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Todas las crónicas
Tras el impresionante éxito de Todos los cuentos, llega la edición definitiva de todas las crónicas de Clarice Lispector, con más de 120 textos inéditos.
Desde Joaquim Machado de Assis, Brasil ha albergado una rica tradición de grandes cronistas. En medio de esta constelación, la estrella de Clarice brilla de un modo especial. Las crónicas de Lispector para el Jornal do Brasil fueron escritas «a vuela pluma» entre 1967 y 1973. Este volumen, que incluye textos inéditos publicados en otros diarios y revistas, nos da por fin una panorámica completa. La Lispector que encontramos aquí es el ama de casa que se enfrenta a los problemas domésticos: el presupuesto familiar, la sopera que hay que devolver, la mudez crónica del teléfono, la educación de los hijos. Pero también la que nos habla de manera cercana sobre el amor, la revuelta contra la resignación, el yo, el paso del tiempo y la muerte. En definitiva, aquella Clarice Lispector capaz de transformar el hecho cotidiano en pura metafísica.
Desde Joaquim Machado de Assis, Brasil ha albergado una rica tradición de grandes cronistas. En medio de esta constelación, la estrella de Clarice brilla de un modo especial. Las crónicas de Lispector para el Jornal do Brasil fueron escritas «a vuela pluma» entre 1967 y 1973. Este volumen, que incluye textos inéditos publicados en otros diarios y revistas, nos da por fin una panorámica completa. La Lispector que encontramos aquí es el ama de casa que se enfrenta a los problemas domésticos: el presupuesto familiar, la sopera que hay que devolver, la mudez crónica del teléfono, la educación de los hijos. Pero también la que nos habla de manera cercana sobre el amor, la revuelta contra la resignación, el yo, el paso del tiempo y la muerte. En definitiva, aquella Clarice Lispector capaz de transformar el hecho cotidiano en pura metafísica.
624 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 2018
640 people are currently reading
11638 people want to read
About the author
Clarice Lispector
249 books8,534 followersClarice Lispector was a Brazilian writer. Acclaimed internationally for her innovative novels and short stories, she was also a journalist. Born to a Jewish family in Podolia in Western Ukraine, she was brought to Brazil as an infant, amidst the disasters engulfing her native land following the First World War.
She grew up in northeastern Brazil, where her mother died when she was nine. The family moved to Rio de Janeiro when she was in her teens. While in law school in Rio she began publishing her first journalistic work and short stories, catapulting to fame at age 23 with the publication of her first novel, 'Near to the Wild Heart' (Perto do Coração Selvagem), written as an interior monologue in a style and language that was considered revolutionary in Brazil.
She left Brazil in 1944, following her marriage to a Brazilian diplomat, and spent the next decade and a half in Europe and the United States. Upon return to Rio de Janeiro in 1959, she began producing her most famous works, including the stories of Family Ties (Laços de Família), the great mystic novel The Passion According to G.H. (A Paixão Segundo G.H.), and the novel many consider to be her masterpiece, Água Viva. Injured in an accident in 1966, she spent the last decade of her life in frequent pain, steadily writing and publishing novels and stories until her premature death in 1977.
She has been the subject of numerous books and references to her, and her works are common in Brazilian literature and music. Several of her works have been turned into films, one being 'Hour of the Star' and she was the subject of a recent biography, Why This World, by Benjamin Moser.
She grew up in northeastern Brazil, where her mother died when she was nine. The family moved to Rio de Janeiro when she was in her teens. While in law school in Rio she began publishing her first journalistic work and short stories, catapulting to fame at age 23 with the publication of her first novel, 'Near to the Wild Heart' (Perto do Coração Selvagem), written as an interior monologue in a style and language that was considered revolutionary in Brazil.
She left Brazil in 1944, following her marriage to a Brazilian diplomat, and spent the next decade and a half in Europe and the United States. Upon return to Rio de Janeiro in 1959, she began producing her most famous works, including the stories of Family Ties (Laços de Família), the great mystic novel The Passion According to G.H. (A Paixão Segundo G.H.), and the novel many consider to be her masterpiece, Água Viva. Injured in an accident in 1966, she spent the last decade of her life in frequent pain, steadily writing and publishing novels and stories until her premature death in 1977.
