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Clarice Lispector - Uma Vida
"That rare person who looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf," Clarice Lispector is one of the most popular but least understood of Latin American writers. Now, after years of research on three continents, drawing on previously unknown manuscripts and dozens of interviews, Benjamin Moser demonstrates how Lispector's development as a writer was directly connected to the story of her turbulent life. Born in the nightmarish landscape of post-World War I Ukraine, Clarice became, virtually from adolescence, a person whose beauty, genius, and eccentricity intrigued Brazil. Why This World tells how this precocious girl, through long exile abroad and difficult personal struggles, matured into a great writer. It also asserts, for the first time, the deep roots in the Jewish mystical tradition that make her the true heir to Kafka as well as the unlikely author of "perhaps the greatest spiritual autobiography of the twentieth century." From Chechelnik to Recife, from Naples and Berne to Washington and Rio de Janeiro, Why This World strips away the mythology surrounding this extraordinary figure and shows how Clarice Lispector transformed one woman's struggles into a universally resonant art.
664 pages, Unknown Binding
First published January 1, 2009
230 people are currently reading
5698 people want to read
About the author
Benjamin Moser
40 books251 followersBenjamin Moser is a writer, editor, critic, and translator who was born in Houston in 1976 and lives in the Netherlands. After attending high school in Texas and France, he graduated from Brown University with a degree in History. He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Utrecht.
He worked at Foreign Affairs magazine and Alfred A. Knopf in New York before becoming an editor at the Harvill Press in London. He was the New Books columnist for Harper's Magazine before becoming a Contributing Editor on visual art and a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. His work has appeared in many publications in the United States and abroad, including Condé Nast Traveler, Newsweek, and The American Scholar.
His first book, Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, was published by Oxford University Press (USA), Haus Publishing (UK), Cosac Naify (Brazil), and Civilização (Portugal). Editions are forthcoming in France and Germany. He is the Series Editor of the new retranslations of Clarice Lispector to be published in the United States by New Directions and in the United Kingdom by Penguin Modern Classics.
He worked at Foreign Affairs magazine and Alfred A. Knopf in New York before becoming an editor at the Harvill Press in London. He was the New Books columnist for Harper's Magazine before becoming a Contributing Editor on visual art and a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. His work has appeared in many publications in the United States and abroad, including Condé Nast Traveler, Newsweek, and The American Scholar.
His first book, Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, was published by Oxford University Press (USA), Haus Publishing (UK), Cosac Naify (Brazil), and Civilização (Portugal). Editions are forthcoming in France and Germany. He is the Series Editor of the new retranslations of Clarice Lispector to be published in the United States by New Directions and in the United Kingdom by Penguin Modern Classics.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 162 reviews
October 22, 2019
I came across Benjamin Moser’s biography, Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector after reading a couple of Lispector’s novels earlier this year. I was intrigued by The Hour of the Star and Como nasceram as estrelas, but had no idea that Lispector was considered such an icon (and an enigmatic one at that) of late 20th century Brazilian literature. Moser does a great job detailing her early life (as a very young immigrant from the Ukraine) and establishing the context for her writing. It made me realize I’d only scratched the surface by what I’d read; I wanted to read more of Lispector’s work. Moser also provides context for why, even with the huge popularity of her debut novel, Near to the Wild Heart, she was so little understood until late in her life. Her enigmatic nature earned her a couple of nicknames, apparently not appreciated by Lispector, the Sacred Monster and Hurricane Clarice. Nice biography that made me wanting to know more (and read more)!
May 6, 2020
Penelope Fitzgerald wrote to her American editor in 1987: "On the whole, I think you should write biographies of those you admire and respect, and novels about human beings who you think are sadly mistaken."
This a remarkable biography. Moser clearly admires Lispector and one learns so much about her life and work from him. His tone, so unlike that of Joan Schenkar (which struck me as rapacious) in The Talented Miss Highsmith, the last biography I read, is even-handed, and the narrative voice intelligent and insightful. He alternates telling the story of her life with a discussion of the book she was writing at the time, and his discussion is smart and respectful, never overly in-depth so that you feel you'd better not continue if you've not yet read the book described.
Her masterworks: Near to the Wild Heart, The Passion According to G.H., Agua Viva, The Hour of the Star. Of these I've read only the first (though I've read her 2 story collections, and Cronicas, all very worthwhile, and also with gems).
It's a good biography that brings you back to the subject's books...I plan to read them all now.
I like Moser. I like how much compassion he shows Lispector, even when she is behaving less than admirably, I trust his view of her life, his respect for her 'unbearable genius,' the thought he brings to bear on this carefully and masterfully written biography of a woman whose very modern work is as important and as beautiful as that of Kafka, Joyce, Woolf.
>>>
I wrote this review in 2009, long before I knew anything of the controversy surrounding Moser, in particular accusations of plagiarism by Brazilian women writers who'd written about Lispector and
claim their writings were used without attribution.
This a remarkable biography. Moser clearly admires Lispector and one learns so much about her life and work from him. His tone, so unlike that of Joan Schenkar (which struck me as rapacious) in The Talented Miss Highsmith, the last biography I read, is even-handed, and the narrative voice intelligent and insightful. He alternates telling the story of her life with a discussion of the book she was writing at the time, and his discussion is smart and respectful, never overly in-depth so that you feel you'd better not continue if you've not yet read the book described.
Her masterworks: Near to the Wild Heart, The Passion According to G.H., Agua Viva, The Hour of the Star. Of these I've read only the first (though I've read her 2 story collections, and Cronicas, all very worthwhile, and also with gems).
It's a good biography that brings you back to the subject's books...I plan to read them all now.
I like Moser. I like how much compassion he shows Lispector, even when she is behaving less than admirably, I trust his view of her life, his respect for her 'unbearable genius,' the thought he brings to bear on this carefully and masterfully written biography of a woman whose very modern work is as important and as beautiful as that of Kafka, Joyce, Woolf.
>>>
I wrote this review in 2009, long before I knew anything of the controversy surrounding Moser, in particular accusations of plagiarism by Brazilian women writers who'd written about Lispector and
claim their writings were used without attribution.
Read
April 7, 2023Video now available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Nipf...
Nota bene: It has been brought to my attention that there has been "bad press" around this book and its author. I am unaware of details. But my focus is on the life and work of Clarice Lispector, both of which are so remarkable that they cannot be marred by Moser.
Nota bene: It has been brought to my attention that there has been "bad press" around this book and its author. I am unaware of details. But my focus is on the life and work of Clarice Lispector, both of which are so remarkable that they cannot be marred by Moser.
October 16, 2011
A Soul Turned Inside Out: Clarice Lispector, Hélène Cixous, and L’écriture féminine
The first time the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector was interviewed, following her sensational debut in 1944 with the novel Near to the Wild Heart, she was asked why she writes: “I write because I find in it a pleasure that I don’t know how to translate. I’m not pretentious. I write for myself, to hear my soul talking and singing, sometimes crying.” She said she believed all writing, in some sense, was autobiographical: “After all Flaubert was right when he said: ‘Madame Bovary c’est moi.’ One is always at the forefront.” Shortly before her death, she stated:
“I write as if to save somebody’s life. Probably my own life.” (A Breath of Life, 1978)
Benjamin Moser’s thorough biography of Clarice Lispector, Why This World, struggles, and wonderfully fails, to bring us closer to the writer he describes as, “weird, mysterious, and difficult, an unknowable mystical genius far above, and outside, the common run of humanity.” Indeed, Lispector’s entire project as a woman and a writer was to remain unknown while simultaneously exposing herself. “I am so mysterious I don’t even understand myself,” says Lispector in one breath; in the next, “My mystery is that I have no mystery.” Her carefully constructed auto-biographical conundrum dictates that the only way into Clarice Lispector is via the individual reader’s esoteric engagement with her writing; Moser admits to having in this manner “fallen in love” with her himself. In a valiant attempt to describe Lispector’s unknown/known quality, he writes:
The soul exposed in her work is the soul of a single woman, but within it one finds the full range of human experience. This is why Clarice Lispector has been described as just about everything: a woman and a man, a native and a foreigner, a Jew and a Christian, a child and an adult, an animal and a person, a lesbian and a housewife, a witch and a saint. Because she described so much of her intimate experience she could credibly be everything for everyone, venerated by those who found in her expressive genius a mirror of their own souls.
Read the rest of my review at Bookslut
http://www.bookslut.com/the_bombshell...
