Musica clarice lispector biography
Clarice Lispector
Lispector had an ability to write as though no one had ever written before. One of the hidden geniuses of the twentieth century, in the same league as Flann O’Brien, Borges, and Pessoa—utterly original and brilliant, haunting and disturbing.
— Colm Tóibín
Clarice Lispector was born in 1920 to a Jewish family in western Ukraine. As a result of the anti-Semitic violence they endured, the family fled to Brazil in 1922, and Clarice Lispector grew up in Recife. Following the death of her mother when Clarice was nine, she moved to Rio de Janeiro with her father and two sisters, and she went on to study law. With her husband, who worked for the foreign service, she lived in Italy, Switzerland, England, and the United States, until they separated and she returned to Rio in 1959; she died there in 1977. Since her death, Clarice Lispector has earned universal recognition as Brazil’s greatest modern writer.
Covert Joy: Selected Stories
This radiant selection of Clarice Lispector’s best and best-loved stories includes such familiar favorites as “The Smallest Woman in the World,” “Love,” “Family Ties,” and “The Egg and the Chicken.” Lispector’s luminous regard for life’s small revelatory incidents is legendary, and here her genius is concentrated in a fizzing, portable volume. Covert Joy offers the particular bliss a book can bring that she expresses in the title story:
Joy would always be covert for me. . . Sometimes I’d sit in the hammock, swinging with the book open on my lap, not touching it, in the purest ecstasy. I was no longer a girl with a book: I was a woman with her lover.
The Apple in the Dark
“It’s the best one,” Clarice Lispector remarked on the occasion of the publication of The Apple in the Dark: “I can’t define it, how it is, I can only say that it’s much better constructed than the previous ones.” A book in three chapters, with three central characters, The Apple in the Dark is in fac
Tchetchelnik, Ucrania, 1920 - Rio de Janeiro, Brasil , 1977
Clarice Lispector is considered to be one of the most important Brazilian writers of the twentieth century. She studied law in Rio de Janeiro while writing for some local newspapers and journals. In 1944 she revolutionised the Brazilian literary world with the publication of her book Perto do Coração Selvagem, a novel for which she was awarded the Prêmio Graça Aranha. She travelled to and lived in a range of countries in Europe and the United States with her husband, the diplomat Maury Gurgel Valente. Lispector is difficult to classify as an author, and she herself describes her style as a “non-style”. Her vast production includes short stories, novels, children’s literature, poems, photography and painting.
- “One of the hidden geniuses of the twentieth century.” Colm Tóibín
- “Sphinx, sorceress, sacred monster. The revival of the hypnotic Clarice Lispector has been one of the true literary events of the 21st century” Parul Sehgal, The New York Times
- “Better than Borges.” Elizabeth Bishop
- “One of the twentieth century’s most mysterious writers.” Orhan Pamuk
- “A truly remarkable writer.” Jonathan Franzen
- “A writer of great, cryptic power.” The New York Times
Bibliography
All the Letters brings together the correspondence written by Clarice Lispector throughout her life. This selection of letters, of which about half are unknown to the public, provides a basic resource for understanding the author's literary career.
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Novel
Um sopro de vida, 1978
A mystical dialogue between a male author (a thinly disguised Clarice Lispector) and his/her creation, a woman named Angela, this posthumous work has never before been translated. Lispector did not even live to see it published. The connection between literature and witchcraft has long been an important part of the Clarice mythology, which endures even now, nearly forty years after her death.PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY PAULO GURGEL VALENTE Catholic communicants are asked at Easter, “Do you renounce the glamour of evil, and refuse to be mastered by sin?” The question preserves a conflation, now rare, of glamour and sorcery: glamour was a quality that confounds, shifts shapes, invests a thing with a mysterious aura; it was, as Sir Walter Scott wrote, “the magic power of imposing on the eyesight of spectators, so that the appearance of an object shall be totally different from the reality.” The legendarily beautiful Clarice Lispector, tall and blonde, clad in the outspoken sunglasses and chunky jewelry of a grande dame of midcentury Rio de Janeiro, met our current definition of glamour. She spent years as a fashion journalist and knew how to look the part. But it is as much in the older sense of the word that Clarice Lispector is glamorous: as a caster of spells, literally enchanting, her nervous ghost haunting every branch of the Brazilian arts. Her spell has grown unceasingly since her death. Then, in 1977, it would have seemed exaggerated to say she was her country’s preëminent modern writer. Today, when it no longer does, questions of artistic importance are, to a certain extent, irrelevant. What matters is the magnetic love she inspires in those susceptible to her. For them, reading Clarice Lispector is one of the great emotional experiences of their lives. But her glamour is dangerous. “Be careful with Clarice,” a friend told a reader decades ago, using the single name by which she is universally known. “It’s not literature. It’s witchcraft.” The connection between literature and witchcraft has long been an important part of the Clarice mythology. That mythology, with a powerful boost from the Internet, which magically transforms rumors into facts, has developed ramifications so bar
At her death, a mountain of fragments remained to be “structured” by Olga Borelli. These fragments form a dialogue betwe Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector
The first time the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector was interviewed, following her sensational debut in 1944 with the novel Near to the Wild Heart, she was asked why she writes: “I write because I find in it a pleasure that I don’t know how to translate. I’m not pretentious. I write for myself, to hear my soul talking and singing, sometimes crying.” She said she believed all writing, in some sense, was autobiographical: “After all Flaubert was right when he said: ‘Madame Bovary c’est moi.’ One is always at the forefront.” Shortly before her death, she stated:
“I write as if to save somebody’s life. Probably my own life.” (A Breath of Life, 1978)
Benjamin Moser’s thorough biography of Clarice Lispector, Why This World, struggles, and wonderfully fails, to bring us closer to the writer he describes as, “weird, mysterious, and difficult, an unknowable mystical genius far above, and outside, the common run of humanity.” Indeed, Lispector’s entire project as a woman and a writer was to remain unknown while simultaneously exposing herself. “I am so mysterious I don’t even understand myself,” says Lispector in one breath; in the next, “My mystery is that I have no mystery.” Her carefully constructed auto-biographical conundrum dictates that the only way into Clarice Lispector is via the individual reader’s esoteric engagement with her writing; Moser admits to having in this manner “fallen in love” with her himself. In a valiant attempt to describe Lispector’s unknown/known quality, he writes:
The soul exposed in her work is the soul of a single woman, but within it one finds the full range of human experience. This is why Clarice Lispector has been described as just about everything: a woman and a man, a native and a foreigner, a Jew and a Christian, a child and an adult, an animal and a person, a lesbian and a hou