Reviews

A Breath of Life by Pedro Almodóvar, Clarice Lispector, Benjamin Moser

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anmol_cheema's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional inspiring mysterious reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated

5.0

rachel_the_managing_editor's review against another edition

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4.0

My bullshit meter is broken. Or else, this book made it go haywire. My opinion changed line to line. So many beautiful passages resonated with me. But then some parts made me laugh out loud at their moody pretentiousness. Phrases like "the apocalyptic orgasm of my existence." Then again, "wanting to understand is one of the worst things that could happen to me."

caramels's review against another edition

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5.0

“I’m afraid to begin. Existing sometimes gives me heart palpitations. I’m so afraid to be me. I’m so dangerous. They gave me a name and alienated me from myself.”

emsemsems's review against another edition

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5.0

‘This is the most important project of translation into English of a Latin American author since the complete works of Jorge Luis Borges were published a decade ago—I get excited when I talk about her.’ — Benjamin Moser (to Pedro Almodóvar)

‘—I found a paragraph that defines transgenesis in an exquisite and precise way. “I want the colourful, confused and mysterious mixture of nature. All the plants and algae, bacteria, invertebrates, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals concluding man with his secrets.” I can’t think of a more beautiful definition of transgenesis, though Lispector was thinking of something quite different. We are already publishing the screenplay of The Skin I Live In, and I’m going to suggest placing that quote at the beginning of the book. —This book has a similar effect on me as the first novels I read by J. M. Coetzee. Each phrase accumulates such a quantity of meanings; it is so dense, rotund, and rich that I halt before it as before a wall. I like it very much but am not qualified to accompany a text of such magnitude—Many thanks for thinking of me. I hope we meet someday.’ — Pedro Almodóvar (to Benjamin Moser)

Like Almodóvar, I don’t know how to talk/write about this fucking masterpiece properly. I even started to immediately re-read this book the moment I finished it. I thought I was only looking for some highlights/excerpts (which was a difficult thing to do because every line is worthy of attention, and so full of life (excuse the cringe)), but then I realised, no, I am actually fully immersed, and committed to this literary experience completely. I am re-reading it without even realising that I am re-reading it.

‘Could I be betraying myself? Could I be altering the course of a river? I must trust that abundant river. Or maybe I’m damming a river? —I write for nothing and for no one. Anyone who reads me does so at his own risk. I don’t make literature: I simply live in the passing of time. The act of writing is the inevitable result of my being alive. I lost sight of myself so long ago that I’m hesitant to try to find myself—Existing sometimes gives me heart palpitations—They gave me a name and alienated me from myself.’

‘I live in the living flesh, that’s why I make such an effort to give thick skin to my characters. But I can’t stand it and make them cry for no reason—It is not autobiographical, you all know nothing of me. I never have told you and never shall tell you who I am. I am all of yourselves. I took from this book only what I wanted — I left out my story and (hers). What matters to me are the snapshots of sensations — sensations that are thought and not the immobile pose of those waiting for me to say, “say cheese!” Because I’m no street photographer.’

‘To create her I must plow the land. Is there some breakdown in the computer system of my ship while it crosses spaces in search of a woman? a computer made of pure silicon, with the equivalent of thousands of microscopic transistors fixed to its polished and gleaming surface with the noonday sun beating down in a mirror, (she) is a mirror. I want her to be the means by which the highest axioms of mathematics are solved within a fraction of a second. I want to calculate through her the answer to seven times the square root of 15 to the third power. (The exact figure is 406.663325.)’

‘—a yolk, but with a small black droplet in its yellow sun. That means: problem—She thinks that to stop writing is to stop living. I control her as much as I can, deleting her merely foolish comments. For example: she’s dying to write about menstruation just to get it off her chest, and I won’t let her.’

‘I’ve always wanted to find someday a person who would live for me because life is so full of useless things that I can only bear it through extreme muscular asthenia, I suffer from moral indolence in living. I tried to make (her) live in my place — but she too wants only the climax of life.’

‘I really like things I don’t understand: when I read a thing I don’t understand I feel a sweet and abysmal vertigo.’

‘Between the word and the thought my being exists. My thought is pure impalpable insaisissable air. My word is made of earth. My heart is life. My electronic energy is magic of divine origin. My symbol is love. My hatred is atomic energy. Everything I just said is worthless, no more than foam.—an enigma intangible in its most intimate nucleus.—I feel within me a subterranean violence—.’