The first time the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector was interviewed, following her sensational debut in 1944 with the novel Near to the Wild Heart, she was asked why she writes: “I write because I find in it a pleasure that I don’t know how to translate. I’m not pretentious. I write for myself, to hear my soul talking and singing, sometimes crying.” She said she believed all writing, in some sense, was autobiographical: “After all Flaubert was right when he said: ‘Madame Bovary c’est moi.’ One is always at the forefront.” Shortly before her death, she stated:
“I write as if to save somebody’s life. Probably my own life.” (A Breath of Life, 1978)
Benjamin Moser’s thorough biography of Clarice Lispector, Why This World, struggles, and wonderfully fails, to bring us closer to the writer he describes as, “weird, mysterious, and difficult, an unknowable mystical genius far above, and outside, the common run of humanity.” Indeed, Lispector’s entire project as a woman and a writer was to remain unknown while simultaneously exposing herself. “I am so mysterious I don’t even understand myself,” says Lispector in one breath; in the next, “My mystery is that I have no mystery.” Her carefully constructed auto-biographical conundrum dictates that the only way into Clarice Lispector is via the individual reader’s esoteric engagement with her writing; Moser admits to having in this manner “fallen in love” with her himself. In a valiant attempt to describe Lispector’s unknown/known quality, he writes:
The soul exposed in her work is the soul of a single woman, but within it one finds the full range of human experience. This is why Clarice Lispector has been described as just about everything: a woman and a man, a native and a foreigner, a Jew and a Christian, a child and an adult, an animal and a person, a lesbian and a housewife, a witch and a saint. Because she described so much of her intimate experience she could credibly be everything for everyone, venerated by those who found in her expressive genius a mirror of their own souls.
Read the rest of my review at Bookslut
http://www.bookslut.com/the_bombshell...
August 24, 2019
An interesting introduction to the life of Lispector - at times it spends too long on details of Brazilian and other politics which makes it somewhat uneven - Moser can be repetitive on CL's thought and philosophy, with multi-page quotations from her texts and too much storytelling rather than analysis - so not a scholarly or critical assessment but it's useful to a new reader, as I am, to have so much background material collected together here, including extracts from letters, interviews, and the writings of her sister, friends and colleagues.
January 1, 2017
I enjoyed this overview of Clarice Lispector and learning some small facts about her life and personality helped immensely with being able to read her works. Why this World fell short of a four star for me because I thought that Moser dedicated too much page space to his own analysis of her works and imposed his own judgements on the facts of her life. He was present on every page, often overshadowing and imposing on Clarice. I would have liked to see more of the content from letters and diaries of friends discussing her as contemporaries and something from her own personal papers that are not part of her published bibliography. Instead, there were incredibly long passages quoted directly from her short stories and novels followed by long passages of Moser's analysis taking almost half of the page count. Although I know this sort of analysis is common in literary biography, I wanted to know about Clarice Lispector and not about what Benjamin Moser thinks of Clarice Lispector's works.
I thought he treated her metaphysical learning cursorily and substituted the background the reader needed on Spinosa and Cabbalism with long passages of analysis of Brazilian politics and political leaders that had only roundabout connection to Clarice (she met them a few times or her husband knew them). Her children, who were incredibly important to her and her understanding of herself (by her own admission many times), feature almost not at all (we are told that Pedro's illness affected her from a young age and the Paulo married - but beyond that nothing else of their lives). Maury appears for only a few pages. Her sisters and the female friends who made up her day-to-day life each have perhaps a page. It was incredibly disappointing. I wanted to know her and the people who surrounded her and influenced her, and instead I know something of the succession of Brazilian leaders in the 20th century and about how Moser reads her works (and even his analysis I thought was pompous and overblown - I started skipping it around the last third of the book). If you like Lispector and are an English reader, I do recommend persevering through this, but if you have not read her works, do not expect this book to inspire you to. Try first with her short stories.
I thought he treated her metaphysical learning cursorily and substituted the background the reader needed on Spinosa and Cabbalism with long passages of analysis of Brazilian politics and political leaders that had only roundabout connection to Clarice (she met them a few times or her husband knew them). Her children, who were incredibly important to her and her understanding of herself (by her own admission many times), feature almost not at all (we are told that Pedro's illness affected her from a young age and the Paulo married - but beyond that nothing else of their lives). Maury appears for only a few pages. Her sisters and the female friends who made up her day-to-day life each have perhaps a page. It was incredibly disappointing. I wanted to know her and the people who surrounded her and influenced her, and instead I know something of the succession of Brazilian leaders in the 20th century and about how Moser reads her works (and even his analysis I thought was pompous and overblown - I started skipping it around the last third of the book). If you like Lispector and are an English reader, I do recommend persevering through this, but if you have not read her works, do not expect this book to inspire you to. Try first with her short stories.
July 18, 2024
Ukraine, not “the Ukraine,” for God’s sake:(
February 26, 2016
I am not usually a fan of biographies, I think they are inevitably partial, and it's very hard to know a life, even if it is described completely. And also I feel a certain guilt of reading someone's life on the page, I find it a little vouyeristic, (I know that word most likely does not exist) but this time I liked knowing more of Clarice, mostly of what was going on around her when she wrote each Novel, where she lived, her family, her friends. You can tell the author loves her, and that I can relate to. It's a love letter to Clarice and her life, and very well written.
Qué misterio tiene Clarice <3
Qué misterio tiene Clarice <3
September 2, 2012
I feel like everything I've ever read has been priming me for Clarice Lispector; not that she's my new favorite writer, but I'm able to read her books entirely without suspicion. She writes about emotion, not melodrama, writes about experience as though it were the first time ever felt. Reminds me of music. Attempts to elucidate her mystique show how transparent she really is, vulnerable even, vulnerability being such a rare and precious thing in writers. "Still alive because it was only 9 in the morning," from a short story. And something, I can't find the quote, about sorrow without anger, like looking for the seafloor from a boat and not finding it, from "Near to the Wild Heart." Love it, can't get enough.
August 20, 2013
Pedant warning: Moser is inordinately fond of the phrase "begs the question" which does not mean "to raise or pose the question" as he and his publisher (OUP?!) seem to think it does.
Be advised that if you like to approach a novel somewhat unspoiled, and haven't yet read Lispector's The Passion According to G.H. (where it could be argued a sense of surprise is part of that story's effect), it won't be enough to skip the chapter dealing with that book as he goes on to deliver one honking great spoiler repeatedly in many successive chapters.
I discovered Lispector's work earlier this year and had high hopes for this biography, but I kept feeling as if I had to peer around Moser to get at Lispector. I found his focus on the mystical, religious aspects of her writing to not quite do justice to other aspects of her writing such as the surrealism, and her work in context of time, place, gender and fellow writers.
He's on sturdier ground during the first half of the book describing her family background and her early life.
I'd give Lispector 5 stars as a writer, but only 3 for this bio as it's just not a very good appraisal of her work.
Be advised that if you like to approach a novel somewhat unspoiled, and haven't yet read Lispector's The Passion According to G.H. (where it could be argued a sense of surprise is part of that story's effect), it won't be enough to skip the chapter dealing with that book as he goes on to deliver one honking great spoiler repeatedly in many successive chapters.
I discovered Lispector's work earlier this year and had high hopes for this biography, but I kept feeling as if I had to peer around Moser to get at Lispector. I found his focus on the mystical, religious aspects of her writing to not quite do justice to other aspects of her writing such as the surrealism, and her work in context of time, place, gender and fellow writers.
He's on sturdier ground during the first half of the book describing her family background and her early life.
I'd give Lispector 5 stars as a writer, but only 3 for this bio as it's just not a very good appraisal of her work.
November 24, 2019
Primeiramente, em relação ao livro em si, a escrita é fluida e bem feita. É também notadamente bem fundamentado e feito com muito trabalho e dedicação. Além da abordagem acerca da vida da autora encontramos uma análise de assuntos que a envolviam como o antissemitismo, Deus, família, períodos políticos (Vargas, República e Ditadura), rotina do marido (diplomata) e o processo de escrita dela. É um livro muuuuito rico em todos os aspectos.
Agora, contarei um pouco da minha história com a escritora. Vim ler meu primeiro livro da Clarice (engraçado que foi o último livro publicado pela autora em vida - A Hora da Estrela) ano passado, aos meus 20 anos. Sou uma pessoa antes e outra depois da leitura. Encontrei a escritora para mim, com frases que eu pensava e coisas que eu sentia. Não estou dizendo que penso como ela, mas me senti muito compreendida. Além disso, esse livro foi a primeira releitura da minha vida também, pois não costumo fazer a mesma coisa duas vezes. Enfim, me marcou profundamente.
Li outros dois livros dela e permaneci com o mesmo encanto. "Um sopro de vida" não tanto e acredito que penso isso porque o li no momento errado.
Foi uma experiência muito interessante conhecer mais da autora. Uma personalidade bastante diferenciada, o que se refletiu em seus livros.
