Book Specs 📖

• Author: Clarice Lispector (translator: Johnny Lorenz)
• Genre: Plotless fiction
• Pages: 164 pages (Paperback)

One Sentence Synopsis🔖

Existentialist dialogue between a male author and Angela Pralini, a character that he creates.

Notes/Thoughts📝

• Plotless fiction has become one of my top genres because there is no point!!! muhahahaha I think this makes people squirm because our human brains need answers, we want something concrete we can reference/imagine. If you want know me, read plotless fiction, but if you REALLY want to get to know me, read Lispector (aka spirit animal)
• Stream-of consciousness writing can be hit-or-miss. What misses is how it’s used in writing. When done well, like a perfectly done steak….there’s always an element of surprise behind the execution – a satisfaction for your senses, a tiny relief of ah! that is shared between you and the author. V demure, v intimate. I may not understand every crease in literary technique but I do understand some contradictions and “nothing” statements in the book. What a feeling it is to be understood, to seek “superunderstanding”
• Another book about the writing process without having prior knowledge…this is a sign from God I NEED to start writing!!
• The book is structured into independent phrases within the dialogue which creates a start-from-anywhere type of reading experience. Brilliant because it deliberately ties into “starting in the middle” or in the instant. Lispector, YOU GENIUS YOU.
• In the book, the main character says “…if I become conscious of what I’m thinking, I can no longer think…But thought needs to be a feeling. “ Seeing thought as a prison is common catch 22 people experience when fraught with overthinking and analysis paralysis. When we ignore our intuition, the subconscious, the “pre-thought” as Lispector calls it, then we bar ourselves from “true thought” – that’s when the real magic/questions emerge (I love questions [without answers])

“Quotes”🗣

“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. I’m afraid to begin.”

“…you don’t start at the beginning, you start in the middle, you begin with the instant today.”

“Sensation is the soul of the world Is intelligence a sensation?”

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

I go on accumulating myself, accumulating myself, accumulating myself-until I no longer fit within me and burst into words.

When I think without any thought-I call that meditation. And it’s so profound that I can’t quite reach and words disappear, manifestations. I meditate and what emerges from that meditation has nothing to do with the meditation: an idea comes that seems totally disconnected from the meditation. It seems it’s only useful to live interrogatively since every interrogation tossed into the air has a corresponding reply formed in the darkness of my being, that part of me which is dark and vital, without it I’d be empty.

“I don’t know if it’s the dream that makes me write or if the dream is the result of a dream that comes from writing.“

“I want to reach within myself a landscape deep beneath the earth a spring of placid waters running-and my ecstatic soul that can’t be restrained and trembles in the lightest orgasm. Pure contemplation.“

“Reality does not exist in itself. What there is is seeing the truth through the dream. Real life is merely symbolic: it refers to something else.“

“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 don’t write because I want to, no. I write because I must. otherwise what would i do with myself?”

“Sometimes writing a single line is enough to save your own heart.”

“I ask for little, it’s almost nothing but it’s everything! peace, peace, peace!”

“There is a secret and to me incomprehensible law; only through suffering does one find happiness. “

“I’m not relative I’m infinite that’s why in each being I reflect myslef in each being I encounter myself.

“I see everything as if I had already died and was seeing everything from afar.”

“A place in the world is waiting for me to inhabit it.”