Cutting to the bone
Reviewing “Why This World,” Benjamin Moser’s 2009 biography of Clarice Lispector (1920-1977), Nicholas Shakespeare called Lispector “one of the symbols of modern Brazil, along with Pelé, the musician Caetano Veloso, the architect Oscar Niemeyer and Copaca
refused to talk about her past. ... Withdrawn, introspective ... hounded and fogged by rumours and conjecture, [with a] reputation as a liar.” Publishers “avoided her like the plague.”
Latterly, though, Lispector’s work is enjoying a robust renaissance, with recent publication by the august New Directions of five of her novels, and now of “The Complete Stories:” 86 of them, introduced by Moser and translated by San Franciscan Katrina Dodson. A life-size photo of Lispector’s face stares from this collection’s cover, its pitiless gaze both dare and accusation. The expression proves fitting.
I don’t have space to detail Lispector’s horrifying childhood, but the Moser biography awaits those wishing to learn more. She was born in Ukraine, to a mother fatally infected with syphilis after rape by Russian soldiers. Jewish pogroms forced the family to flee to Recife, Brazil, where Lispector, as a child, made up plays to try to distract (and cure) her dying mother. If cursory, this sorrowful context helps explicate the artist Lispector became.
Praise for her oeuvre comes from big guns: Lorrie Moore, Colm Toíbín, Rachel Kushner. Poet Elizabeth Bishop, who translated Lispector, called her “better than Borges.” Kafka, Joyce and Virginia Woolf have likewise been named as comparable Lispector forerunners.
It’s easy to see why. A South American woman writing aggressively experimental, quasi-absurdist prose during an era fairly defined by its devaluation of women may alone confer her place in the pantheon. But to read her is to be dazzled by Lispector’s gifts, which surface instantly in even the earliest of these stories — dry, incisive freshness of language; fierce, finely parsed description; ruthless determination to tear to the bone of the riddle of life.
Early stories reflect youthful preoccupations. In “The Triumph,” a young woman wakens stunned by her lover’s departure, but recognizes by day’s end that “he’d be back, because she was the stronger one.” “Obsession” tells of a young married bourgeoise meeting a Svengali-like youth who introduces her to the revolutionizing power of ideas, awaking “in me the sensation that palpitating inside my body and spirit was a deeper and more intense life than the one I was living.”
As time deepens (and darkens) her vision, one finds astonishing, almost clinically nuanced psychological insights on almost every page. “A Chicken” recounts a family’s brief adoption of a chicken, before they lose interest and eat it. In “The Disasters of Sofia,” a young girl loves her grade-school teacher so hopelessly that she sets out to torment him, and is shocked into “learning how to be loved, bearing the sacrifice of not deserving it” when the tired teacher responds to her with kind encouragement.
A few stories qualify as pure tour de force. The brilliant “The Sharing of Loaves” describes a feast so luscious it’s hostile, wanting “to be eaten as badly as we wanted to eat it.”
But far too many of these parable-like pieces, while razor-smart and almost bewilderingly imaginative, wander too long, to endings that either dribble away or chop off — as if its maker suddenly grew bored, or was seized with hatred for the whole enterprise. “I went to bed. I had died.” “I’m going to turn on the television. We die sometimes.” (For Lispector, “dying” often means shutting down, giving up.) Too many pieces feel like exercises, sketches or what-ifs — unto themselves, slight.
Sometimes her narrators yammer on like one of Beckett’s:
“Well, didn’t they pour bleach on the ground in Brasilia. Well they did: to disinfect. But I am, thank God, thoroughly infected. But I had my lungs x-rayed ... And so it goes on. I am suddenly silent and have nothing to say. Respect my silence. I don’t paint, no ma’am, I write and do I ever.”
Lispector wrestles with the lonely torment of human consciousness — terrified or mystified by mortal existence, seeking meaning or communion, finding brutal nullity. In the collection’s last story, “[s]he felt like screaming at the world: ‘I’m not awful! I’m a product of I don’t even know what, how can I know anything about this misery of the soul.’ ” Sometimes death (real or figurative) is the only exit. Each piece gives another riff on this vision, albeit reworked in an exhaustive array of settings and principals. Like the great names she’s been compared with, she is recognizably important. Some of her audacity is unforgettable. But the aftertaste is bitter.