Ano que vem começarei o projeto de leitura dos romances dela: 1 livro por mês na ordem de publicação. Acredito que ler depois de descobrir os pormenores da construção de cada um deles vai ser muito enriquecedor.
Recomendo muito a leitura a quem interessar. Estou completamente satisfeita.
Agora, contarei um pouco da minha história com a escritora. Vim ler meu primeiro livro da Clarice (engraçado que foi o último livro publicado pela autora em vida - A Hora da Estrela) ano passado, aos meus 20 anos. Sou uma pessoa antes e outra depois da leitura. Encontrei a escritora para mim, com frases que eu pensava e coisas que eu sentia. Não estou dizendo que penso como ela, mas me senti muito compreendida. Além disso, esse livro foi a primeira releitura da minha vida também, pois não costumo fazer a mesma coisa duas vezes. Enfim, me marcou profundamente.
Li outros dois livros dela e permaneci com o mesmo encanto. "Um sopro de vida" não tanto e acredito que penso isso porque o li no momento errado.
Foi uma experiência muito interessante conhecer mais da autora. Uma personalidade bastante diferenciada, o que se refletiu em seus livros.
Ano que vem começarei o projeto de leitura dos romances dela: 1 livro por mês na ordem de publicação. Acredito que ler depois de descobrir os pormenores da construção de cada um deles vai ser muito enriquecedor.
Recomendo muito a leitura a quem interessar. Estou completamente satisfeita.
October 21, 2014
O jovem autor não poderia ter sido mais feliz na escolha do título ao colocar a vírgula após o nome da biografada, uma das pessoas mais enigmáticas do planeta. Enigmática, difícil, anti social, deprimida, eufórica, misteriosa, apaixonada, fria... Terminei o livro com a certeza de que nem ela deve ter conseguido se definir. Após a vírgula complete com a palavra que melhor se adeque a essa personalidade tão complexa. Seu psicanalista não conseguiu a proeza., desistiu dela.
Já tentei ler alguns de seus livros e confesso-me incapaz de compreendê-los. Essa biografia é importante nessa compreensão pois mostra que seus romances refletem os momentos vitais pelos quais ela passava. Além disso descreve o contexto histórico pelo qual passava o país em cada fase.
Clarice, após sua viagem ao Egito, disse que não havia conseguido decifrar o enigma da Esfinge. E completou: "e nem ela me decifrou". Quem poderia?
Já tentei ler alguns de seus livros e confesso-me incapaz de compreendê-los. Essa biografia é importante nessa compreensão pois mostra que seus romances refletem os momentos vitais pelos quais ela passava. Além disso descreve o contexto histórico pelo qual passava o país em cada fase.
Clarice, após sua viagem ao Egito, disse que não havia conseguido decifrar o enigma da Esfinge. E completou: "e nem ela me decifrou". Quem poderia?
January 26, 2018
Una completísima biografía que pone en contexto cada una de las obras de Clarice y cada uno de los aspectos relevantes de su vida; contexto histórico, social y religioso -aunque Clarice no era practicante la religión judía influyó notablemente en su percepción del mundo- fundamental para entender el porqué de sus obras y también el cómo. La enigmática Clarice es un poco menos hermética gracias a este libro aunque su carácter trascendental y poético hace que siempre podamos adaptar sus historias a la propia nuestra.
July 18, 2021
"When I write for children, I am understood, but when I write for adults I become 'difficult'? Should I write for adults with the words and the feelings appropriate to a child? Can’t I speak as an equal?”
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December 30, 2022before I get into grumbling I'll preface this by saying I think this is worth your time though to do so there's a lot to take in account. if nothing else please read the Edwards article I mention at the end. My feeling reading Why This World was ultimately desperately sad
starting with nice things I liked learning about the children's books CL wrote I want to look at The Woman Who Killed the Fish
anyway about 100 pages in I was going along idly wishing this sort of thing had been in the hands of somebody with the attentive capacities & dedication of a Heather Clark or somesuch. To put it bluntly I never felt like Moser could depict Clarice as human. Also a minor point but I feel dates, years, could have been signalled far better (à la Red Comet) - there were a few times it felt like he'd meant to go back and insert the date later but just forgot to. I guess it's fine that it's not Clarkish in a way- she's a kind of once-in-a-generation biographer. arguably. but Moser was constantly getting distracted with his own missions, and that began to open up other, more serious issues for me
ok so Misogyny
(o and also it's a relatively minor point with everything else going on here but I'm surprised Moser's description of a gay man's attempts to resist persecution as 'correcting' his sexuality (from gay to straight?) made it past an editor. no I'm not saying that Benjamin Moser is some sort of archaic superhomophobe but I think this is a really unfortunate phrasing which it seems should have been immediately picked up and 'corrected' in editing)
I'm going to open by just mentioning a few places in the text where BM is being, just strange. I think a lot of his misogyny serves to both produce and re-produce the Clarice 'myth' in the anglosphere, but we'll get back to The Real World in time. Sadly I only started taking real notes on this later on in the text so I'd like to draw attention to the way Moser has - and continues to treat beauty and the artist.
The blurb for this book opens with the Dietrich-Woolf quote from Gregory Rabassa, which has been reproduced all over the current Penguin CLs under Moser's direction. These are essentially the only Clarices the anglophone world has reasonable access to. Frankly, the Dietrich-Woolf thing is a comment made in the 60s and it should probably have stayed there - what a shock! She's not only smart, she's ALSO pretty! who knew a woman could do the both. what a dear.
Reading Why This World I find Moser doubles down on this bizarrely dated view - as if beauty and intelligence are somehow incompatible in a woman - and it really just runs through the whole text. p.284 he's lamenting that at age forty-six her 'beauty' 'was now in the past'. This is apparently due to her gaining weight. Thank you Mr biographer but I am sure that a beautiful forty-six-year-old (let alone a beautiful forty-six-year-old Clarice Lispector) is not entirely beyond one's capacity to imagine. Moser keeps on this train of how terrible it is that women age and 'lose beauty'. there's a reference in his acknowledgments to meeting Clarice's sister Tania, aged ninety 'dressed to the nines' - he claims he 'fell for her'.
At another point (p.315), Moser is describing the manuscript of Loud Objects, one of the iterations of the inimitable Água Viva. I don't think it's only weird to me that he describes it as at times 'as dull and uninspired as a housewife's neighbourly chitchat'. THAT'S your comparison?? There are countless thousands of hours' worth of entertainment based on the drama of housewifery I assume that is why they are Real. To me it reeks of this super-1950s tired masculine trope that women's domestic lives = inane, airheaded, not worthy of note. It seems I was tired by this point so my marginal annotation reads 'shut up moser'
Anyway I'm kind of glad I didn't start writing down this sort of thing earlier on because trust me we would be here all day. now onto the fearsome Real World
I read about a year ago that Benjamin Moser has problematic edges but I don't think I really investigated. This time I did. I read the piece that started this controversy and a brilliant little supplementary one which I also highly recommend. So let's talk about Moser. He's kind of spearheaded the recent translations of Clarice's, starting in 2017 with Hour of the Star which is his own translation, and he has more or less been involved with the subsequent translations. How, do you ask? Well, here is the crucial part. Please read this article (I mean it, it is not so often I ask for homework): https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/b...
written by Magdalena Edwards, the translator of The Chandelier, or, co-translator, as Moser has decided to label her. It's a fantastic investigation into his academic malpractices, imprecisions (such as a pretty shocking lapse in his translation of Hour of the Star), and frankly abusive behaviour toward the team of translators who have together produced the current Penguin Lispectors. She mentions his constant erasure of women's writing, translation, including in his recent 800-page biography of Susan Sontag (brilliantly detailed in This article, also highly recommend: https://www.thewhitereview.org/review... ). He seems to have a penchant for straight-up making things up in his biographical work. Edwards mentions that a good proportion of Brazilian academics are (rightly) pissed off with him. BM is inclined to charge his biographies with a 'bomb' to drop, his radical new information which justifies writing in the first place. As Edwards discusses, the main one in Why This World is probably the entire narrative of Clarice's mother being raped by Russian soldiers which leads to C's own guilt, a shadow hanging over her. Absolutely everybody (it would seem) in Lispector studies, especially in Brazil, points out that this is nonsense and unsubstantiated. Disregard
Obviously this speaks to the way that the 'international literary community' is So limited by which academics have access to translation. As it stands we have This Guy in charge of the Lispector name in English and look at how that's working out
the anecdotes I'm reading about Benjamin are, yes, anecdotes. But they're more than a little disturbing to read. To cite Barbara Epler as she's quoted in Edwards: 'You can’t say no to that guy,” said Epler. “He finally just put a bag over my head and clubbed me and said he’d do the translation himself in two or three weeks.”
