Clarice Lispector

Clarice Lispector (1920-1977) was born in Chechelnyk, Ukraine, to Jewish parents. Her family immigrated to Brazil in 1922. In 1943, she married her former law school classmate, Maury Gurgel Valente, and obtained Brazilian citizenship. In December 1943, she published her first novel, "Perto do Coração Selvagem" ("Near to the Wild Heart"), which made a significant impact, won the Graça Aranha Prize for debut authors, and was declared the best novel of 1943. That same year, following her husband on his diplomatic mission, she moved to Naples, where she worked for a time as a volunteer at the American military hospital and began writing her second novel, "O Lustre" ("The Chandelier," 1946). In Rome, she met the poet Giuseppe Ungaretti, who translated excerpts from "Near to the Wild Heart" for the magazine "Prosa," and Giorgio de Chirico, who painted her portrait. After a brief return to Brazil, the couple settled in Bern, Switzerland, between 1946-49. During this time, her first son, Pedro, was born, and she wrote her next novel, "A Cidade Sitiada" ("The Besieged City," 1949), as well as most of the stories in the collection "Laços de Família" ("Family Ties," 1960). After a brief six-month stay in Torquay, England, in 1950, Maury was transferred to Washington in 1952, where Lispector's second son, Paulo, was born, "Near to the Wild Heart" was translated into French, and she began working on her next novel, "A Maçã no Escuro" ("The Apple in the Dark," 1961), as well as a new collection of short stories. However, her marriage to Maury entered a crisis as Lispector gradually realized the challenges of life within the conventionality of diplomatic circles. In 1959, she traveled alone to the Netherlands and then returned to Brazil, determined to live alone with her two sons, and began writing for women's magazines. The short story collection "Family Ties," published in 1960, received rave reviews ("the most important collection of short stories ever published in the country since the time of Machado de Assis," wrote author Fernando Sabino). In 1961, the novel "The Apple in the Dark" was published, winning the Carmen Dolores Barbosa Prize. In 1964, the short story collection "A Legião Estrangeira" ("The Foreign Legion") and the novel "A Paixão Segundo G.H." ("The Passion According to G.H.") were published, one of the most significant and discussed novels of the 20th century. In 1966, while the first study of her work was published (Benedito Nunes, "The World of Clarice Lispector"), Lispector was hospitalized with third-degree burns after falling asleep with a lit cigarette that caused a fire. In 1967, her first children's book, "The Mystery of the Thinking Fish," was published, winning the award for best children's book, and she began to engage politically against the atrocities of the dictatorship in her country. The following books include "The Woman Who Killed the Fish" (children's, 1968), "Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures" (novel, 1969), "Covert Joy" (short stories, 1971), "The Stream of Life" (novel, 1973), "The Imitation of the Rose" (short stories, 1973), "The Via Crucis of the Body" (erotic short stories, 1974), "Where Were You at Night" (short stories, 1974), "The Inner Life of Laura" (children's, 1974), "The Hour of the Star" (novella, 1977), which would be her last book published during her lifetime as she was diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer. A friend recounts that on her way to the hospital, she said, "let's pretend we're not going to the hospital, that I'm not sick, and that we're going to Paris," and she tipped the taxi driver ten times the fare. She passed away a month and a half later in Rio de Janeiro, on December 9, 1977, the eve of her 57th birthday. After her death, the children's book "Almost True" and the prose work "A Breath of Life" (a dialogue between a Creator and his work) were published, and her only television interview was broadcast on TV Cultura in São Paulo. Regarding Lispector's significance, Amalia Rouvali writes in the afterword of her translation of "Near to the Wild Heart" (Typothito, 2008): "Clarice Lispector is considered one of the main representatives of modernism—and for some, postmodernism—in 20th-century Brazilian literature and globally. With "Near to the Wild Heart," her first novel in 1944, she carved innovative and solitary paths in Brazilian prose. 'No one writes like her; she writes like no one else.' A unique case, not only in Brazilian letters, she did not create a school, nor did she have successors, except for a few imitators who cannot be considered heirs to her style of writing. She was called the female Kafka, the female Joyce, a relative of Woolf and Borges, a mature Rimbaud if he had lived longer, Proust's alter ego, the Kierkegaard of literature. From the mid-1960s until her untimely death, she had already achieved publicity and recognition. Today, her books are bestsellers in Brazil. For her homeland, she is considered its greatest female writer, and her works are a cultural heritage. To this day, her work is the subject of analyses, articles, doctoral dissertations, discussions, symposia, and references. While still alive, Clarice Lispector was mythologized as few were in her country. She was one of the few authors whose statements received wide press coverage. To this day, she is honored by readers worldwide, academic institutions, countless 'Friends of Clarice Lispector' clubs, and her peers. Her entire body of work has been translated into the major languages. We count 32 of her works: novels, short story collections, anthologies of chronicles—where she also excelled. In all of them, the embodiment of the inanimate and the senses are automatically transcribed and claim vital space in the reader's perceptions." (The biographical details were drawn from the biographical note by Marios Chatziprokopiou accompanying the edition of "The Hour of the Star," Antipodes, 2016.)