Former posting: like most enduring writers, Lispector, who died in 1977, was more than one thing, capable of inhabiting more than one role. Her fiction contains multitudes. For example, she’s often described as “middle class,” but I’ll be damned if I don’t see in some of these stories as much of an affinity for Charles Bukowski as Anton Chekhov. In some of the later mystical stories, she also can conjure up an outright religious experimentalism that suggests a whole other set of writers entirely//Reading these stories, I had the same feeling I had when I first read the collected stories of Angela Carter and of Vladimir Nabokov: that something lives beyond the skin and in the skin, and you welcome the invasion, you begin to long for it every time you’re away from the book. You read slow, you read fast, you hold stories back and then devour them, you dread that moment when you’ve finished the last of them. Because the strangeness is familiar and yet different than you’ve ever encountered before. Because life seems more vital, almost hyperreal, after reading Lispector, and it is harder to ignore the hidden life surging all around you, in all its many forms.// All three of those writers suffered from the same affliction of genius: They saw with absolute clarity, and they divined more connections between elements in the world than other writers. http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2015/08/clarice_lispector_s_complete_stories_reviewed.2.html

 

Jansy Mello:  Jeff VanderMeer wrote a review about a very recent translation of Clarice Lispector’s stories and established a connection between her and V.Nabokov which, at first, surprised me. I had never thought of placing the two side by side. Lispector’s world is densely populated by women of all sizes, ages and social backgrounds and their inner lives rendered in a basically “feminine” style: the contrast between the two writers couldn’t be greater.
T
he reviewer in fact only stressed their genius (“a genius on the level of Nabokov”) and a very general point of contact: “something lives beyond the skin and in the skin…life seems more vital, almost hyperreal…they saw with absolute clarity, and they divined more connections between the elements in the world than other writers.”*

As I see it, that’s about allbut it’s a lot, considering.

 

 

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*-  “Clarice Lispector,” writes Carlos Mendes de Sousa, “is the first, most radical affirmation of a non-place in Brazilian literature.” [   ] The poet Lêdo Ivo captured the paradox: There will probably never be a tangible and acceptable explanation for the language and style of Clarice Lispector. The foreigness of her prose is one of the most overwhelming facts of our literary history, and even, of the history of our language. This borderland prose, of immigrants and emigrants, has nothing to do with any of our illustrious predecessors…You could say that she, a naturalized Brazilian, naturalized a language.” (Cf. Why this World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector. Benjamin Moser)

 

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