look I could go on but I'm going to put a lid on it here
EDIT - ok no disregard the lid. page 9, my marginal annotation: oof. Description of a picture of Clarice, beautiful, with the author/memorialist Carolina Maria de Jesus. despite Moser's description of her writing as 'harrowing', Moser sees fit to describe a black woman stood next to Clarice as 'out of place, as if someone dragged Clarice's maid into the picture'. WHAT HOW DID thIS GET THROUGH EDITiNG IN 2009
here's the posthumous clarice interview if you've not given it the time before. It'll give you a much more useful impression of Clarice Lispector than the stuff wot this guy reckons:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1zwG...
tl;dr please read this: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/b...
and if you have time left over, this: https://www.thewhitereview.org/review...
starting with nice things I liked learning about the children's books CL wrote I want to look at The Woman Who Killed the Fish
anyway about 100 pages in I was going along idly wishing this sort of thing had been in the hands of somebody with the attentive capacities & dedication of a Heather Clark or somesuch. To put it bluntly I never felt like Moser could depict Clarice as human. Also a minor point but I feel dates, years, could have been signalled far better (à la Red Comet) - there were a few times it felt like he'd meant to go back and insert the date later but just forgot to. I guess it's fine that it's not Clarkish in a way- she's a kind of once-in-a-generation biographer. arguably. but Moser was constantly getting distracted with his own missions, and that began to open up other, more serious issues for me
ok so Misogyny
(o and also it's a relatively minor point with everything else going on here but I'm surprised Moser's description of a gay man's attempts to resist persecution as 'correcting' his sexuality (from gay to straight?) made it past an editor. no I'm not saying that Benjamin Moser is some sort of archaic superhomophobe but I think this is a really unfortunate phrasing which it seems should have been immediately picked up and 'corrected' in editing)
I'm going to open by just mentioning a few places in the text where BM is being, just strange. I think a lot of his misogyny serves to both produce and re-produce the Clarice 'myth' in the anglosphere, but we'll get back to The Real World in time. Sadly I only started taking real notes on this later on in the text so I'd like to draw attention to the way Moser has - and continues to treat beauty and the artist.
The blurb for this book opens with the Dietrich-Woolf quote from Gregory Rabassa, which has been reproduced all over the current Penguin CLs under Moser's direction. These are essentially the only Clarices the anglophone world has reasonable access to. Frankly, the Dietrich-Woolf thing is a comment made in the 60s and it should probably have stayed there - what a shock! She's not only smart, she's ALSO pretty! who knew a woman could do the both. what a dear.
Reading Why This World I find Moser doubles down on this bizarrely dated view - as if beauty and intelligence are somehow incompatible in a woman - and it really just runs through the whole text. p.284 he's lamenting that at age forty-six her 'beauty' 'was now in the past'. This is apparently due to her gaining weight. Thank you Mr biographer but I am sure that a beautiful forty-six-year-old (let alone a beautiful forty-six-year-old Clarice Lispector) is not entirely beyond one's capacity to imagine. Moser keeps on this train of how terrible it is that women age and 'lose beauty'. there's a reference in his acknowledgments to meeting Clarice's sister Tania, aged ninety 'dressed to the nines' - he claims he 'fell for her'.
At another point (p.315), Moser is describing the manuscript of Loud Objects, one of the iterations of the inimitable Água Viva. I don't think it's only weird to me that he describes it as at times 'as dull and uninspired as a housewife's neighbourly chitchat'. THAT'S your comparison?? There are countless thousands of hours' worth of entertainment based on the drama of housewifery I assume that is why they are Real. To me it reeks of this super-1950s tired masculine trope that women's domestic lives = inane, airheaded, not worthy of note. It seems I was tired by this point so my marginal annotation reads 'shut up moser'
Anyway I'm kind of glad I didn't start writing down this sort of thing earlier on because trust me we would be here all day. now onto the fearsome Real World
I read about a year ago that Benjamin Moser has problematic edges but I don't think I really investigated. This time I did. I read the piece that started this controversy and a brilliant little supplementary one which I also highly recommend. So let's talk about Moser. He's kind of spearheaded the recent translations of Clarice's, starting in 2017 with Hour of the Star which is his own translation, and he has more or less been involved with the subsequent translations. How, do you ask? Well, here is the crucial part. Please read this article (I mean it, it is not so often I ask for homework): https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/b...
written by Magdalena Edwards, the translator of The Chandelier, or, co-translator, as Moser has decided to label her. It's a fantastic investigation into his academic malpractices, imprecisions (such as a pretty shocking lapse in his translation of Hour of the Star), and frankly abusive behaviour toward the team of translators who have together produced the current Penguin Lispectors. She mentions his constant erasure of women's writing, translation, including in his recent 800-page biography of Susan Sontag (brilliantly detailed in This article, also highly recommend: https://www.thewhitereview.org/review... ). He seems to have a penchant for straight-up making things up in his biographical work. Edwards mentions that a good proportion of Brazilian academics are (rightly) pissed off with him. BM is inclined to charge his biographies with a 'bomb' to drop, his radical new information which justifies writing in the first place. As Edwards discusses, the main one in Why This World is probably the entire narrative of Clarice's mother being raped by Russian soldiers which leads to C's own guilt, a shadow hanging over her. Absolutely everybody (it would seem) in Lispector studies, especially in Brazil, points out that this is nonsense and unsubstantiated. Disregard
Obviously this speaks to the way that the 'international literary community' is So limited by which academics have access to translation. As it stands we have This Guy in charge of the Lispector name in English and look at how that's working out
the anecdotes I'm reading about Benjamin are, yes, anecdotes. But they're more than a little disturbing to read. To cite Barbara Epler as she's quoted in Edwards: 'You can’t say no to that guy,” said Epler. “He finally just put a bag over my head and clubbed me and said he’d do the translation himself in two or three weeks.”
look I could go on but I'm going to put a lid on it here
EDIT - ok no disregard the lid. page 9, my marginal annotation: oof. Description of a picture of Clarice, beautiful, with the author/memorialist Carolina Maria de Jesus. despite Moser's description of her writing as 'harrowing', Moser sees fit to describe a black woman stood next to Clarice as 'out of place, as if someone dragged Clarice's maid into the picture'. WHAT HOW DID thIS GET THROUGH EDITiNG IN 2009
here's the posthumous clarice interview if you've not given it the time before. It'll give you a much more useful impression of Clarice Lispector than the stuff wot this guy reckons:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1zwG...
tl;dr please read this: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/b...
and if you have time left over, this: https://www.thewhitereview.org/review...
December 2, 2024
4.5 stars. A very readable biography of the Brazilian author, Clarice Lispector. Lispector is a very interesting individual who, for the most part, lead quite an eventful life. She was born in the Ukraine, has two sisters, travelled to Brazil before she was one year old, completed a law degree, was a journalist, had major success with her first novel, ‘Near to the Wild Heart’ (1943), written when she was 23 years old. She married a diplomat, living in Europe and the USA. Had two sons. Left her husband to live with her two sons in Brazil. She had been married sixteen years.
Moser describes her upbringing, relationships, working and family life, and provides informative comments on each of her published novels and short story collections.
This book provides the reader with a good understanding of who Clarice Lispector was as a person.
Highly recommended.
This book was first published in 2009.
Moser describes her upbringing, relationships, working and family life, and provides informative comments on each of her published novels and short story collections.
This book provides the reader with a good understanding of who Clarice Lispector was as a person.
Highly recommended.
This book was first published in 2009.
June 7, 2023
i want to know everything about Lispector, and this book is a great way to accomplish that. Moser did an exceptionally good job by providing not only a detailed recollection of Lispector's life and work, but also a nuanced social and political context she lived in.
January 9, 2021
I loved this book! But I also have some thoughts about it, I'll start with what I liked.
Clarice Lispector is an intensely interesting writer and I enjoyed reading all the minute details of her life. Her written correspondence was an important element of this book, it really made it feel like she was co-writing it. I was really expecting this book to be dense but the short chapters and the breaks within the chapters made reading it a breeze.
I do think that there is no better person perhaps to write a biography for her than Benjamin Moser who has translated and edited so many of her works, so I enjoyed the light art/writing criticism in it, without getting dry or boring. Clarice wouldn't have wanted that.
I now feel like I have a good understanding of her oeuvre, how each book moved into the next though now I know the basic plot to all her novels, not that you can spoil a Clarice Lispector book... but if you are waiting to read Passion According to G.H., read that before this biography, it totally spoiled the climax of the book!
Another thing that made this book special was excerpts from Elisa Lispector's fictionalized re-telling of her family's life in Ukraine and their passage to Brazil, as well as the short chapters for political context in Ukraine and Brazil.
