Perhaps the best way to understand and appreciate the prose style Clarice Lispector uses in “Near to the Wild Heart” is to consider how her young protagonist, Joana, thinks and feels about the world, the fact of her existence in it, and how she responds to the people around her. Joana’s philosophy of life is expressed in numerous and varied ways throughout the novel, but it comes down to a couple of basic tenets. One of them we learn early on when Joana is still a student in school. Studying math one day, she comes to the realization that, “the only truth is that I live.” Later on, in response to a question from her teacher about “what is good and what is bad?” Joana answers, “Good is living … Bad is not living”. The teacher assumes that by “not living” Joana means dying, but she is quick to correct him. “Bad is not living, that’s all. Dying is something else. Dying is different to good and bad.” As the novel proceeds, Joana refines and elaborates her thoughts around living and not living. She asks herself, “What matters then: to live, or to know you are living?” By living, Joana means merely existing. She is describing people who go through life without reflecting on themselves or their actions. They live their lives in an unquestioning manner, as if they were on autopilot, and proceed through each day like sleepwalkers. She sees her aunt and uncle and thinks of them as only playing at life because they have forgotten how to truly live. “They all forgot. They only knew how to play … Her aunt played with a house, a cook, a husband … Her uncle played with money, with work, with a farm …” The aunt and uncle have forgotten the childhood ability to perceive the world with fresh and open eyes. By contrast, Joana not only lives, but knows that she lives. “Analyze instant by instant,” she exhorts herself. “Own each moment, connect my awareness to them, like tiny filaments almost imperceptible but strong.” Joana is fully aware of what she is thinking and feeling every waking minute, and marvels at the simple fact of being alive. The result is that Joana can never entirely lose herself or be overwhelmed by any experience. Her consciousness of herself always rises to the surface, buoyed up by the power of the passing stream of stimuli absorbed by her senses. There is a scene near the end of the novel where Joana is at home and gets up in the middle of the night. She is drawn to look out an open window, “as if at her own face in the night … To get close, close, almost touch it, but feel the wave behind her sucking her back … leaving her afterwards with the haunting, impalpable memory of a hallucination … Even at that moment, perceiving the night and her own indistinct thoughts, she still remained separate to them, always a small closed block, watching, watching. The little light twinkling silently, set apart, solitary, unconquered. She never surrendered herself.” It is characteristic of Lispector’s way of describing Joana’s thinking that she has her compare herself both to “a small closed block” and to a “little light twinkling silently” in the same sentence. Both figures of speech illustrate Joana’s permanent self-conscious observer status in her world, even while “perceiving the night and her own indistinct thoughts.” In "Mansfield Park", there is a scene where Fanny Price has her own experience of looking out of a window into the cloudless night, but her response is quite different from Joana's. Fanny believes "there could be neither wickedness nor sorrow in the world ... if the sublimity of Nature were more attended to, and people were carried more out of themselves by contemplating such a scene." I don't think Joana would ever want to be carried out of herself. She holds on to her Self in her clenched fist all her life. In trying to represent Joana’s multi-faceted perceptions of the world, Lispector employs a prose style that is complex, repetitive, and full of poetic metaphor. In quoting the passages above, I felt I was doing an injustice to her as a writer, because no few phrases or sentences can duplicate the effect of reading her full novel. It’s like an art critic assessing a painting by focusing on a few isolated brushstrokes. I felt compelled to read the novel in a slow and deliberate manner, almost word by word, to extract the most meaning from the text. Certain passages, such as the final section ‘The Journey’, required rereading before I felt I had come close to understanding the author’s intent. Lispector gives us Joana’s internal monologue in the same direct, unfiltered manner that her thoughts occur to her, and it’s difficult not to quote at east a few of her thought provoking and contradictory turns of phrase. Thinks Joana, “goodness makes me want to be sick … It smelled of raw meat kept for too long.” Elsewhere she speaks of “a silent scream”, “joy without laughter”, “a certain happiness, dark and violent”, “a happiness that few people will envy”, “silence had taken a seat at the table”, “she was so body that she was pure spirit”, “she was sadly a happy woman”, “the sadness of happiness”, and “the three of them formed a pair.” Other characters express themselves in a similar cryptic manner. Otavio thinks that, “A certain degree of blindness is necessary in order to see certain things”, while Joana’s lover confesses, “I’ve always never been anything.” These examples really don’t do justice to how rich and mesmerizing Lispector can be. You don’t fully understand every sentence, but you grasp enough meaning to want to go on to the next, and the next, and the next … And I haven't even mentioned Joana's thoughts on death and eternity, or childhood, or the significance of the water imagery that flows through almost every page of her novel. Joana doesn’t place any particular value on being human, and continually compares the people around her to animals. When she visits her old, retired teacher