Scan barcode
A review by paigeweb
A Breath of Life by Clarice Lispector
5.0
"I went trembling to encounter myself."
"I am an abyss of myself.'"
"I am a memory of myself."
The book in which Clarice splits the atom and becomes a god. A Breath of Life is a twisted maze of layered literary artifice: Clarice creates a narrator, who creates Angela. Character of a character. Which one is the true Clarice? Both and neither, simultaneously.
A book about encountering the self, about splitting the self to know it, about the alienation of the self from the self. It's enormously interesting that she wrote it as she herself was dying, and completely appropriate that the last work in her oeuvre ends mid-thought with an ellipses. As she prophecied in Agua Viva much earlier in her career, "what I am writing goes on and I am bewitched."
"I am an abyss of myself.'"
"I am a memory of myself."
The book in which Clarice splits the atom and becomes a god. A Breath of Life is a twisted maze of layered literary artifice: Clarice creates a narrator, who creates Angela. Character of a character. Which one is the true Clarice? Both and neither, simultaneously.
A book about encountering the self, about splitting the self to know it, about the alienation of the self from the self. It's enormously interesting that she wrote it as she herself was dying, and completely appropriate that the last work in her oeuvre ends mid-thought with an ellipses. As she prophecied in Agua Viva much earlier in her career, "what I am writing goes on and I am bewitched."