My only complaint with this book was how the author mentions Clarice's beauty and fame in completely inappropriate moments. Like he will be discussing the pogroms and her mother who died from syphilis and randomly talk about their unborn daughters future fame and beauty. I think an editor should have flagged that, it was kind of awkward.
This doesn't stop me from giving it 5 stars because I LOVED IT! and I love Clarice
Clarice Lispector is an intensely interesting writer and I enjoyed reading all the minute details of her life. Her written correspondence was an important element of this book, it really made it feel like she was co-writing it. I was really expecting this book to be dense but the short chapters and the breaks within the chapters made reading it a breeze.
I do think that there is no better person perhaps to write a biography for her than Benjamin Moser who has translated and edited so many of her works, so I enjoyed the light art/writing criticism in it, without getting dry or boring. Clarice wouldn't have wanted that.
I now feel like I have a good understanding of her oeuvre, how each book moved into the next though now I know the basic plot to all her novels, not that you can spoil a Clarice Lispector book... but if you are waiting to read Passion According to G.H., read that before this biography, it totally spoiled the climax of the book!
Another thing that made this book special was excerpts from Elisa Lispector's fictionalized re-telling of her family's life in Ukraine and their passage to Brazil, as well as the short chapters for political context in Ukraine and Brazil.
My only complaint with this book was how the author mentions Clarice's beauty and fame in completely inappropriate moments. Like he will be discussing the pogroms and her mother who died from syphilis and randomly talk about their unborn daughters future fame and beauty. I think an editor should have flagged that, it was kind of awkward.
This doesn't stop me from giving it 5 stars because I LOVED IT! and I love Clarice
March 20, 2020
Six stars. The book is a biography of Clarice Lispector who was originally a Ukrainian born Brazilian Jewish lady who came over into Brazil during the time of the Second World war. I've read quite a few books by her and in my opinion she has to be one of the best ever female writers the I've read. it's hard to explain why because her books are so subtle and nuanced. She has the ability to do what only a few writers can do which is that magical way of being able to paint an entire Panorama or vision of the scene that she's depicting By describing only a few simply chosen almost random words a description of one part and one small part of the entire scene. So she may describe a napkin falling from a table and the way she does it you can somehow envisage the entire restaurant bustling and moving. She clearly was a very unique individual and the book talks about her youth and her family and her background and how she really rocked the global literature scene with her debut novel and subsequent novels and the last one in particular. I really recommend you read her ASAP. Anyway here are some of the best bits from this particular biography.
Respect even the bad parts of yourself : respect above all the bad parts of yourself. For the love of God don't try to make yourself perfect, don't copy an ideal, copy yourself, that is the only way to live.
A horse acts only according to its nature, free of the artifices of thoughts and analysis and that is the freedom Clarice seems to long for: the freedom to do as she liked, yes, but more important the freedom from the shipwreck of introspection.
She rather enjoyed England. This here is a typical small town, with a whiff of Bern. If we weren't going to be here for such a short time, it would be unendurable. Everyone is more or less ugly, wearing horrible hats, and with horrible clothes in the shop windows. But though Torquay is boring, I do like England. The lack of sun, certain beaches with dark rocks , the lack of beauty, it all moves me much more than the beauty of Switzerland. Speaking of which I hate it more and more. I hope to never return there. To Switzerland.
The controlled tension between impulsiveness and reason was a source of her creative power but she always feared the danger. Those of her characters, Virginia, for instance, who tried to keep their intimate balance, always lost in the end.
The difference between the Mystic and the madman is that the Mystic can return, emerging from the state of grace and finding a human language to describe it.
The presentation of herself as lacking culture and erudition met with remarkable successful. none less than Elizabeth Bishop, her neighbour in Rio, wrote to Robert Lowell that Clarice is the most non literary writer I've ever known. And never cracks a book as we used to say. She's never read anything, that I can discover. I think she's a self taught writer like a primitive painter.
Suspecting that the answers to the mute and intense question that had troubled her as an adolescent , what is the world like? And why this world? Could not be discovered intellectually, she sought a higher kind of understanding. You ought to know, a Spanish cabalist muttered at the end of the 13th century that these philosophers whose wisdom you are praising, end where we begin.
You naturally know that drawing attention to oneself is not done and always gives a bad impression of a woman. Whether with scandalous clothing, exotic hairstyles , ways of walking, manners, rule after, any way of calling attention to oneself deserves, in shorts, nothing more than a prize for vulgarity.
Clarisse had conceived civilization as essentially linguistic. Language builds the towns , literally. Lucretia indicated the intimate name of things. Reality required the girl in order to take a form. That civilisation crumbles when language is taken away.
That problem of justice is in me as a feeling so obvious and so basic that I can't surprise myself with it, and without surprising myself, I just can't write.
It seemed that I vaguely felt that while i had suffered physically in such an unendurable way that would be proof of living to the maximum. The pain was monstrous.
But i'm not really enjoying this part with the mediocrity of living.
However the dreamlike aguaviva is not hermetic in the least. It can be opened to any page, just as a painting can be viewed from any angle , and it pulses with a sensuality that gives it an unequalled and direct emotional appeal: I see that I've never told you how I listen to music , I press my hand lightly to the record player and my hand vibrates spreading waves through my whole body: that is how I hear the electricity of the vibration, last substratum in the domain of reality and the world trembles inside my hands.
Daddy i made up a poem.
What's it called?
Me and the sun.
Without waiting long I recited:
“the hens who are in the yard ate two earthworms but I didn't see it.”
She was increasingly becoming incapable of small talk. God death matter spirit were the subjects of her everyday conversation
Last night I had a dream within a dream. I dreamed that I was calmly watching actors working on a stage. And through a door that was not locked men came in with machine guns and killed all the actors. I began to cry: I didn't want them to be dead. So the actors got up off the ground and said: we aren't dead in real life, just as actors , the massacre was part of the show. Then I dreamed such a good dream: in life we are actors in an observed play written by an absurd God. We are all participants in this Theatre: in truth we never shall die when death happens. We only dies actors. Could that be eternity?
In near to the wild heart she gives an example of the Childs tendency to use words to evoke sensations , the word “lalande” which she invents and then defines: it's Angels tears. Do you know what Angel tears are? A kind of little Narcissus which the slightest breeze pushes from one side to the other. Lalande Is also the sea in the morning when no one has yet gazed upon the beach, when the sun is still to rise. Every time I say the word you should feel the fresh and salty breeze from the sea, you should walk along the still dark beach, slowly, naked . Soon you will feel it.
You have to know how to feel, but you also have to know how to stop feeling, because if the experience is sublime it can also become dangerous.
The man is punished for his crime because the state is stronger than he: the great crime of war is not punished, because beyond the individual there is mankind , and beyond mankind there is nothing else at all.
And even the fatigue of life has a certain beauty when born alone and desperately. But together, eating everyday the same bread, watching one's own defeat in the defeat of others. Not to mention the weight of the habits reflected in the habits of the other the weight of the shared bed , the shared table , the shared life, preparing and threatening the shared death. I always said: never.
Here we see the unmistakable imprint of spinoza, who equates nature with God and both with an absence of good and evil. All things which are in nature, are either things or actions. Now good and evil are neither things nor actions. There for good and evil do not exist in nature.
I'm not enjoying travelling. I like to be there with you or with morrie. The whole world is lightly annoying it seems. What matters in life is being close to the people you love. That is the most important truth in the world.
The truth is I don't know how to write letters about trips: the truth is I don't even know how to travel. It's funny how, passing through all those places I see very little, I think nature all looks pretty much alike and the things are all pretty much alike. I knew more about the veiled Arab woman when I was in Rio. Anyway I hope I'll never expect myself to take a stand. That would tie me. This whole month I haven't done anything, read anything, anything at all. This isn't travelling: travelling is leaving and going home whenever you want to go . Travelling is being able to move. But travelling this way is awful and like serving out a sentence in different places. The impressions you have after a year in a place end up killing your first impressions. At the end of it all you end up educated. But that's not my style. I never minded being ignorant.
At age 91, Tonya still remembered her wonderment at her father's reaction when as a teenager she came out in favour of free love and proclaimed that she wasn't going to get married. From a girl in the small conservative Jewish community in Brazil in the 1930s, this was a provocation , and Tanya braced herself for the reaction. Our fathers would have beat a child who said something like that. I'm sure he was shocked but he asked why I thought that way full stopped we talked about it full stopped and then as I'm sure he knew I would to, I forgot about the whole thing.
(The following is an extract from an interview you can see of clarice lispector on YouTube . It's got English subtitles.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1zwG...
Do you ever write something only to tear it up again?