at his home, she finds him “like a large neutered cat reigning over a cellar.” Watching her husband, Otavio, take notes from a law book, Joana thinks, “What an animal”. When Joana visits her husband’s mistress, Lidia, she finds her “as confident and serene as an animal grazing.” Joana doesn’t exclude herself from this animal realm. Early in the novel, she compares herself to “a wild beast” with “a perfect animal inside her.” As a child, Joana’s aunt and uncle call her “a viper” when they catch her stealing a book from a store. Later on, when Joana and Lidia are discussing having a child by Otavio, Joana assures Lidia, “Don’t be afraid, any animal can have young. You’ll have an easy birth and so will I. We both have wide hips.” While others, such as Lidia, might be concerned about the personal and moral issues involved in having a child, especially an illegitimate one, for Joana it’s only a matter of having a big enough pelvis, society’s opinion doesn’t matter. Towards the end of “Near to the Wild Heart”, Lispector gives us a scene where Joana and Lidia are talking about marriage, and Joana gives one of her clearest explanations of why the married state is not for her. “I believed more or less this: marriage is the end, after marrying nothing else can happen to me. Imagine: always having someone beside you, never knowing solitude.-Good God!-not being with myself ever, ever. And being a married woman, that is, a person with her destiny all mapped out. From then on all you do is wait to die … There is someone who is always observing you, who scrutinizes you, who sees your every move. And even the weariness of living has a certain beauty when it is borne alone and desperate …” “Near to the Wild Heart” doesn’t really have a plot. The novel has an episodic but generally chronological structure that shows us Joana at various points in her life. By the end of the book, Joana understands that a life fully lived is only possible when she is left alone to live it, moment by passing moment, and that one day some greater understanding will be revealed to her. “Solitude is mixed up with my essence”, she tells Otavio, shortly before leaving him. If there is no room for a controlling patriarchal figure such as a husband in Joana’s life, there is also no room for God. “No, no, I want no God, I want to be alone.”
This Thursday August 8, 2024, TV Cultura (a Brazilian public television network) re-presents, in celebration of the broadcaster's 55th anniversary, a special with the last interview given by writer Clarice Lispector to reporter Júlio Lerner, in 1977. After the recording, Clarice asked that the chat only air after her death, which occurred 10 months later, in December of the same year. The original interview is available on TV Cultura's RUclips channel. I'm not sure, but perhaps they will also make today's special program available after it airs. And I too, since I was a teenager when I first read her, I have always been in love with Clarice Lispector.
I'm pretty sure the interview you've described is the same one Alyssa has left a link to in her comments below her own video above ... but I could be wrong.
i'd say água viva as a next read -- breath of life is one of my favorite books of hers, and ever, but i think it benefits from having read more of her stuff. (admittedly, you have read a huge amount of her writing in the form of her short stories!) i think the life/death theme of a breath of life will be right up yr alley based on this discussion. i like the egg point, and it reminds me of a couple of her short stories, esp. "the egg and the chicken"
My local independent bookstore didn’t have any copies of “Near to the Wild Heart” on its shelves, so I ordered one. It did, however, have Clarice’s “The Complete Stories”, so I’ve started right in on that and read the first three stories of the collection. For some reason, Cristina, the young female protagonist of the second story, “Obsession”, vaguely reminded me of the narrators of some of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories. It sounds odd, but there was something about the way she described her experiences of married life with her husband Jaime and her affair with Daniel that made me think of the way Poe’s male characters find themselves caught up in strange situations they can neither fully understand nor control. Cristina also reminded me of a girl I used to know who once told me she preferred relationships with guys who were more in love with her than she was with them, because it allowed her to remain in control. I thought of her again watching the interview with Clarice Lispector that you linked to when the author describes adults as becoming “sad and solitary” in later life. The first time I heard of Clarice was when Kaveh Akbar used a quote from her as an epigraph to his novel, "Martyr": "My God, I just remembered that we die." I'll be vigilant for signs that she influenced his writing. When the man in "The Fever Dream" begins to hallucinate while lying in bed, I couldn't help but think of the vision Cyrus and his friend Zee have while sitting on a park bench at the end of "Martyr". I would suggest that anyone having this collection read the introduction at the beginning of the book and then the Appendix, Translator’s Note, and Bibliographical Note at the end before tackling the stories themselves. The reader will then have a better understanding of the reasons for the idiosyncratic use of English in the translations, which only reflects Lispector’s creative use of Portuguese. It also seems that her stories sometimes appeared in slightly different versions as they were republished over the years. I also appreciated knowing the publication dates of the original stories, as it allowed me to better imagine in my theatre of the mind how her characters would have looked and dressed and how their surroundings would have appeared.