She has been the subject of numerous books and references to her, and her works are common in Brazilian literature and music. Several of her works have been turned into films, one being 'Hour of the Star' and she was the subject of a recent biography, Why This World, by Benjamin Moser.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 139 reviews
January 27, 2023
I've been reading this for about five months - and I'm so going to miss Clarice's voice on my commute.
This complete collection of her newspapers columns is glorious: there's just so much life here as Lispector talks - chats in writing - about everything: from literary discussions to dating advice (I mean, dating advice from Clarice - I'm so in!), scenes with her sons (who sound adorable) to her latest haircut; meetings with friends and fans to solitary contemplation of beauty or tragedy. Brimming over with everything from wit to rage to low moments, it's impossible to get bored and this lovely chunky book is like a textual friend who makes you laugh, shares her sadness with you, talks smart and always surprises you.
The individual pieces vary enormously in subject matter, tone and length - some are just a few sentences long, others full column length. But what they share is a vibrant, curious, constantly interested engagement with whatever Lispector comes across that week, in her head or in life.
Having finished this I'm putting the paperback (beautifully produced with French flaps - thank you, Penguin) back on my bedside table to re-read at leisure before sleep. Undoubtedly one of my books of the year.
This complete collection of her newspapers columns is glorious: there's just so much life here as Lispector talks - chats in writing - about everything: from literary discussions to dating advice (I mean, dating advice from Clarice - I'm so in!), scenes with her sons (who sound adorable) to her latest haircut; meetings with friends and fans to solitary contemplation of beauty or tragedy. Brimming over with everything from wit to rage to low moments, it's impossible to get bored and this lovely chunky book is like a textual friend who makes you laugh, shares her sadness with you, talks smart and always surprises you.
The individual pieces vary enormously in subject matter, tone and length - some are just a few sentences long, others full column length. But what they share is a vibrant, curious, constantly interested engagement with whatever Lispector comes across that week, in her head or in life.
Having finished this I'm putting the paperback (beautifully produced with French flaps - thank you, Penguin) back on my bedside table to re-read at leisure before sleep. Undoubtedly one of my books of the year.
Want to read
January 26, 2026screamed because i finished my last supplementary essay and i'm going to write my final exam tomorrow and this came in the mail today so when i'm done writing i get to read 700+ pages of clarice lispector's thoughts AND i'll have a lot of time to read it because my second semester should be pretty easy HELLO i am going to ascend
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once i get my hands on my beautiful penguin modern classic copy that i ordered from blackwells prepare to be utterly sick of me
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once i get my hands on my beautiful penguin modern classic copy that i ordered from blackwells prepare to be utterly sick of me
Want to read
October 15, 2024If I read this I’ll forever be at peace I just know it.
March 29, 2025
Clarice Lispector is mainly known for her fiction. But being a single mother of two, she used to earn extra income by writing a weekly column (in Brazilian Portuguese, crônica) for the Rio-based newspaper Jornal do Brasil since 1967. Around 80 per cent of this volume contains Clarice’s crônicas in the Jornal do Brasil between 1967 and 1973, while the remaining contains some other crônicas published sporadically in various magazines and newspapers. Clarice’s crônicas provides a great introduction to readers unfamiliar with this form of literary expression. In Brazil, crônicas have a unique place in newspapers where writers would communicate with their readers about daily topics (for Clarice, her crônicas appeared every Saturday).
The crônicas produced by Clarice possess some unique characteristics, albeit she admits in some of her crônicas that she didn’t enjoy writing these columns and mainly did it to supplement her meagre income as a writer in Brazil (as she describes it back then, only two Brazilian authors were capable of living entirely from their writing, namely Erico Verissimo and Jorge Amado). Having to raise her two children by herself following her divorce from a Brazilian diplomat, was a practical decision on her part. Yet Clarice’s crônicas are far from substandard. They’re witty, full of surprise and full of reflections on the nature of life. There are frequent times when conversations she had with her children would appear in her crônicas, reflecting the informal nature and the relaxed attitude of how she addressed the readers.