I've put it aside or : no I tear things up she says annoyed.
Is that reaction purely rational or more of a sudden emotion?
Anger a little bit of anger. Her tone harden's, her eyes are downcast and her hands are fiddling with a packet of cigarettes .
With whom?
With myself
why clarice? Who knows. I'm a little tired.
Of work?
Of myself.
But aren't you born again and refreshed with every new work?
Well. She takes a deep breath before finding looking up.
For now I'm dead. Will see if I can be born again. For now I'm dead. I'm speaking from my tomb.
The camera pans out to reveal a room as bare and silent as the room in which G H encountered the cockroach . The cameraman and Olga borelli said nothing as an intern stood softly crying. Clarisse whispered a request to Lerner that the footage be broadcast only after her death. The wish would be respected.
Respect even the bad parts of yourself : respect above all the bad parts of yourself. For the love of God don't try to make yourself perfect, don't copy an ideal, copy yourself, that is the only way to live.
A horse acts only according to its nature, free of the artifices of thoughts and analysis and that is the freedom Clarice seems to long for: the freedom to do as she liked, yes, but more important the freedom from the shipwreck of introspection.
She rather enjoyed England. This here is a typical small town, with a whiff of Bern. If we weren't going to be here for such a short time, it would be unendurable. Everyone is more or less ugly, wearing horrible hats, and with horrible clothes in the shop windows. But though Torquay is boring, I do like England. The lack of sun, certain beaches with dark rocks , the lack of beauty, it all moves me much more than the beauty of Switzerland. Speaking of which I hate it more and more. I hope to never return there. To Switzerland.
The controlled tension between impulsiveness and reason was a source of her creative power but she always feared the danger. Those of her characters, Virginia, for instance, who tried to keep their intimate balance, always lost in the end.
The difference between the Mystic and the madman is that the Mystic can return, emerging from the state of grace and finding a human language to describe it.
The presentation of herself as lacking culture and erudition met with remarkable successful. none less than Elizabeth Bishop, her neighbour in Rio, wrote to Robert Lowell that Clarice is the most non literary writer I've ever known. And never cracks a book as we used to say. She's never read anything, that I can discover. I think she's a self taught writer like a primitive painter.
Suspecting that the answers to the mute and intense question that had troubled her as an adolescent , what is the world like? And why this world? Could not be discovered intellectually, she sought a higher kind of understanding. You ought to know, a Spanish cabalist muttered at the end of the 13th century that these philosophers whose wisdom you are praising, end where we begin.
You naturally know that drawing attention to oneself is not done and always gives a bad impression of a woman. Whether with scandalous clothing, exotic hairstyles , ways of walking, manners, rule after, any way of calling attention to oneself deserves, in shorts, nothing more than a prize for vulgarity.
Clarisse had conceived civilization as essentially linguistic. Language builds the towns , literally. Lucretia indicated the intimate name of things. Reality required the girl in order to take a form. That civilisation crumbles when language is taken away.
That problem of justice is in me as a feeling so obvious and so basic that I can't surprise myself with it, and without surprising myself, I just can't write.
It seemed that I vaguely felt that while i had suffered physically in such an unendurable way that would be proof of living to the maximum. The pain was monstrous.
But i'm not really enjoying this part with the mediocrity of living.
However the dreamlike aguaviva is not hermetic in the least. It can be opened to any page, just as a painting can be viewed from any angle , and it pulses with a sensuality that gives it an unequalled and direct emotional appeal: I see that I've never told you how I listen to music , I press my hand lightly to the record player and my hand vibrates spreading waves through my whole body: that is how I hear the electricity of the vibration, last substratum in the domain of reality and the world trembles inside my hands.
Daddy i made up a poem.
What's it called?
Me and the sun.
Without waiting long I recited:
“the hens who are in the yard ate two earthworms but I didn't see it.”
She was increasingly becoming incapable of small talk. God death matter spirit were the subjects of her everyday conversation
Last night I had a dream within a dream. I dreamed that I was calmly watching actors working on a stage. And through a door that was not locked men came in with machine guns and killed all the actors. I began to cry: I didn't want them to be dead. So the actors got up off the ground and said: we aren't dead in real life, just as actors , the massacre was part of the show. Then I dreamed such a good dream: in life we are actors in an observed play written by an absurd God. We are all participants in this Theatre: in truth we never shall die when death happens. We only dies actors. Could that be eternity?
In near to the wild heart she gives an example of the Childs tendency to use words to evoke sensations , the word “lalande” which she invents and then defines: it's Angels tears. Do you know what Angel tears are? A kind of little Narcissus which the slightest breeze pushes from one side to the other. Lalande Is also the sea in the morning when no one has yet gazed upon the beach, when the sun is still to rise. Every time I say the word you should feel the fresh and salty breeze from the sea, you should walk along the still dark beach, slowly, naked . Soon you will feel it.
You have to know how to feel, but you also have to know how to stop feeling, because if the experience is sublime it can also become dangerous.
The man is punished for his crime because the state is stronger than he: the great crime of war is not punished, because beyond the individual there is mankind , and beyond mankind there is nothing else at all.
And even the fatigue of life has a certain beauty when born alone and desperately. But together, eating everyday the same bread, watching one's own defeat in the defeat of others. Not to mention the weight of the habits reflected in the habits of the other the weight of the shared bed , the shared table , the shared life, preparing and threatening the shared death. I always said: never.
Here we see the unmistakable imprint of spinoza, who equates nature with God and both with an absence of good and evil. All things which are in nature, are either things or actions. Now good and evil are neither things nor actions. There for good and evil do not exist in nature.
I'm not enjoying travelling. I like to be there with you or with morrie. The whole world is lightly annoying it seems. What matters in life is being close to the people you love. That is the most important truth in the world.
The truth is I don't know how to write letters about trips: the truth is I don't even know how to travel. It's funny how, passing through all those places I see very little, I think nature all looks pretty much alike and the things are all pretty much alike. I knew more about the veiled Arab woman when I was in Rio. Anyway I hope I'll never expect myself to take a stand. That would tie me. This whole month I haven't done anything, read anything, anything at all. This isn't travelling: travelling is leaving and going home whenever you want to go . Travelling is being able to move. But travelling this way is awful and like serving out a sentence in different places. The impressions you have after a year in a place end up killing your first impressions. At the end of it all you end up educated. But that's not my style. I never minded being ignorant.
At age 91, Tonya still remembered her wonderment at her father's reaction when as a teenager she came out in favour of free love and proclaimed that she wasn't going to get married. From a girl in the small conservative Jewish community in Brazil in the 1930s, this was a provocation , and Tanya braced herself for the reaction. Our fathers would have beat a child who said something like that. I'm sure he was shocked but he asked why I thought that way full stopped we talked about it full stopped and then as I'm sure he knew I would to, I forgot about the whole thing.
(The following is an extract from an interview you can see of clarice lispector on YouTube . It's got English subtitles.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1zwG...
Do you ever write something only to tear it up again?
I've put it aside or : no I tear things up she says annoyed.
Is that reaction purely rational or more of a sudden emotion?
Anger a little bit of anger. Her tone harden's, her eyes are downcast and her hands are fiddling with a packet of cigarettes .
With whom?
With myself
why clarice? Who knows. I'm a little tired.
Of work?
Of myself.
But aren't you born again and refreshed with every new work?
Well. She takes a deep breath before finding looking up.
For now I'm dead. Will see if I can be born again. For now I'm dead. I'm speaking from my tomb.
The camera pans out to reveal a room as bare and silent as the room in which G H encountered the cockroach . The cameraman and Olga borelli said nothing as an intern stood softly crying. Clarisse whispered a request to Lerner that the footage be broadcast only after her death. The wish would be respected.
February 12, 2018
I am curious to learn more about one of my favorite Brazilian writers, a real "myth" according to some critics.
November 3, 2022
Clarice mudou a minha vida em definitivo e nada que eu escrever vai contemplar o misto de sensações que foi a imersão na sua biografia… mas vou tentar, não custa, né?
O que mais me tocou foi conhecer uma Clarice vulnerável frente ao desamparo que a acompanhou por toda a vida. A escrita imponente, por vezes rebuscada, não dá tantas pistas da fragilidade que possuía a autora dos maiores clássicos da nossa literatura.
Na infância, uma menina de inteligência precoce, moradora de Recife, inventora de fábulas e de criativas brincadeiras.
Na juventude, enérgica, perspicaz e dotada de extraordinária beleza, mas ainda cambaleante ao tentar se apropriar do seu potencial como escritora.
Na maturidade e no final da vida, já reconhecida como figura mística e lendária, fascinava na mesma medida em que assustava aqueles que com ela se deparavam.