As far as which Lispector novel to read next, I would use the chronological approach of the short story collection and go with the next book in order of publication. I would guess that if there's anything better than reading "Near to the Wild Heart" for the first time, it would be reading it in the original Portuguese. And Clarice Lispector was all of 23 years old when it was published! Incrível! I wonder how much of their Ukrainian culture Clarice's parents taught her as she was growing up. My father's mother was Ukrainian, and when we were kids my sister and I always thought it was a real treat when she would bring out her carefully stored collection of intricately decorated Easter eggs for us to look at. You could feel and hear the dried up yolks rattling around inside them. Just checking online, there was a pagan tradition that the decorations on the eggs were intended to trap evil spirits within the egg, and different regions of Ukraine had their own styles of egg decoration.
I'm trying to learn Spanish and that's challenging enough. It will be a long time (if ever) before I can even attempt to learn Portuguese. I wish I was more of polyglot so I could read more books in their original language. Excellent idea about reading the novel in publication order! The next book is The Chandelier which I just placed an order for. And there's a new translation of The Apple in the Dark which was on sale during prime day so I snagged it while I was grabbing the few random things we needed for the house from the sale. It's crazy that she was 23 for Near to the Wild Heart. I was up to no good at 23. I was working hard but my downtime was far from productive.
I just had to kill a snake in my bedroom and I wish I'd had a big fat book like the one you were holding up to do it with haha. But I wouldn't have used that one cause the cover is too nice. Seriously glad to hear you've found a brilliant new author but not sure what you mean when you say her writing is so different that it has opened up a whole new literary perspective for you.⚛😀❤
Perhaps the best way to understand and appreciate the prose style Clarice Lispector uses in “Near to the Wild Heart” is to consider how her young protagonist, Joana, thinks and feels about the world, the fact of her existence in it, and how she responds to the people around her. Joana’s philosophy of life is expressed in numerous and varied ways throughout the novel, but it comes down to a couple of basic tenets.
One of them we learn early on when Joana is still a student in school. Studying math one day, she comes to the realization that, “the only truth is that I live.” Later on, in response to a question from her teacher about “what is good and what is bad?” Joana answers, “Good is living … Bad is not living”. The teacher assumes that by “not living” Joana means dying, but she is quick to correct him. “Bad is not living, that’s all. Dying is something else. Dying is different to good and bad.”
As the novel proceeds, Joana refines and elaborates her thoughts around living and not living. She asks herself, “What matters then: to live, or to know you are living?” By living, Joana means merely existing. She is describing people who go through life without reflecting on themselves or their actions. They live their lives in an unquestioning manner, as if they were on autopilot, and proceed through each day like sleepwalkers. She sees her aunt and uncle and thinks of them as only playing at life because they have forgotten how to truly live. “They all forgot. They only knew how to play … Her aunt played with a house, a cook, a husband … Her uncle played with money, with work, with a farm …”
The aunt and uncle have forgotten the childhood ability to perceive the world with fresh and open eyes. By contrast, Joana not only lives, but knows that she lives. “Analyze instant by instant,” she exhorts herself. “Own each moment, connect my awareness to them, like tiny filaments almost imperceptible but strong.” Joana is fully aware of what she is thinking and feeling every waking minute, and marvels at the simple fact of being alive. The result is that Joana can never entirely lose herself or be overwhelmed by any experience. Her consciousness of herself always rises to the surface, buoyed up by the power of the passing stream of stimuli absorbed by her senses.
There is a scene near the end of the novel where Joana is at home and gets up in the middle of the night. She is drawn to look out an open window, “as if at her own face in the night … To get close, close, almost touch it, but feel the wave behind her sucking her back … leaving her afterwards with the haunting, impalpable memory of a hallucination … Even at that moment, perceiving the night and her own indistinct thoughts, she still remained separate to them, always a small closed block, watching, watching. The little light twinkling silently, set apart, solitary, unconquered. She never surrendered herself.” It is characteristic of Lispector’s way of describing Joana’s thinking that she has her compare herself both to “a small closed block” and to a “little light twinkling silently” in the same sentence. Both figures of speech illustrate Joana’s permanent self-conscious observer status in her world, even while “perceiving the night and her own indistinct thoughts.”
