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mrshoney1's review against another edition
adventurous
lighthearted
reflective
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.25
pemdas97's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.0
amymay84's review against another edition
reflective
relaxing
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.0
laurenemc's review against another edition
emotional
inspiring
lighthearted
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
iga_chaotic's review against another edition
mysterious
reflective
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
3.0
emilyconstance's review against another edition
5.0
“Everything happens on the border between dream and reality, between past and present, between the natural and the pre-natural, between clarity and madness.”
“There is the epiphany that shakes up a humdrum life, awakening the protagonist to the possibility of mystical knowledge. There is the condescending view of that conventional, “human” life (Marry, have children, and finally, be happy), coexisting alongside a sacred awareness that a full embrace of the irrational, “animal” life involves, and even invites, a descent into madness,” –Moser’s summary of Clarice’s writing in Why This World.
Three short works that perfectly live up to these assessments.
Daydream and Drunkenness of a Young Lady: (4/5) Clarice once wrote, “You must lead a serene life, well appointed, middle class. If you don’t the madness comes. It is dangerous. You must shut your mouth and say nothing about what you know and what you know is so much, and is so glorious.” Daydream and Drunkenness of a Young Lady is a short story dedicated to this understanding. A bored housewife who allows herself to climb to the brink of this ‘madness’ (daydreaming and drinking) knowing that she is “protected by the position she’d achieved in life,”. In this drunken state, she explores her feelings of resentment and scorn for the ‘dull’ people–largely the other housewives (or wannabe housewives) who are remote, disconnected…before she comes down from this lucidity and succumbs to the “empty happiness” (as Clarice viewed it) of domestic life; the ‘disillusionment,’ ‘resignation,’ (another condition Clarice loathes), ‘contentment;’ the “vague nausea”. This one is very true to Clarice’s traditional stream-of-consciousness writing, reading very close to a how a daydream or intoxication feels.
Love: (5/5) Another line from Clarice’s personal writings, “Everything touches me–I see too much, I hear too much, everything demands too much of me.” While Clarice often wrote about the emptiness and passivity of married life, equally as fatiguing to her was the madness and absurdity of that free and universal life: the one without value, purpose, or morality. As Benjamin Moser writes in his biography, Clarice was always trying to maintain a balance between ‘the two souls dwelling in her breast:’ her two leading ladies in Near to the Wild Heart...
This short work is a depiction of what happens when this balance is lost. Ana is a common mother and housewife, boarding the tram on her way home, ostensibly from buying groceries, where she is expecting to host her family over for dinner. She seems to be recommiting herself to this life of tranquility, impassivity, and quietude; a reincarnation of Lídia:
Ana’s children were good, something true and succulent...
All her vaguely artistic desire had long since been directed toward making the days fulfilled and beautiful; over time, her taste for the decorative had developed and supplanted her inner disorder. She seemed to discover that everything could be perfected, to each thing she could lend a harmonious appearance; life could be wrought by the hand of man...
What had happened to Ana before she had a home was forever out of reach: A restless exaltation so often mistaken for unbearable happiness. In exchange she had created something at last comprehensible, an adult life...
She sits on the tram attempting, presumably as she so often does, to carve out a purpose or mission in life; to find the truth or “root” of it; and to find her necessary place in it:
“As for herself, she obscurely participated in the gentle black roots of the world. And nourished life anonymously. That was what she had wanted and chosen.” She thinks to herself, possibly unconvincingly.
But then, as the tram approaches one of its stops, she sees a blind man chewing gum on the platform, and all hell breaks loose. She is abruptly reminded of the neutrality of life; the coexistence of good and evil, life’s indifferent cruelty and arbitrary kindness; and above all, it’s lack of meaning:
“The knit mesh was rough between her fingers, not intimate as when she had knit it. The mesh had lost its meaning…Compassion was suffocating her”...
“The world had become once again a distress. Several years were crashing down, the yellow yokes were running. Expelled from her own days, she sensed that the people on the street were in peril, kept afloat on the surface of the darkness by a minimal balance–and for a moment the lack of meaning left them so free they didn’t know where to go. The perception of an absence of law happened so suddenly that Ana clutched the seat in front of her, as if she might fall off the tram, as if things could be reverted with the same calm they no longer held. What she called a crisis had finally come. And its sign was the intense pleasure with which she now looked at things, suffering in alarm”...
“She had pacified life so well, taken such care for it not to explode. She had kept it all in serene comprehension, separated each person from the rest…everything wrought in such a way that one day followed another. And a blind man chewing gum was shattering it all to pieces”...
