She is known for works such as Near to the Wild Heart (1943) and The Hour of the Star (1977).
Clarice arrived in Brazil before she turned two years old, with her family, amidst the pogroms that followed the collapse of the Russian Empire. Born to a Jewish family in Podolia in Western Ukraine, she grew up in Recife, the capital of the northeastern state of Pernambuco, where her mother died when Clarice was nine. The family moved to Rio de Janeiro when she was in her teens. While in law school in Rio, she began publishing her first journalistic work and short stories, catapulting to fame at the age of 23 with the publication of her first novel, Near to the Wild Heart (Perto do Coração Selvagem), written as an interior monologue in a style and language that was considered revolutionary in Brazil.
In 1944, Lispector spent the next decade and a half in Europe and the United States due to her marriage to a Brazilian diplomat. After returning to Rio de Janeiro in 1959, she published the stories of Family Ties (Laços de Família) and the novel The Passion According to G.H. (A Paixão Segundo G.H.). Injured in an accident in 1966, she spent the last decade of her life in frequent pain, steadily writing and publishing novels and stories, including the celebrated Água Viva, until her premature death in 1977.
Lispector has been the subject of numerous books, and references to her and her work are common in Brazilian literature and music. Several of her works have been turned into films. In 2009, the American writer Benjamin Moser published Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector. Since that publication, her works have been the object of an extensive project of retranslation, published by New Directions Publishing and Penguin Modern Classics, the first Brazilian to enter that prestigious series. Moser, who is also the editor of her anthology The Complete Stories (2015), describes Lispector as the most important Jewish writer in the world since Franz Kafka.Ha, T. H., "Clarice Lispector's Magical Prose", The Atlantic, August 21, 2015.
Early life, emigration and Recife Clarice Lispector was born Chaya Lispector in Chechelnyk, Podolia, a rural shtetl in the Ukrainian SSR. She was the youngest of three daughters of Pinkhas Lispector and Mania Krimgold Lispector. Her family suffered significantly in the pogroms that followed the collapse of the Russian Empire, circumstances later dramatized in her older sister Elisa Lispector's autobiographical novel No exílio (In Exile, 1948). They left in the winter of 1921, and they eventually managed to flee to Romania, from where they emigrated to Brazil, where her mother Mania had relatives. They sailed from Hamburg and arrived in Brazil in the early months of 1922, when Clarice was little more than one year old.
The Lispectors changed their names upon arrival. Pinkhas became Pedro; Mania became Marieta; Leah became Elisa, and Chaya became Clarice. Only the middle daughter, Tania (April 19, 1915 – November 15, 2007), kept her name. They first settled in the northeastern city of Maceió, Alagoas. Her mother, who was paralyzed, was in rapidly declining health during this period, possibly due to trauma-related hemiplegia (some speculate that Marieta was raped in the Ukraine pogroms, but this has not been confirmed),Gotlib, Nádia Battella, Clarice, uma vida que se conta (in Portuguese), São Paulo, Ática, 1995; Ferreira, Teresa Cristina Montero, Eu sou uma pergunta (in Portuguese), Rio de Janeiro, Rocco, 1999. and, later, with tremors caused by Parkinson's disease.Jeronimo, Thiago C., 'Benjamim Moser: quando a luz dos holofotes interessa mais que a ética acadêmica'. DLCV - Língua, linguística e Literatura, 14(1), 8-20, 2018.https://doi.org/10.22478/ufpb.2237-0900.2018v14n1.42212 After three years, the Lispector family moved to the city of Recife, Pernambuco, settling in the neighbourhood of Boa Vista, where they lived at number 367 in the Praça Maciel Pinheiro and later in the Rua da Imperatriz.
In Recife, where her father continued to struggle economically, her mother finally died on September 21, 1930, aged 42, when Clarice was nine. Clarice attended the Colégio Hebreo-Idisch-Brasileiro, which taught Hebrew and Yiddish in addition to the usual subjects. In 1932, she gained admission to the Ginásio Pernambucano, then the most prestigious secondary school in the state. A year later, strongly influenced by Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf, she "consciously claimed the desire to write".Lispector, Clarice. "Escrever." In: A Descoberta do mundo, p. 304.
In 1935, Pedro Lispector decided to move with his daughters to the then-capital, Rio de Janeiro, where he hoped to find more economic opportunity and also to find Jewish husbands for his daughters. The family lived in the neighborhood of São Cristóvão, north of downtown Rio, before moving to Tijuca. In 1937, she entered the Law School of the University of Brazil, then one of the most prestigious institutions of higher learning in the country. Her first known story, "Triunfo", was published in the magazine Pan on May 25, 1940.Gotlib, Nádia Battella. Clarice Fotobiografia, São Paulo, Edusp, 2007, p. 123. Soon afterwards, on August 26, 1940, as a result of a botched gallbladder operation, her father died, aged 55.
While still in law school, Clarice began working as a journalist, first at the official government press service the Agência Nacional and then at the important newspaper A Noite. Lispector would come into contact with the younger generation of Brazilian writers, including Lúcio Cardoso, with whom she fell in love. Cardoso was gay, however, and she soon began seeing a law school colleague named Maury Gurgel Valente, who had entered the Brazilian Foreign Service, known as Itamaraty. Eager to be recognised as Brazilian, she applied for citizenship the moment she turned 21, the earliest age that law allowed, and was naturalised January 12, 1943. Eleven days later she married Gurgel.