‘The most beautiful music in the world is the interstellar silence.’

‘Happy silence—And because I know how to hold my tongue. To hold your tongue is to be born again.’

‘When I am strong enough to be alone and mute — then I will free forever the butterfly from its cocoon. And even if it lives for only a day, that butterfly, it is already useful to me: may it flutter its bright colours above the green brightness of the plants in a garden on a summer’s morning. When the morning is still early, it looks just like a light butterfly. Whatever is even lighter than a butterfly. A butterfly is a petal that flies.’

‘Grapes, a bunch of grapes round and fleshy and liquid and falsely transparent because they give the impression of being transparent, but you can’t see the other side you are entirely opaque though you give the impression of transparency what the hell do I have to do with the opacity of things—It’s said like this kissed by the cliché breeze I prefer to say that the breeze blesses me between slightly ochre and at the same time lightly astringent it’s also lightly sweet on lips that are polluted by the pollen brought by the veil of perfume that is the breeze.’

‘Music deeply teaches me a boldness in the world to feel itself. I seek disorder, I seek the primitive state of chaos. That is where I feel myself living. I need the darkness that implores, the receptivity of the most primary forms of wanting—.’

‘An attempt to sensitise the language so that it shivers and shakes and my earthquake opens frightening fissures in this free language — but I captive and in the process of not being I become aware and it goes on without me—The word is the defecation of the thought. It glistens. Every book is blood, it’s pus, it’s excrement, it’s heart torn to shreds, it’s nerves cut to pieces, it’s electric shock, it’s coagulated blood running like boiling lava down the mountain.’

‘I’m a beggar with a beard full of lice seated on the sidewalk crying. I’m no more than that. I’m neither happy nor sad. I’m exempt and unscathed and gratuitous.’

‘Numbers . . . are they what’s hidden behind your mysteries, secret effluvia and succulent secretions or, maybe, sibilant and pointed questions without any answers? What do they hide, clouds?—But the bottomlessness of the sea blossoms inside me with the scare of a scarecrow.’

‘In luxury we become an object that in turn possesses other objects—The spirit can live on bread and water—Men kill for a yellow brick. A woman sells herself for a diamond.’

‘Living is a hobby for her. She thinks it has nothing to do with her and lives tossed to the side, without past or future; just today forever—I fear myself because I’m always ready to be able to suffer—I must want myself in order to give something to myself. Must I be worth something?—I’m worth something in relation to others — but in relation to myself, I am nothing.’

Whether or not my views/response to the text(s) are as Lispector would have ‘intended’ (probably not), I like how I am able to ‘relate’ some of her ‘poetry’ (or what I think of as the poetic building blocks of her writing) to what she has written about in her 'cronicas', [b:Too Much of Life|60472556|Too Much of Life|Clarice Lispector|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1660621036l/60472556._SY75_.jpg|75203436]. Like that unforgettable bit about setting herself aflame. Evidently, even though this is her ‘last’ book that she never even lived long enough to personally ‘publish’, I think it’s endearing that she even managed to squeeze in her love for ‘football’, and her undying dark as fuck humour in it (and I think she would be ‘happy’ to know that the editors kept all that in the book. Only ‘one’ line was taken out of the original manuscript/text because the editor felt it might be too ‘sensitive’/triggering; I think Lispector would have preferred otherwise). I think she truly is my top, top favourite writer ever. Reading this has made certain of that. Of course, time will/might change that, but for now, she’s the one for me, without any breath of doubt.

With a book like this, even if/when filled to the brim with all the stars in the world and beyond; any kind of of 5* rating, any form of ‘praises’ and/or ‘compliments’ will all come across as being thoroughly rude, inaccurate and ‘lacking’, never enough. I shall write no more of it, I simply can’t. It’s simply one of the best things ever written. Excuse me, for I've just realised that all my 'reviews' and/or thoughts on everything by Clarice Lispector are unapologetically unhinged...

‘Sometimes I hurry to finish some intimate episode of life, in order to capture it in memories, and, more than having lived, to live. A living that already was. Swallowed by me and now part of my blood—But what I really like is a soccer tournament. Will I be alive during the next world cup? I hope not, my God—.”

‘This future of mine that shall be for you the past of someone dead. When you have finished this book, cry a hallelujah for me. When you close the last page of this frustrated and dauntless and playful book of life then forget me—Am I falling into discourse?—I write and that way rid myself of me and then at last I can rest.’