Tanto nas identificações quanto nas estranhezas (e sustos!), me senti mais próxima dessa que já reconheço como a autora da minha vida.
Admiro Clarice com todo o meu coração, com todo o meu corpo, com tudo o que sei sobre mim e com o que ainda vou descobrir.
Muito grata hoje à minha Eu criança que surrupiou "A hora da estrela" da estante da avó pra dar uma espiadinha rápida - espiada que, felizmente, já dura 10 anos.
O que mais me tocou foi conhecer uma Clarice vulnerável frente ao desamparo que a acompanhou por toda a vida. A escrita imponente, por vezes rebuscada, não dá tantas pistas da fragilidade que possuía a autora dos maiores clássicos da nossa literatura.
Na infância, uma menina de inteligência precoce, moradora de Recife, inventora de fábulas e de criativas brincadeiras.
Na juventude, enérgica, perspicaz e dotada de extraordinária beleza, mas ainda cambaleante ao tentar se apropriar do seu potencial como escritora.
Na maturidade e no final da vida, já reconhecida como figura mística e lendária, fascinava na mesma medida em que assustava aqueles que com ela se deparavam.
Tanto nas identificações quanto nas estranhezas (e sustos!), me senti mais próxima dessa que já reconheço como a autora da minha vida.
Admiro Clarice com todo o meu coração, com todo o meu corpo, com tudo o que sei sobre mim e com o que ainda vou descobrir.
Muito grata hoje à minha Eu criança que surrupiou "A hora da estrela" da estante da avó pra dar uma espiadinha rápida - espiada que, felizmente, já dura 10 anos.
February 29, 2024
ela é tão eu (tristeza inexplicável nos olhos e uma licenciatura em direito)
September 17, 2016
The “it”, the “neutral”, the “pre-human”. When I read Clarice Lispector, I believe that these things exist. I know what she is talking about. And the experience of reading her brings you close to having the same experiences yourself. But when I read Moser’s biography, I often found myself doubting whether I had ever truly experienced the “it” in the first place, and if it even exists at all. Moser and other critics classify Lispector’s writing as “mystical” but I think to label it in any form flattens the attempt to describe the “it” as just part of some sort of genre of other writers. In other words:
The tao that can be named is not the tao.
It’s like having a dream vs. telling someone about the dream. Lispector is the dream and Moser is the telling. You might have a dream where you talk to aliens and they impart some Profound Secret about the human race or being in a body or whatever. But when you tell someone about the dream, it gets categorized as “dream” and therefore has certain limits to its significance with regard to everyday life. Oh, dreams are mystical, just like grass is green and water is wet, what else is new. You know how you can’t really explain why an experience is profoundly moving? Because being moved is about what happens to you. Saying that something is profound does nothing to truly explain the effect it has on you. Or like: Explaining why a joke is funny can never substitute the funniness of the joke itself.
On the other hand you could also say that Lispector is the telling and the “it” is the dream. But Lispector, unlike Moser, does the telling in a way that enhances the “it”, brings it to life, gets you to experience it. In a way that explaining a joke or, in this case, writing her biography, never could.
I don’t blame Moser. He was writing a biography. Biographies are supposed to be factual, rational, compatible with the everyday. That’s why I think I have a problem with the whole project of writing a biography about Lispector in the first place. Lispector herself claimed “Facts and particulars annoy me”, yet this book is nothing but details of her birthplace, youth, books she was reading, people she knew, places she lived, the political climate in those places, etc. I am so doubtful of reading all of her work as autobiographical in some way. Skeptical as seeing the work as a symptom of a person. And to parse out all these details and relate them to what she was writing at the time seems to be the equivalent of doing just that.
I don’t think understanding Lispector as a person is integral to understanding her work, at least in the way that she understood it.
The tao that can be named is not the tao.
It’s like having a dream vs. telling someone about the dream. Lispector is the dream and Moser is the telling. You might have a dream where you talk to aliens and they impart some Profound Secret about the human race or being in a body or whatever. But when you tell someone about the dream, it gets categorized as “dream” and therefore has certain limits to its significance with regard to everyday life. Oh, dreams are mystical, just like grass is green and water is wet, what else is new. You know how you can’t really explain why an experience is profoundly moving? Because being moved is about what happens to you. Saying that something is profound does nothing to truly explain the effect it has on you. Or like: Explaining why a joke is funny can never substitute the funniness of the joke itself.
On the other hand you could also say that Lispector is the telling and the “it” is the dream. But Lispector, unlike Moser, does the telling in a way that enhances the “it”, brings it to life, gets you to experience it. In a way that explaining a joke or, in this case, writing her biography, never could.
I don’t blame Moser. He was writing a biography. Biographies are supposed to be factual, rational, compatible with the everyday. That’s why I think I have a problem with the whole project of writing a biography about Lispector in the first place. Lispector herself claimed “Facts and particulars annoy me”, yet this book is nothing but details of her birthplace, youth, books she was reading, people she knew, places she lived, the political climate in those places, etc. I am so doubtful of reading all of her work as autobiographical in some way. Skeptical as seeing the work as a symptom of a person. And to parse out all these details and relate them to what she was writing at the time seems to be the equivalent of doing just that.
I don’t think understanding Lispector as a person is integral to understanding her work, at least in the way that she understood it.
September 10, 2016
Jewish. Kabbalistic. Mystic. Void. Numerology. Ukraine. And Brazil. These are the categories that inspired Clarice Lispector life, living and writing. Inspired and determined partially - but not completely. Next to that, she was one-of-a-kind and original.
Saturday I finished Benjamin Moser's book 'Why This World. A Biography of Clarice Lispector' (2009). I read this biography because I want to understand why Clarice (1920-1977) is so popular in Brazil. I encounter quotes from her books quite often from my Brazilian friends.
To be honest I still don't understand. It must be her strange- or foreignness. Above all, her writing is very quotable just like Nietzsche. Why Clarice? Because in her works one finds the full range of human experience. She is like a mirror. As she said, "I am all of yourselves." (page 5)
Jewish mystics: "The name of the thing is the thing, and by discovering the name one creates it. (...) The point where the name of a thing becomes identical to the thing itself, the "word that has its own light," is the ultimate reality. The discovery of the holy name, synonymous with God, was the highest goal of the Jewish mystics." (page 155)
For Clarice her writing didn't bring what she wanted, which was peace. "My literature is in no sense a catharsis that would do me good and is useless as a form of liberation." (page 260)
Was she a hermetic? Clarice: "I understand myself. Well, there's one story I don't understand, 'The Egg and the Hen,' which is a mystery to me." (page 278)
Moser: "Much of Clarice Lispector's subsequent fame, her enduring popularity among a broad public, rests on this thin book, in which she managed to bring together all the strands of her writing and of her life. Explicitly Jewish and explicitly Brazilian, joining the northeast of her childhood with her Rio de Janeiro of her adulthood, "social" and abstract, tragic and comic, uniting her religious and linguistic questions with the narrative drive of her finest stories, 'The Hour of the Star' is a fitting monument to its author's "unbearable genius"." (page 372)
Did you know ... that singer Maria Bethânia threw herself at the feet of Clarice exclaiming, "My goddess"?
Did you know ... that singer Cazuza read her book 'Água viva'/ 111 times?
Saturday I finished Benjamin Moser's book 'Why This World. A Biography of Clarice Lispector' (2009). I read this biography because I want to understand why Clarice (1920-1977) is so popular in Brazil. I encounter quotes from her books quite often from my Brazilian friends.
To be honest I still don't understand. It must be her strange- or foreignness. Above all, her writing is very quotable just like Nietzsche. Why Clarice? Because in her works one finds the full range of human experience. She is like a mirror. As she said, "I am all of yourselves." (page 5)
Jewish mystics: "The name of the thing is the thing, and by discovering the name one creates it. (...) The point where the name of a thing becomes identical to the thing itself, the "word that has its own light," is the ultimate reality. The discovery of the holy name, synonymous with God, was the highest goal of the Jewish mystics." (page 155)
For Clarice her writing didn't bring what she wanted, which was peace. "My literature is in no sense a catharsis that would do me good and is useless as a form of liberation." (page 260)
Was she a hermetic? Clarice: "I understand myself. Well, there's one story I don't understand, 'The Egg and the Hen,' which is a mystery to me." (page 278)
Moser: "Much of Clarice Lispector's subsequent fame, her enduring popularity among a broad public, rests on this thin book, in which she managed to bring together all the strands of her writing and of her life. Explicitly Jewish and explicitly Brazilian, joining the northeast of her childhood with her Rio de Janeiro of her adulthood, "social" and abstract, tragic and comic, uniting her religious and linguistic questions with the narrative drive of her finest stories, 'The Hour of the Star' is a fitting monument to its author's "unbearable genius"." (page 372)
Did you know ... that singer Maria Bethânia threw herself at the feet of Clarice exclaiming, "My goddess"?