Clarice is also fond of addressing her readers directly in her crônicas. There were instances when she would admit to having no inspiration of some sort and would just fill her column with responses to letters she received from her readers. Some other time, it was another cronista (the term for people who write crônicas) in Jornal do Brasil, such as the case of Armando Nogueira, who became her target. Armando challenged her to write a crônica about football, while he wrote one “about life”, a challenge they both met. Her crônicas also at times feature various taxi drivers with whom she conversed, when once a taxi driver decided to give her “a life lesson” by telling his life story of leaving his previous job as a beggar and climbing up the ladder to finally own a taxi of his own.
It is also apparent that Clarice never eyed a publication of her collected crônicas since as her son later admits at the afterword of this volume, there are instances when recycled crônicas would appear in later years between 1967 and 1973 in deadline-induced panic, as Clarice believed that her readers would not be aware of this practice. The practice more or less shows the nature of authorship at that time, with people having no way to find out duplication of texts through search engines. Writers at that time also needed in one way or another make duplicates of their writings, since they had no way to rewrite them if they got lost. There was no laptop or cloud computing back then. In 1966, Clarice experienced a severe burning of her hands and legs after she fell asleep with a lit cigarette. Her right hand almost got amputated and she had to rely on her nurse to deliver her crônicas to the newspaper.
More than anything else, Clarice’s crônicas are a celebration of life with its multitudes. Clarice was the kind of person who could see the beauty of life even in the unlikeliest circumstances, in situations that we’d rather avoid such as talking to some taxi drivers. And for readers who have been acquainted with Clarice’s works, the crônicas also provide intimate information on Clarice’s personality and how she viewed her literary works spanning several years of her most productive period as a journalist.
Second reading (29/03/2025):
I spent 3.5 months on my second reading of this book, and now I feel as though I've just lost a friend who had been accompanying my days through thick and thin. I feel like I can appreciate Clarice's columns now, and see why she loved life just as much bit too much.
The crônicas produced by Clarice possess some unique characteristics, albeit she admits in some of her crônicas that she didn’t enjoy writing these columns and mainly did it to supplement her meagre income as a writer in Brazil (as she describes it back then, only two Brazilian authors were capable of living entirely from their writing, namely Erico Verissimo and Jorge Amado). Having to raise her two children by herself following her divorce from a Brazilian diplomat, was a practical decision on her part. Yet Clarice’s crônicas are far from substandard. They’re witty, full of surprise and full of reflections on the nature of life. There are frequent times when conversations she had with her children would appear in her crônicas, reflecting the informal nature and the relaxed attitude of how she addressed the readers.
Clarice is also fond of addressing her readers directly in her crônicas. There were instances when she would admit to having no inspiration of some sort and would just fill her column with responses to letters she received from her readers. Some other time, it was another cronista (the term for people who write crônicas) in Jornal do Brasil, such as the case of Armando Nogueira, who became her target. Armando challenged her to write a crônica about football, while he wrote one “about life”, a challenge they both met. Her crônicas also at times feature various taxi drivers with whom she conversed, when once a taxi driver decided to give her “a life lesson” by telling his life story of leaving his previous job as a beggar and climbing up the ladder to finally own a taxi of his own.
It is also apparent that Clarice never eyed a publication of her collected crônicas since as her son later admits at the afterword of this volume, there are instances when recycled crônicas would appear in later years between 1967 and 1973 in deadline-induced panic, as Clarice believed that her readers would not be aware of this practice. The practice more or less shows the nature of authorship at that time, with people having no way to find out duplication of texts through search engines. Writers at that time also needed in one way or another make duplicates of their writings, since they had no way to rewrite them if they got lost. There was no laptop or cloud computing back then. In 1966, Clarice experienced a severe burning of her hands and legs after she fell asleep with a lit cigarette. Her right hand almost got amputated and she had to rely on her nurse to deliver her crônicas to the newspaper.
