Clarice Lispector
Clarice Lispector | |
|---|---|
| Born | December 10, 1920 Chechelnyk, Ukraine |
| Died | December 9, 1977 (aged 56) Rio de Janeiro, Brazil |
| Occupation | Novelist, poet |
| Nationality | Brazilian |
| Literary movement | Modernism |
Clarice Lispector (December 10 1920 - December 9 1977) was a Brazilian writer. Acclaimed internationally for her innovative novels, she was also an accomplished writer of short stories and a journalist with a regular national column.
Considered one of the greatest Brazilian prose writers of the twentieth century, Clarice Lispector was born in Chechelnyk, a shtetl in Ukraine, while her family was in transit to Brazil. By the time of their arrival in Brazil, she was two months old. Her family first settled in Maceió, Alagoas, where her mother had family relations, and later moved to Recife, Pernambuco, where she went to elementary and high school, and wrote her first essays. After her mother's death, the family moved again, to Rio de Janeiro, when Clarice was already 14 years old. There, she studied law and married her classmate Maury Gurgel Valente. After he entered the diplomatic corps she moved to Europe, living in Naples, Berne, Torquay (England), and Washington. She returned to Brazil in 1959.
Lispector was fluent in Yiddish, English, French and also had various levels of ability and knowledge in other languages, particularly Italian and German. In later life, she supported herself by translating books from English and French. She never said that she spoke Yiddish at home, but always said that her native Portuguese was the language of her heart. She never wrote in any other language.
Her family was Jewish and spoke Yiddish at home. In 1944 she published her first novel Perto do Coração Selvagem, translated into English as "Near the Wild Heart." When the novel was published, many claimed that her stream-of-consciousness writing style was heavily influenced by Virginia Woolf or James Joyce, but she had read neither of these authors. This novel, like all of her subsequent works, was marked by an intense focus on interior emotional states.
Lispector died of cancer in 1977, just one day before her 57th birthday, and was buried in the Jewish Cemetery of Caju, in Rio de Janeiro.
Her last novel is A Hora da Estrela, translated as The Hour of The Star, where the life of Macabéa, a poor woman living in Rio de Janeiro, is described by a narrator called Rodrigo S.M., a fictional writer. Written near the end of her life, A Hora da Estrela diverged from the themes and style of most of her work, instead directly and explicitly focusing on poverty and marginality in Brazil.
Her sister Elisa Lispector (born Savran, Ukraine, July 24, 1911, died Rio de Janeiro, January 6, 1989) was also a respected Brazilian novelist.
Bibliography
- Minhas taras de ninfomaniaca(1943) - My nynmphomaniac's desires
- Perto do Coração Selvagem (1944) - Near the Wild Heart
- O Lustre [The Luster] (1946)
- A Cidade Sitiada (1949)
- Alguns Contos [Some Narratives] (1952)
- Laços de Família (1960) - Family Ties
- A Maçã no Escuro [The Apple in the Dark] (1961)
- A Legião Estrangeira (1964) - Foreign Legion
- A Paixão segundo G.H. (1964) - The Passion According to G.H., University of Minnesota Press (1988), ISBN 0816617120
- O Mistério do Coelho Pensante (1967)
- A mulher que matou os peixes [The woman who killed the fishes] (1968)
- Uma Aprendizagem ou O Livro dos Prazeres (1969)
- Felicidade Clandestina (1971)
- A imitação da rosa [The imitation of the rose] (1973)
- Água Viva (1973) - The Stream of Life, University of Minnesota Press (paperback 1989), ISBN 0816617821
- A Vida Íntima de Laura (1974)
- A Via-crucis do Corpo (1974)
- Onde estivestes de Noite (1974)
- A hora da Estrela (1977) - The Hour of the Star, tr. Giovanni Pontiero, Carcanet Press (1992), ISBN 0856359890
- Para não Esquecer (1978)
- Quase de Verdade [Almost True] (1978)
- Um Sopro de Vida [A Blow of Life] (1978)
- A Bela e a Fera [The Beauty and the Beast] (1979)
- A Descoberta do Mundo [The Discovery of the World] (1984)
- Como Nasceram as Estrelas [How the Stars were born] (1987)
- Cartas perto do Coração (2001) [Letters near the Heart] (letters exchanged with Fernando Sabino)
- Correspondências [Correspondences] (2002)
Further reading
- Efraín Kristal, The Cambridge Companion to the Latin American Novel, Cambridge University Press (2005), ISBN 0521825334 - includes a chapter on The Passion According to G.H.
- Earl E. Fitz, Sexuality and Being in the Poststructuralist Universe of Clarice Lispector: The Différance of Desire, University of Texas Press (2001), ISBN 0292725299
External links
- When it all happened...
- Biography (in Portuguese)
- Video Interview in 3 parts (in Portuguese)
- Reviews of journalistic prose