Did you know ... that singer Cazuza read her book 'Água viva'/ 111 times?
February 25, 2019
Clarice Lispector is one of my favourite authors ever. «Agua Viva», was, is and will always be a landmark in my life. She is a genre in herself, how many writers in history took its readers to say such a thing? Very few, I promise. Her life, well, if not always happy was, of course, interesting. Something one would like to read about and yet, what Mr Moser produced was... this... anodyne... book!!! How did he get to write this tiresome book about her? That is a question we would never perhaps answer in full.
As many others have already stated, I don't know why it was necessary for him to quote as much from her books, it gets you to guess why do you need to fill your work with that much of your subject's books. Wasn't her life enough? I do wonder... Don't read this book unless you had read every book from Clarice since it might spoils some of them for you, 2 books are almost quoted in full, which is in itself a pity. Since in his attempt to dissect them, he manages to make them not interesting at all.
And that is, of course, the main issue here. This whole book was really boring. I don't know how many times I left it for other books since I couldn't manage to keep my attention focused on its pages, I actually lost track. And it pains me to say so, therefore I decided to finish this today come what may! And so I did. But no, I would not advice anyone to read it, I do hope it might come to the point to find a good writer that might do justice to Clarice's life, a proper biography about her life.
PS: This is not in itself Mr Moser's fault, but I do find that Clarice's writing lacks something in anything but a romance language. Spanish and Portuguese are both rich languages when it comes to prose, and their ability to provide a writer with so many options, and I'm sorry, but having read the same book in the original language, and then found it quoted in English, it was not the same.
As many others have already stated, I don't know why it was necessary for him to quote as much from her books, it gets you to guess why do you need to fill your work with that much of your subject's books. Wasn't her life enough? I do wonder... Don't read this book unless you had read every book from Clarice since it might spoils some of them for you, 2 books are almost quoted in full, which is in itself a pity. Since in his attempt to dissect them, he manages to make them not interesting at all.
And that is, of course, the main issue here. This whole book was really boring. I don't know how many times I left it for other books since I couldn't manage to keep my attention focused on its pages, I actually lost track. And it pains me to say so, therefore I decided to finish this today come what may! And so I did. But no, I would not advice anyone to read it, I do hope it might come to the point to find a good writer that might do justice to Clarice's life, a proper biography about her life.
PS: This is not in itself Mr Moser's fault, but I do find that Clarice's writing lacks something in anything but a romance language. Spanish and Portuguese are both rich languages when it comes to prose, and their ability to provide a writer with so many options, and I'm sorry, but having read the same book in the original language, and then found it quoted in English, it was not the same.
August 13, 2017
Clarice Lispector left both a lot and little for her readers to sift through when trying to understand her. There are her books, subtly exploring her inner turmoil and personal experiences. There are her letters. There are remnants to form into a whole.
Moser clearly admires his subject, but the clear takeaway in this bio is the question of whether we should try to understand her further than her own words - if we should dare to try and flesh out the story. Even in detail, CL remains elusive. This is a bio of fragments linked into sentences, paragraphs, and chapters. It's a barrage of names and situations surrounding her, not an exploration of her.
After a clear exploration of her youth and the family and turmoil she came from, she becomes an impossible to catch figure--a Carmen Sandiego traveling the world, and through time, as others try to catch and encapsulate her.
If you want to know Clarice, read her.
Moser clearly admires his subject, but the clear takeaway in this bio is the question of whether we should try to understand her further than her own words - if we should dare to try and flesh out the story. Even in detail, CL remains elusive. This is a bio of fragments linked into sentences, paragraphs, and chapters. It's a barrage of names and situations surrounding her, not an exploration of her.
After a clear exploration of her youth and the family and turmoil she came from, she becomes an impossible to catch figure--a Carmen Sandiego traveling the world, and through time, as others try to catch and encapsulate her.
If you want to know Clarice, read her.
Read
January 29, 2015This wasn't very good as a biography. Everything aside from the (long and frequent) analytical passages concerning her work felt very.....procedural. I swear 1/4 of the text in this book is devoted just to the political situation of various parts of Eastern Europe and South America.
But then I suppose that gets back to the 'Why read biography?' question. Perhaps Lispector as biographical subject seems...redundant and irrelevant since her work is so intimate and cosmological.
I really liked the passages concerning her as a mother, though.
But then I suppose that gets back to the 'Why read biography?' question. Perhaps Lispector as biographical subject seems...redundant and irrelevant since her work is so intimate and cosmological.
I really liked the passages concerning her as a mother, though.
August 21, 2020
"Dadas as circunstâncias brutais da primeira infância de Clarice, seria difícil que ela pudesse chegar a uma conclusão diferente desta: a vida não é humana e não tem "valor humano" algum." Sua existência não tinha mais razão de ser do que a de uma barata."
November 12, 2013
Wonderful book, though quite sad, and nothing I would ever read again because of it.
September 30, 2018
In zijn dankbetuiging schrijft Moser, de auteur van deze vlot lezende biografie, dat hem werd aangeraden zich voor een schrijversbiografie vooral te laten leiden door de eigen interpretatie van het werk van de besproken schrijver. Het is duidelijk dat Moser deze raad opgevolgd heeft. En maar goed ook, Moser blijkt een grote fan van zijn subject en kan haar maar moeilijk van haar pied de stalletje halen.
Ondanks de vele herhalingen heeft Moser een mooie en boeiende introductie geschreven op leven en werk van Clarice Lispector. Boeiend, omdat Lispector - hij mag haar Clarice noemen - in zijn biografie even hermetisch blijft als haar verschijning zelf was en hij via een interpretatie van haar werk deze mythe toch van heel wat sluiers ontdoet. Ik ben er nog niet uit hoezeer dit van invloed zal zijn op mijn verdere lectuur van Lispectors romans en verhalen.
Deze biografie leest vlot door een stukje Zuid-Amerikaanse geschiedenis. Wellicht is dit de grootste bijdrage van dit werk. Vaag was ik bekend met vele gebeurtenissen die zich afgelopen eeuw in en rond Brazilië voltrokken, dit werk bracht daar wat meer lijn in. Lispectors leven blijkt een mooie insteek voor een stukje interessante geschiedschrijving.
En daar wringt het schoentje... Moser beschrijft uitgebreid de harde omstandigheden aan het begin van Lispectors leven en de vele demonen die haar sindsdien blijvend achtervolgden (de dood van haar moeder bvb.). Hij vertelt hoe deze hardheid zich heel haar leven blijft herhalen, in verschillende vormen en omstandigheden. Maar de hardheid van deze vrouw zelf, haar moeilijk karakter, haar stugheid, de schim van het personage 'Clarice Lispector de schrijfster' die voortdurend in haar leven en werk rondwaart... blijkt net wat te donker (en gevaarlijk misschien) voor de fan Moser om in door te dringen. Dat is jammer, maar misschien een reden te meer om me verder te verdiepen in haar verhalen en romans.
Ondanks de vele herhalingen heeft Moser een mooie en boeiende introductie geschreven op leven en werk van Clarice Lispector. Boeiend, omdat Lispector - hij mag haar Clarice noemen - in zijn biografie even hermetisch blijft als haar verschijning zelf was en hij via een interpretatie van haar werk deze mythe toch van heel wat sluiers ontdoet. Ik ben er nog niet uit hoezeer dit van invloed zal zijn op mijn verdere lectuur van Lispectors romans en verhalen.
Deze biografie leest vlot door een stukje Zuid-Amerikaanse geschiedenis. Wellicht is dit de grootste bijdrage van dit werk. Vaag was ik bekend met vele gebeurtenissen die zich afgelopen eeuw in en rond Brazilië voltrokken, dit werk bracht daar wat meer lijn in. Lispectors leven blijkt een mooie insteek voor een stukje interessante geschiedschrijving.
En daar wringt het schoentje... Moser beschrijft uitgebreid de harde omstandigheden aan het begin van Lispectors leven en de vele demonen die haar sindsdien blijvend achtervolgden (de dood van haar moeder bvb.). Hij vertelt hoe deze hardheid zich heel haar leven blijft herhalen, in verschillende vormen en omstandigheden. Maar de hardheid van deze vrouw zelf, haar moeilijk karakter, haar stugheid, de schim van het personage 'Clarice Lispector de schrijfster' die voortdurend in haar leven en werk rondwaart... blijkt net wat te donker (en gevaarlijk misschien) voor de fan Moser om in door te dringen. Dat is jammer, maar misschien een reden te meer om me verder te verdiepen in haar verhalen en romans.
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