More than anything else, Clarice’s crônicas are a celebration of life with its multitudes. Clarice was the kind of person who could see the beauty of life even in the unlikeliest circumstances, in situations that we’d rather avoid such as talking to some taxi drivers. And for readers who have been acquainted with Clarice’s works, the crônicas also provide intimate information on Clarice’s personality and how she viewed her literary works spanning several years of her most productive period as a journalist.
Second reading (29/03/2025):
I spent 3.5 months on my second reading of this book, and now I feel as though I've just lost a friend who had been accompanying my days through thick and thin. I feel like I can appreciate Clarice's columns now, and see why she loved life just as much bit too much.
May 18, 2022
All the Chronicles of Clarice Lispector" is a volume that presents in a single edition the work in chronological order that was signed by Clarice when she worked for Jornal Brasil (between 1967 and 1973). Ideal for those who still don't know her or are afraid of her writing, or for those who already know and want to know more about the author's opinions on the most diverse subjects.
Don't be alarmed by the size of the book, more than 700 pages, it is a delight to read the intimate thoughts of a writer who is practically an entity within Brazilian literature. In 2017, in a similar edition, I read "All the short stories" it took me almost a year to read it, because Clarice is Clarice and why the hurry? Unlike the short stories, which needed more time for reflection, the book of chronicles flowed very well, it's still Clarice, but a little more accessible.
Officially we do not have a biography of the author, but this book is the closest we will know about her daily life, political positions, musical and literary tastes. We also see writings about the relationship between the author and her children, her internal revolution, the search for the self... In the preface we already have a glimpse of how special the book will be.
Marina Colasanti, another extraordinary writer, reveals how she met Clarice, as she worked at the newspaper and would be responsible for receiving her texts. Marina tells us about Clarice's requests: Not to lose the texts, as they were unique, without copies.What a responsibility!! She also asked her not to change anything in her texts, not even the commas.
The book was organized by Pedro Karp Vasquez and Larissa Vaz did the textual research. The work is divided into three parts: the first presents the chronicles published in the "Jornal do Brasil" and some texts that did not appear in the collection "The discovery of the world". The second part brings together texts published in other media outlets, many unpublished in book form. The third part retrieves some texts from the book "Not to forget". In summary, this work is a definitive collection of Clarice Lispector's production of chronicles for newspapers and magazines and we received 120 unpublished texts as a gift.
@thereader2408
Don't be alarmed by the size of the book, more than 700 pages, it is a delight to read the intimate thoughts of a writer who is practically an entity within Brazilian literature. In 2017, in a similar edition, I read "All the short stories" it took me almost a year to read it, because Clarice is Clarice and why the hurry? Unlike the short stories, which needed more time for reflection, the book of chronicles flowed very well, it's still Clarice, but a little more accessible.
Officially we do not have a biography of the author, but this book is the closest we will know about her daily life, political positions, musical and literary tastes. We also see writings about the relationship between the author and her children, her internal revolution, the search for the self... In the preface we already have a glimpse of how special the book will be.
Marina Colasanti, another extraordinary writer, reveals how she met Clarice, as she worked at the newspaper and would be responsible for receiving her texts. Marina tells us about Clarice's requests: Not to lose the texts, as they were unique, without copies.What a responsibility!! She also asked her not to change anything in her texts, not even the commas.
The book was organized by Pedro Karp Vasquez and Larissa Vaz did the textual research. The work is divided into three parts: the first presents the chronicles published in the "Jornal do Brasil" and some texts that did not appear in the collection "The discovery of the world". The second part brings together texts published in other media outlets, many unpublished in book form. The third part retrieves some texts from the book "Not to forget". In summary, this work is a definitive collection of Clarice Lispector's production of chronicles for newspapers and magazines and we received 120 unpublished texts as a gift.
@thereader2408
May 5, 2025
This book literally changed my life! I’ve missed having Clarices sharp witt and incredibly unique voice whispering in my ear during the time it took me to read this book.I started to feel lonely without this book by my side and i fully cherish the relationship she has created with her readers. Reading the way she understands life and explores the human condition throughout a decade of ‘chronicas’ has changed my perspective on the world and my ability to look deeper into what makes things tick. Literally the GOAT 🐐 Everyone should read this book I know I will be rereading this for the rest of eternity!
