I knew Clarice Lispector by reputation as an avant-garde author from Brazil, without knowing much about the nature of her experimental approach. Many of her books were published in English during a renaissance about a decade ago, so I had plenty of options to choose from. I decided on the Complete Stories since it would give me a view of her entire career –– and manageable pieces if her experiments were too much for me.
It was the correct choice, I think. The chronological organization of the collection enables you to see Lispector's style developing, and I can identify the precise year when she lost me: 1971.
From the beginning, Lispector had an odd depersonalized prose style that works surprisingly well with her interior stories about women undergoing personal transformations. For example, from the very first page:
Luisa remains motionless, sprawled atop the tangled sheets, her hair spread out on the pillow. An arm here, another there, crucified by lassitude.
It is Luisa who is "crucified by lassitude," but the phrase appears in a sentence with a couple of disembodied arms. In another story, a woman looks at herself in a mirror while a tram causes the room to shake: "Her eyes didn't leave themselves." A woman turning eighty-nine: "The birthday girl's facial muscles no longer expressed her, so no one could tell whether she was in a good mood."
I found many of the stories in the first half of the book unexpected and moving. In the stories from the 1970s, I felt the balance between her off-kilter style and the emotional content tipped too far toward the former.
I believe I will return to (the first half of) this book in the future. If I decide to pursue Lispector's novels, I'll definitely choose one of her earlier ones, such as Near to the Wild Heart or The Passion According to G.H..
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