And then, in the midst of all this chaos or unravelling, is one of my favorite passages of hers:
Gripped with the “worst desire to live” and a compassion she feels ill-suited for (“It was easier to be a saint than a person!”) She runs home, and clings tightly to her children, and to her husband (“In a gesture that wasn’t his, but that seemed natural, he held his wife’s hand, taking her along without looking back, removing her from the danger of living,”) and lulls herself back to the state of tranquility she had lost so easily, but just as easily regained (“She was now combing her hair before the mirror, for an instant with no world at all in her heart. Before going to bed, as if putting out a candle, she blew out the little flame of the day,”)
This is perhaps one of Lispector’s strongest works, in my opinion. The pacing perfectly matched the sense of panic and anxiety that had abrubtly taken over Ana after seeing the blind man, and concludes with the same sense of false reassurance and calmness that had started the piece, likely as a suggestion that these moments will happen again, and just as easily be overcome.
Family Ties: (5/5) Another personal entry from Clarice: “Ah, poor me. So without a mother. It is a duty to have a mother. It is a thing of nature.” As Moser writes in his biography, “like the lost or hidden name, the dying mother, and her child’s longing for her, would recur in almost everything Clarice wrote.” This short story ruminates the often overlooked and taken-for-granted relationship between mother and daughter; the pain of love; and the use of marriage and family to distract us–if only momentarily–from the madness of living:
“No one but me can love you, thought the woman laughing through her eyes; and the weight of that responsibility left the taste of blood in her mouth. As if ‘mother and daughter’ were life and abhorrence. No, you couldn’t say she loved her mother. Her mother pained her; that was all.”
“Catarina also had the feeling they’d forgotten something and they looked at each other at a loss–for if they really had forgotten something it was too late now…What was it they’d forgotten to say to each other? and now it was too late. It struck her that one day they should have said something like: ‘I am your mother, Catarina.’ And she should have answered: ‘And I am your daughter.’”
“And things had worked out in such a way that painful love seemed like happiness to her–everything around her was so alive and tender; the dirty street, the old trams, orange peels–strength flowed back and forth through her heart in weighty abundance.”
“Just when does a mother, holding a child tight, impart to him the prison of love that would forever fall heavily on the future man.”
“They lived so peacefully that, if they brushed up against a moment of joy, they’d exchange rapid, almost ironic, glances, and both would say with their eyes: let’s not waste it, let’s not use it up frivolously. As if they’d been alive forever.”
Really beautiful and poignant.
“There is the epiphany that shakes up a humdrum life, awakening the protagonist to the possibility of mystical knowledge. There is the condescending view of that conventional, “human” life (Marry, have children, and finally, be happy), coexisting alongside a sacred awareness that a full embrace of the irrational, “animal” life involves, and even invites, a descent into madness,” –Moser’s summary of Clarice’s writing in Why This World.
Three short works that perfectly live up to these assessments.
Daydream and Drunkenness of a Young Lady: (4/5) Clarice once wrote, “You must lead a serene life, well appointed, middle class. If you don’t the madness comes. It is dangerous. You must shut your mouth and say nothing about what you know and what you know is so much, and is so glorious.” Daydream and Drunkenness of a Young Lady is a short story dedicated to this understanding. A bored housewife who allows herself to climb to the brink of this ‘madness’ (daydreaming and drinking) knowing that she is “protected by the position she’d achieved in life,”. In this drunken state, she explores her feelings of resentment and scorn for the ‘dull’ people–largely the other housewives (or wannabe housewives) who are remote, disconnected…before she comes down from this lucidity and succumbs to the “empty happiness” (as Clarice viewed it) of domestic life; the ‘disillusionment,’ ‘resignation,’ (another condition Clarice loathes), ‘contentment;’ the “vague nausea”. This one is very true to Clarice’s traditional stream-of-consciousness writing, reading very close to a how a daydream or intoxication feels.
Love: (5/5) Another line from Clarice’s personal writings, “Everything touches me–I see too much, I hear too much, everything demands too much of me.” While Clarice often wrote about the emptiness and passivity of married life, equally as fatiguing to her was the madness and absurdity of that free and universal life: the one without value, purpose, or morality. As Benjamin Moser writes in his biography, Clarice was always trying to maintain a balance between ‘the two souls dwelling in her breast:’ her two leading ladies in Near to the Wild Heart...
“The tension between the rebellious Joana and the placid Lídia, between the animal world and the artifice of human ‘civilization’ was a favorite symbol, and in her letters Clarice mentioned her fear of losing her ‘intimate balance.’”
This short work is a depiction of what happens when this balance is lost. Ana is a common mother and housewife, boarding the tram on her way home, ostensibly from buying groceries, where she is expecting to host her family over for dinner. She seems to be recommiting herself to this life of tranquility, impassivity, and quietude; a reincarnation of Lídia:
Ana’s children were good, something true and succulent...
All her vaguely artistic desire had long since been directed toward making the days fulfilled and beautiful; over time, her taste for the decorative had developed and supplanted her inner disorder. She seemed to discover that everything could be perfected, to each thing she could lend a harmonious appearance; life could be wrought by the hand of man...