June 18, 2023
so much daily joy and pain in one person!
January 4, 2024
Наскоро някой ме попита как се справям със самотата. Снощи, отваряйки за пореден път на случайна страница от книгата, разбрах. Справям се, четейки дневници и писма на близки на сърцето ми автори. И ето - понякога просто имам нужда от компанията на Кларис Лиспектор. Който е имал удоволствието да чете “Чуждестранният легион”, която излезе на български преди няколко години, знае колко наситено, гъсто, дълбоко и първично е писането й. Тя дълбае навътре в личната митология и прави дисекция на съществуването; интерпретира света през Себе си. Поради тази първичност и свобода в писането й, исках да разследвам отвъд и навътре нейните лични разсъждения за битовото… За съботите. За балконите. За мисленето като игра на ума. :) От 1967 г. до 1977 г. Кларис пише статии за съботното издание на Jornal do Brasil. Вече известна с експерименталните, за времето си, книги - интроспективни и метафизични, в своите crônicas тя дисектира ежедневото и отваря врата съм собствения си живот. Тези текстове са преведени и публикувани в над 700 страници на английски със заглавието Too much of life през 2022 г. от Penguin Classics. Защо това заглавие ли?
“Споделих на приятелка:
Животът винаги е изисквал твърде много от мен.
А тя отговори:
Не забравяй, че ти винаги си изисквала твърде много от живота.
Да.”
"Everything about the place reminded him of Clarita — the name of the dead girl, which startled me because it was so like my own name, making me feel at once both dead and loved."
Playing in Thinking
Perhaps because I'm in the habit of naming things or out of a sudden desire to have an unblotted exercise book as I did at school, I wrote: list of. And it was then that the desire to be frivolous arrived. That is the first sign of the animus brincandi if you take up thinking as a hobby. And so I blithely wrote: list of feelings.
Then I began to draw up a brief list of feelings for which I have no name.
Spring Suite Swiss-style
The worst thing is this wide-awake brightness, the streetlights of Berne buzzing with mosquitoes. And how we walk and walk. Dust on my sandals, no destination. Ah, at last, the Cathedral, shelter, darkness. But the Cathedral is warm and wide open. Full of mosquitoes.
In Favor of Fear
Yes, but having a slightly skewed heart has its advantages: it means I have a good nose for things, a sense of which way the wind is blowing, wisdom, keen instincts, experience of deaths, an ability to read the future in a pool of water, as well as being happily maladapted, for maladaptation, I find, has proved to be my wellspring. [...] And I know with my heart that, having for centuries always avoided the spot-light, lurks in the shadows to the left—I know that one is a stranger to oneself, but his very innocence means that he is also natural. No, my oblique heart is absolutely right, even if the facts openly contradict me. A paseito means certain death, and the victim's horrified face gazes up, glassy-eyed, at the full, full-of-itself moon.
“Споделих на приятелка:
Животът винаги е изисквал твърде много от мен.
А тя отговори:
Не забравяй, че ти винаги си изисквала твърде много от живота.
Да.”
"Everything about the place reminded him of Clarita — the name of the dead girl, which startled me because it was so like my own name, making me feel at once both dead and loved."
Playing in Thinking
Perhaps because I'm in the habit of naming things or out of a sudden desire to have an unblotted exercise book as I did at school, I wrote: list of. And it was then that the desire to be frivolous arrived. That is the first sign of the animus brincandi if you take up thinking as a hobby. And so I blithely wrote: list of feelings.
Then I began to draw up a brief list of feelings for which I have no name.
Spring Suite Swiss-style
The worst thing is this wide-awake brightness, the streetlights of Berne buzzing with mosquitoes. And how we walk and walk. Dust on my sandals, no destination. Ah, at last, the Cathedral, shelter, darkness. But the Cathedral is warm and wide open. Full of mosquitoes.
