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A review by lindy_b
The Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector
5.0
I feel like I've finished running a marathon, having read 83 stories spanning an entire writer's life in the matter of two and half weeks. The prose is complex and strange, constantly pushing at the boundaries of intelligibility. If there's a singular thematic throughline, it's the futility of ego. As Lispector writes of another book in "Covert Joy," this is "a thick book, my God, it [is] a book you could live with, eating it, sleeping it" (370).
Volume highlights:
- "Obsession," telling of a struggle to reconcile one's self-perception to the perceptions of others in the context of a romantic relationship
- "Gertrudes Asks for Advice," in which a teenage girl in the throes of existential crisis seeks advice from a famed columnist
- "Love," in which the totality of the breathing world becomes visible to a woman as she is returning with her groceries, only for it to slip away from her in an instant
- "Happy Birthday," in which an extended family gathers to celebrate an elderly relative's birthday, an event neither they nor she care about
- "The Crime of the Mathematics Teacher," in which a man, alone on a plateau at night but for the corpse of a dog, attempts to absolve himself of an unforgivable sin
- "The Fifth Story," a story about storytelling and its masks
- "Covert Joy" & "The First Kiss," begin and end the section of stories that were first published in a volume titled Covert Joy and respectively describe a process through which a girl becomes a woman and a boy becomes a man.
- "Forgiving God," in which a woman contends with a sudden brush with God
- "Dry Sketch of Horses," asking what is horse and what is human
- "Soul Storm," a mass of magic and creation
- "The Sound of Footsteps," about woman and the annoying persistence of sexual desire
- "Pig Latin," although somehow only a few pages long, confronts a number of social beliefs around sexual assault
- "BrasÃlia," a story of contradictions, of the world seen and unseen both
Volume highlights:
- "Obsession," telling of a struggle to reconcile one's self-perception to the perceptions of others in the context of a romantic relationship
- "Gertrudes Asks for Advice," in which a teenage girl in the throes of existential crisis seeks advice from a famed columnist
- "Love," in which the totality of the breathing world becomes visible to a woman as she is returning with her groceries, only for it to slip away from her in an instant
- "Happy Birthday," in which an extended family gathers to celebrate an elderly relative's birthday, an event neither they nor she care about
- "The Crime of the Mathematics Teacher," in which a man, alone on a plateau at night but for the corpse of a dog, attempts to absolve himself of an unforgivable sin
- "The Fifth Story," a story about storytelling and its masks
- "Covert Joy" & "The First Kiss," begin and end the section of stories that were first published in a volume titled Covert Joy and respectively describe a process through which a girl becomes a woman and a boy becomes a man.
- "Forgiving God," in which a woman contends with a sudden brush with God
- "Dry Sketch of Horses," asking what is horse and what is human
- "Soul Storm," a mass of magic and creation
- "The Sound of Footsteps," about woman and the annoying persistence of sexual desire
- "Pig Latin," although somehow only a few pages long, confronts a number of social beliefs around sexual assault
- "BrasÃlia," a story of contradictions, of the world seen and unseen both