What had happened to Ana before she had a home was forever out of reach: A restless exaltation so often mistaken for unbearable happiness. In exchange she had created something at last comprehensible, an adult life...
She sits on the tram attempting, presumably as she so often does, to carve out a purpose or mission in life; to find the truth or “root” of it; and to find her necessary place in it:
“As for herself, she obscurely participated in the gentle black roots of the world. And nourished life anonymously. That was what she had wanted and chosen.” She thinks to herself, possibly unconvincingly.
But then, as the tram approaches one of its stops, she sees a blind man chewing gum on the platform, and all hell breaks loose. She is abruptly reminded of the neutrality of life; the coexistence of good and evil, life’s indifferent cruelty and arbitrary kindness; and above all, it’s lack of meaning:
“The knit mesh was rough between her fingers, not intimate as when she had knit it. The mesh had lost its meaning…Compassion was suffocating her”...
“The world had become once again a distress. Several years were crashing down, the yellow yokes were running. Expelled from her own days, she sensed that the people on the street were in peril, kept afloat on the surface of the darkness by a minimal balance–and for a moment the lack of meaning left them so free they didn’t know where to go. The perception of an absence of law happened so suddenly that Ana clutched the seat in front of her, as if she might fall off the tram, as if things could be reverted with the same calm they no longer held. What she called a crisis had finally come. And its sign was the intense pleasure with which she now looked at things, suffering in alarm”...
“She had pacified life so well, taken such care for it not to explode. She had kept it all in serene comprehension, separated each person from the rest…everything wrought in such a way that one day followed another. And a blind man chewing gum was shattering it all to pieces”...
And then, in the midst of all this chaos or unravelling, is one of my favorite passages of hers:
“In the trees the fruits were black, sweet like honey. On the ground were dried pits full of circumvolutions, like little rotting brains. The bench was stained with purple juices. With intense gentleness the waters murmured. Clinging to the tree trunk were the luxuriant limbs of a spider. The cruelty of the world was tranquil. The murder was deep. And death was not what we thought.”
Gripped with the “worst desire to live” and a compassion she feels ill-suited for (“It was easier to be a saint than a person!”) She runs home, and clings tightly to her children, and to her husband (“In a gesture that wasn’t his, but that seemed natural, he held his wife’s hand, taking her along without looking back, removing her from the danger of living,”) and lulls herself back to the state of tranquility she had lost so easily, but just as easily regained (“She was now combing her hair before the mirror, for an instant with no world at all in her heart. Before going to bed, as if putting out a candle, she blew out the little flame of the day,”)
This is perhaps one of Lispector’s strongest works, in my opinion. The pacing perfectly matched the sense of panic and anxiety that had abrubtly taken over Ana after seeing the blind man, and concludes with the same sense of false reassurance and calmness that had started the piece, likely as a suggestion that these moments will happen again, and just as easily be overcome.
Family Ties: (5/5) Another personal entry from Clarice: “Ah, poor me. So without a mother. It is a duty to have a mother. It is a thing of nature.” As Moser writes in his biography, “like the lost or hidden name, the dying mother, and her child’s longing for her, would recur in almost everything Clarice wrote.” This short story ruminates the often overlooked and taken-for-granted relationship between mother and daughter; the pain of love; and the use of marriage and family to distract us–if only momentarily–from the madness of living:
“No one but me can love you, thought the woman laughing through her eyes; and the weight of that responsibility left the taste of blood in her mouth. As if ‘mother and daughter’ were life and abhorrence. No, you couldn’t say she loved her mother. Her mother pained her; that was all.”
“Catarina also had the feeling they’d forgotten something and they looked at each other at a loss–for if they really had forgotten something it was too late now…What was it they’d forgotten to say to each other? and now it was too late. It struck her that one day they should have said something like: ‘I am your mother, Catarina.’ And she should have answered: ‘And I am your daughter.’”
“And things had worked out in such a way that painful love seemed like happiness to her–everything around her was so alive and tender; the dirty street, the old trams, orange peels–strength flowed back and forth through her heart in weighty abundance.”
“Just when does a mother, holding a child tight, impart to him the prison of love that would forever fall heavily on the future man.”
“They lived so peacefully that, if they brushed up against a moment of joy, they’d exchange rapid, almost ironic, glances, and both would say with their eyes: let’s not waste it, let’s not use it up frivolously. As if they’d been alive forever.”
Really beautiful and poignant.
tarynlun's review against another edition
emotional
reflective
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? N/A
- Loveable characters? N/A
- Diverse cast of characters? N/A
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
innedc's review against another edition
dark
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
yinxie's review against another edition
emotional
funny
reflective
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? N/A
- Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A
4.25
This was my first Clarice Lispector book and let me tell you it was beautiful, and I don’t understand it. Yet. English is not my first language and I still struggle with classics but I believe that when I go back to this book in the future the rating will become higher each time. I think there are many messages still to uncover for me in this book and I look forward to the rereads that are bound to come.