In "Mansfield Park", there is a scene where Fanny Price has her own experience of looking out of a window into the cloudless night, but her response is quite different from Joana's. Fanny believes "there could be neither wickedness nor sorrow in the world ... if the sublimity of Nature were more attended to, and people were carried more out of themselves by contemplating such a scene." I don't think Joana would ever want to be carried out of herself. She holds on to her Self in her clenched fist all her life.
In trying to represent Joana’s multi-faceted perceptions of the world, Lispector employs a prose style that is complex, repetitive, and full of poetic metaphor. In quoting the passages above, I felt I was doing an injustice to her as a writer, because no few phrases or sentences can duplicate the effect of reading her full novel. It’s like an art critic assessing a painting by focusing on a few isolated brushstrokes. I felt compelled to read the novel in a slow and deliberate manner, almost word by word, to extract the most meaning from the text. Certain passages, such as the final section ‘The Journey’, required rereading before I felt I had come close to understanding the author’s intent.
Lispector gives us Joana’s internal monologue in the same direct, unfiltered manner that her thoughts occur to her, and it’s difficult not to quote at east a few of her thought provoking and contradictory turns of phrase. Thinks Joana, “goodness makes me want to be sick … It smelled of raw meat kept for too long.” Elsewhere she speaks of “a silent scream”, “joy without laughter”, “a certain happiness, dark and violent”, “a happiness that few people will envy”, “silence had taken a seat at the table”, “she was so body that she was pure spirit”, “she was sadly a happy woman”, “the sadness of happiness”, and “the three of them formed a pair.”
Other characters express themselves in a similar cryptic manner. Otavio thinks that, “A certain degree of blindness is necessary in order to see certain things”, while Joana’s lover confesses, “I’ve always never been anything.” These examples really don’t do justice to how rich and mesmerizing Lispector can be. You don’t fully understand every sentence, but you grasp enough meaning to want to go on to the next, and the next, and the next … And I haven't even mentioned Joana's thoughts on death and eternity, or childhood, or the significance of the water imagery that flows through almost every page of her novel.
Joana doesn’t place any particular value on being human, and continually compares the people around her to animals. When she visits her old, retired teacher at his home, she finds him “like a large neutered cat reigning over a cellar.” Watching her husband, Otavio, take notes from a law book, Joana thinks, “What an animal”. When Joana visits her husband’s mistress, Lidia, she finds her “as confident and serene as an animal grazing.”
Joana doesn’t exclude herself from this animal realm. Early in the novel, she compares herself to “a wild beast” with “a perfect animal inside her.” As a child, Joana’s aunt and uncle call her “a viper” when they catch her stealing a book from a store. Later on, when Joana and Lidia are discussing having a child by Otavio, Joana assures Lidia, “Don’t be afraid, any animal can have young. You’ll have an easy birth and so will I. We both have wide hips.” While others, such as Lidia, might be concerned about the personal and moral issues involved in having a child, especially an illegitimate one, for Joana it’s only a matter of having a big enough pelvis, society’s opinion doesn’t matter.
Towards the end of “Near to the Wild Heart”, Lispector gives us a scene where Joana and Lidia are talking about marriage, and Joana gives one of her clearest explanations of why the married state is not for her. “I believed more or less this: marriage is the end, after marrying nothing else can happen to me. Imagine: always having someone beside you, never knowing solitude.-Good God!-not being with myself ever, ever. And being a married woman, that is, a person with her destiny all mapped out. From then on all you do is wait to die … There is someone who is always observing you, who scrutinizes you, who sees your every move. And even the weariness of living has a certain beauty when it is borne alone and desperate …”
“Near to the Wild Heart” doesn’t really have a plot. The novel has an episodic but generally chronological structure that shows us Joana at various points in her life. By the end of the book, Joana understands that a life fully lived is only possible when she is left alone to live it, moment by passing moment, and that one day some greater understanding will be revealed to her. “Solitude is mixed up with my essence”, she tells Otavio, shortly before leaving him. If there is no room for a controlling patriarchal figure such as a husband in Joana’s life, there is also no room for God. “No, no, I want no God, I want to be alone.”
This Thursday August 8, 2024, TV Cultura (a Brazilian public television network) re-presents, in celebration of the broadcaster's 55th anniversary, a special with the last interview given by writer Clarice Lispector to reporter Júlio Lerner, in 1977. After the recording, Clarice asked that the chat only air after her death, which occurred 10 months later, in December of the same year.
The original interview is available on TV Cultura's RUclips channel. I'm not sure, but perhaps they will also make today's special program available after it airs.
And I too, since I was a teenager when I first read her, I have always been in love with Clarice Lispector.
I'm pretty sure the interview you've described is the same one Alyssa has left a link to in her comments below her own video above ... but I could be wrong.
