The Complete Stories
Clarice Lispector, Trans. by Katrina Dodson
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
The Complete Stories
Clarice Lispector, Trans. by Katrina Dodson
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
There’s a whiff of madness in the fiction of Clarice Lispector. The Complete Stories of the great Brazilian writer, edited by Benjamin Moser and sensitively translated by Katrina Dodson, is a dangerous book to read quickly or casually because it’s so consistently delirious. Sentence by sentence, page by page, Lispector is exhilaratingly, arrestingly strange, but her perceptions come so fast, veer so wildly between the mundane and the metaphysical, that after a while you don’t know where you are, either in the book or in the world.
The stories in this collection are ones you can live and wrestle with, like difficult scripture. From the punctuation to the use of repetition, every small detail powers the whole and makes an indelible mark.
The consistent theme is the circumscribed role of women in mid-century Brazil – her protagonists are often daughters, wives, or ageing widows, stifled by a conservative society. But these characters resist in myriad ways, dreaming of real love, or good sex, or intelligent conversation – just as Lispector’s remarkable prose breaks with literary convention.
In her mixture of nonchalance, inscrutability, wit, and knowing simplicity, in her use of tones that are whimsical and subtle, in the stories that are filled with abstractions, she has perhaps more in common with some Brazilian visual artists of her generation than she does with any writers.
a splendorous achievement.
Even if she finds herself rooted in a feminine quest for self-empowerment and autonomy, the early Lispector bears witness to numerous interesting stylizations that galvanize and individuate her suffragette-ish concerns. Primary among these is a strain of mysticism, a tendency to use the magical and fantastical as a hopeful figure for every potential that lies beyond the stifling personae and conventions people are forced to adopt.
[The stories] often verge on the surreal; strange or supernatural elements are introduced slyly into the lives of her urban characters. A quirky realism is equally in evidence. [Lispector] avoids the grand magic realist flourishes of her Hispanic contemporaries – the weirdness of her worlds is calculated.
For almost all of New Directions’ remarkable new Complete Stories, brilliantly translated by Katrina Dodson, I felt wrapped in flame.
Lispector's writing – dense, often engaging in aspects of surrealism or disjunction, and steeped in a tradition of Jewish mysticism – is not easy, or particularly comfortable.
In this collection, Lispector’s style — stranger than that of any of the writers she is compared to — might put off some fans of literary realism. Some stories are so brief that after reading them I thought: That’s not a story! But there are many rewards.
Lispector's laconic, almost aphoristic syntax is, at times, full of a brutal sense of humor and at times disquieting.