Book Specs 📖

• Author: Clarice Lispector
• Genre: Literary Fiction
• Publisher: New Directions
• Pages: 194 (Paperback)

One Sentence Synopsis🔖

Girl describes transition from childhood to loveless marriage through existentialist vignettes.

Notes/Thoughts📝

• I did not know this was Lispector’s debut novel at 23! You can totally see how her writing has evolved through this series, especially if you read Agua Viva and The Breath of Life. Lispector has been the IT girl for decades and we’re all just catching up! The inner work we now try to accomplish through therapy, the mystery of being, living in the instant etcetc – she’s known that all along….and it’s so obvious now after reading her first book why she reigns supreme. Queen shit.
• The day I read all of Lispector’s books will be a sad, sad day.

“Quotes”🗣

“I can’t say who I am. that is to say, I know it all too well, but I can’t say it. More than anything, I’m afraid to say it, because the moment I try to speak not only do I fail to express what I feel but what I feel slowly becomes what I say.”

“It’s not being worth more to others… It’s being worth more inside yourself.”

“She wanted even more: to be reborn always, to sever everything that she had learned, that she had seen, and inaugurate herself in new terrain where every tiny act had a meaning, where the air was breathes as if for the first time. She had the feeling that life ran thick and slow inside her, bubbling like a hot sheet of lava.”

“There is nothing else to be but what you are, the rest is useless embroidery…”

“Within the world there is no place for other creations. There is just an opportunity for reintegration and continuity. Everything that could exist already exists. Nothing else can be created but revealed.”

“…there are indestructible things that accompany the body to death as if they had been born with it. And one of them is what is created between a man and a woman who have experienced certain moments together.”

“Why refuse the things that happened? Have lots at the same time, feel in a number of ways, recognize life in a range of sources…Who could stop someone from living amply?”

“On what poetry might her life be based?”

“And woman was mystery in itself…There was in all of them a quality of raw material, something that might one day define itself but which was never realized, because its real essence was “becoming.” Wasn’t it precisely through this that the past was united with the future and with all times?”

“I want to know you through other sources, seek your soul along other paths; I desire nothing of your life that has passed, not even your name, not even your dreams, not even the story of your suffering; the mystery explains more than the light…”

“There was no point taking shelter in the pain of each episode, getting angry at the things that happened, because the facts were just a big tear in her dress, the silent arrow indicating the bottom of things again, a river that dries up and reveals its naked riverbed.”

“I will live, only then will I live bigger than in my childhood, I will be as brutal and misshapen as a rock, I will be as light and vague as something felt and not understood, I willl surpass myself in waves…”