Near to the Wild Heart
In December 1943, Lispector published her first novel, Perto do coração selvagem (Near to the Wild Heart). The novel, which tells of the inner life of a young woman named Joana, caused a sensation. In October 1944, the book won the prestigious Graça Aranha Prize for the best debut novel of 1943. One critic, the poet Lêdo Ivo, called it "the greatest novel a woman has ever written in the Portuguese language."Instituto Moreira Salles, Clarice Lispector: Cadernos de Literatura Brasileira, IMS, p. 49. Another wrote that Lispector had "shifted the center of gravity around which the Brazilian novel had been revolving for about twenty years".Jorge de Lima, "Romances de Mulher", Gazeta de Notícias, November 1, 1944. "Clarice Lispector's work appears in our literary world as the most serious attempt at the introspective novel," wrote the São Paulo critic Sérgio Milliet. "For the first time, a Brazilian author goes beyond simple approximation in this almost virgin field of our literature; for the first time, an author penetrates the depths of the psychological complexity of the modern soul."Sérgio Milliet, Diário Crítico, Vol. 2.
This novel, like all of her subsequent works, was marked by an intense focus on interior emotional states. When the novel was published, many claimed that her stream-of-consciousness writing style was heavily influenced by Virginia Woolf or James Joyce, but she only read these authors after the book was ready.Lispector, Clarice. "Correspondências – Clarice Lispector (organized by Teresa Montero)", Rio de Janeiro, Rocco, 2002. Based on private letters she exchanged with Lúcio Cardoso and her sister Tania. The epigraph from Joyce and the title, which is taken from Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, were both suggested by Lúcio Cardoso.
Shortly afterwards, Lispector and Maury Gurgel left Rio for the northern city of Belém, in the state of Pará, at the mouth of the Amazon. There, Maury served as a liaison between the Foreign Ministry and the Allies who were using northern Brazil as a military base in World War II.
Europe and the United States On July 29, 1944, Lispector left Brazil for the first time since she had arrived as a child, destined for Naples, where Gurgel was posted to the Brazilian Consulate.Gotlib, p. 172. Naples was the staging post for the troops of the Brazilian Expeditionary Force whose soldiers were fighting on the Allied side against the Nazis. She worked at the city's military hospital, taking care of wounded Brazilian troopsMoser, Benjamin (2009). Why this World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector. Oxford University Press. . p. 146. In Rome, Lispector met the Italian poet Giuseppe Ungaretti, who translated parts of Near to the Wild Heart, and had her portrait painted by Giorgio de Chirico. In Naples, she completed her second novel, O Lustre (The Chandelier, 1946), which like the first focused on the interior life of a girl, this time one named Virgínia. This longer and more difficult book also met with an enthusiastic critical reception, although it had a lower impact than Near to the Wild Heart. Gilda de Melo e Sousa wrote, "Possessed of an enormous talent and a rare personality, she will have to suffer, fatally, the disadvantages of both, since she so amply enjoys their benefits."De Mello e Souza, Gilda. "O lustre," Estado de S. Paulo, July 14, 1946. After a short visit to Brazil in 1946, Lispector and Gurgel returned to Europe in April 1946, where he was posted to the embassy in Bern, Switzerland. This was a time of considerable boredom and frustration for Lispector, who was often depressed. "This Switzerland," she wrote her sister Tania, "is a cemetery of sensations."Olga Borelli, Clarice Lispector: esboço para um possível retrato, p. 114. Her son Pedro Gurgel Valente was born in Bern on September 10, 1948, and in the city she wrote her third novel, A cidade sitiada (The Besieged City, 1946).
The book Lispector wrote in Bern, The Besieged City, tells the story of Lucrécia Neves, and the growth of her town, São Geraldo, from a little settlement to a large city. The book, which is full of metaphors of vision and seeing, met with a tepid reception and was "perhaps the least loved of Clarice Lispector's novels", according to a close friend of Lispector's.Marly de Oliveira quoted in Regina Pontieri, Clarice Lispector, Uma poética do olhar, p. 37. Sérgio Milliet concluded that "the author succumbs beneath the weight of her own richness."Sérgio Milliet, Diário Crítico, Vol. VII, pp. 33-34. And the Portuguese critic João Gaspar Simões wrote: "Its hermeticism has the texture of the hermeticism of dreams. May someone find the key."João Gaspar Simões, "Clarice Lispector 'Existencialista' ou 'Supra-realista'", Diário Carioca (May 28, 1950).
After leaving Switzerland in 1949 and spending almost a year in Rio, Lispector and Gurgel traveled to Torquay, Devon, where he was a delegate to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). They remained in England from September 1950 until March 1951. Lispector liked England, though she suffered a miscarriage on a visit to London.Edilberto Coutinho, Criaturas de papel, p. 170.
In 1952, back in Rio, where the family would stay about a year, Lispector published a short volume of six stories called Alguns contos (Some Stories) in a small edition sponsored by the Ministry of Education and Health. These stories formed the core of the later Laços de família (Family Ties), 1960. She also worked under the pseudonym Teresa Quadros as a women's columnist at the short-lived newspaper Comício.