If it’s not that interview I’ll have to find it
I literally just bought that same collection! Great minds think alike.
YES! I hope you love it!
@@NerdyNurseReads You should read Agua-Viva first by the way
I neeeeed that sweater !
The link is in the description! My friend sells shirts for all your favorite female authors. I have too many and want more 😂
i'd say água viva as a next read -- breath of life is one of my favorite books of hers, and ever, but i think it benefits from having read more of her stuff. (admittedly, you have read a huge amount of her writing in the form of her short stories!)
i think the life/death theme of a breath of life will be right up yr alley based on this discussion. i like the egg point, and it reminds me of a couple of her short stories, esp. "the egg and the chicken"
I trust your judgment!! I will start with água viva
My local independent bookstore didn’t have any copies of “Near to the Wild Heart” on its shelves, so I ordered one. It did, however, have Clarice’s “The Complete Stories”, so I’ve started right in on that and read the first three stories of the collection.
For some reason, Cristina, the young female protagonist of the second story, “Obsession”, vaguely reminded me of the narrators of some of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories. It sounds odd, but there was something about the way she described her experiences of married life with her husband Jaime and her affair with Daniel that made me think of the way Poe’s male characters find themselves caught up in strange situations they can neither fully understand nor control. Cristina also reminded me of a girl I used to know who once told me she preferred relationships with guys who were more in love with her than she was with them, because it allowed her to remain in control. I thought of her again watching the interview with Clarice Lispector that you linked to when the author describes adults as becoming “sad and solitary” in later life.
The first time I heard of Clarice was when Kaveh Akbar used a quote from her as an epigraph to his novel, "Martyr": "My God, I just remembered that we die." I'll be vigilant for signs that she influenced his writing. When the man in "The Fever Dream" begins to hallucinate while lying in bed, I couldn't help but think of the vision Cyrus and his friend Zee have while sitting on a park bench at the end of "Martyr".
I would suggest that anyone having this collection read the introduction at the beginning of the book and then the Appendix, Translator’s Note, and Bibliographical Note at the end before tackling the stories themselves. The reader will then have a better understanding of the reasons for the idiosyncratic use of English in the translations, which only reflects Lispector’s creative use of Portuguese. It also seems that her stories sometimes appeared in slightly different versions as they were republished over the years. I also appreciated knowing the publication dates of the original stories, as it allowed me to better imagine in my theatre of the mind how her characters would have looked and dressed and how their surroundings would have appeared.
I’m so happy to hear you’re reading Lispector too! Please keep me posted on all your thoughts
@@NerdyNurseReads Well, okay, but you realize the book has 650 pages.
A Breath of Life is my favorite book of all time :)
I’ve heard this from many people. I’m excited to get to it!
❤ Clarice
Goddess!!!!
As far as which Lispector novel to read next, I would use the chronological approach of the short story collection and go with the next book in order of publication. I would guess that if there's anything better than reading "Near to the Wild Heart" for the first time, it would be reading it in the original Portuguese. And Clarice Lispector was all of 23 years old when it was published! Incrível!
I wonder how much of their Ukrainian culture Clarice's parents taught her as she was growing up. My father's mother was Ukrainian, and when we were kids my sister and I always thought it was a real treat when she would bring out her carefully stored collection of intricately decorated Easter eggs for us to look at. You could feel and hear the dried up yolks rattling around inside them. Just checking online, there was a pagan tradition that the decorations on the eggs were intended to trap evil spirits within the egg, and different regions of Ukraine had their own styles of egg decoration.
I'm trying to learn Spanish and that's challenging enough. It will be a long time (if ever) before I can even attempt to learn Portuguese. I wish I was more of polyglot so I could read more books in their original language.
Excellent idea about reading the novel in publication order! The next book is The Chandelier which I just placed an order for. And there's a new translation of The Apple in the Dark which was on sale during prime day so I snagged it while I was grabbing the few random things we needed for the house from the sale.
It's crazy that she was 23 for Near to the Wild Heart. I was up to no good at 23. I was working hard but my downtime was far from productive.
I just had to kill a snake in my bedroom and I wish I'd had a big fat book like the one you were holding up to do it with haha. But I wouldn't have used that one cause the cover is too nice. Seriously glad to hear you've found a brilliant new author but not sure what you mean when you say her writing is so different that it has opened up a whole new literary perspective for you.⚛😀❤
Please don't use good books to kill snakes! Also, I'd be terrified if I saw a snake in my bedroom!
I stopped reading agua viva because I was afraid to lose my mind lmaoo.
She definitely changes your brain chemistry while you’re reading her