In Favor of Fear
Yes, but having a slightly skewed heart has its advantages: it means I have a good nose for things, a sense of which way the wind is blowing, wisdom, keen instincts, experience of deaths, an ability to read the future in a pool of water, as well as being happily maladapted, for maladaptation, I find, has proved to be my wellspring. [...] And I know with my heart that, having for centuries always avoided the spot-light, lurks in the shadows to the left—I know that one is a stranger to oneself, but his very innocence means that he is also natural. No, my oblique heart is absolutely right, even if the facts openly contradict me. A paseito means certain death, and the victim's horrified face gazes up, glassy-eyed, at the full, full-of-itself moon.
February 11, 2026
4.5. gotta love her
May 12, 2019
Um livro que recebi de prenda de Natal (vejam lá, só agora cheguei a ele, haha) e que me encantou do início ao fim.
Até agora, ainda só li um romance de Clarice Lispector, que me surpreendeu pela sua clareza na linguagem e análise do personagem. Nestas crónicas, encontramos uma Clarice mais próxima e mais familiar, que nos aborda como uma amiga a quem se convida para tomar um café.
Conta-nos histórias da sua vida e das coisas que lhe foram acontecendo, misturando tudo isso com uma análise profunda e emocional sobre o próprio acto de escrever. Assim, para uma pessoa que escreve este livro é uma bíblia de inspiração, perdida em frases soltas dentro das curtas narrativas que Clarice nos conta .
Escrito com uma perfeição técnica arrasadora, este conjunto de crónicas acompanha a própria história do Brasil moderno. Recomendo vivamente.
Até agora, ainda só li um romance de Clarice Lispector, que me surpreendeu pela sua clareza na linguagem e análise do personagem. Nestas crónicas, encontramos uma Clarice mais próxima e mais familiar, que nos aborda como uma amiga a quem se convida para tomar um café.
Conta-nos histórias da sua vida e das coisas que lhe foram acontecendo, misturando tudo isso com uma análise profunda e emocional sobre o próprio acto de escrever. Assim, para uma pessoa que escreve este livro é uma bíblia de inspiração, perdida em frases soltas dentro das curtas narrativas que Clarice nos conta .
Escrito com uma perfeição técnica arrasadora, este conjunto de crónicas acompanha a própria história do Brasil moderno. Recomendo vivamente.
April 20, 2024
“I’m absolutely livid that I don’t know the end of the story, and, I imagine, so are you.”
October 12, 2023
“Don’t forget that you have always demanded too much of life.”
Over the span of ten years Clarice Lispector wrote in a column of a newspaper weekly cronicas—entries that blend short story narrative, philosophical reflections on quotidian life, interviews with Brazilian writers and sculptors and painters, letters, and even transcripts of phone calls from devoted readers. What one gains by reading these cronicas is access to a lighter, more readily available, Lispector. Unlike her lofty, dense, metaphysical prose found in “The Passion According to G.H.” or “Agua Viva”, here you find sentences such describing the habits of bees, buying a backup typewriter, and and pithy thoughts on psychoanalysis, the smell of the sea, knitting sweaters, table etiquette, and quantum physics.
What struck me most was Lispector’s writing about writing. She writes that “writing is a curse…a curse that saves.” Writing has something to do with learning to live with guilt, with shame, a way to take care of the world, a way of being responsible for what exists, it’s a silent communication that breaches the chasm of loneliness between two people. Writing is an act of affection, a refusing to be numbered, a return to the original biblical creative act of naming the world. And yet with full seriousness she writes, “when I’m not writing, I have absolutely no idea how to write…what do you do with that blank sheet of paper gazing calmly up at you? I know that, however baffling, there is only one answer: by writing.”
In addition to the many entries recording her insomniac coffee-drinking late-night reflections on parenting and Brazilian politics, I enjoyed in particular Lispector’s thoughts on turtles, which happen to be my favourite animal. “What use, dear God, is a turtle?” she wonders. She queries: “how do you understand a turtle? How do you understand God?” In 2013, when I lived in Northern California, I asked myself similar questions when I watched turtles every day at a creek near my house. I love that even great writers like Lispector have these same strange puzzling questions, questions that “deepen the hours”, that act as an art of the unconscious.
Over the span of ten years Clarice Lispector wrote in a column of a newspaper weekly cronicas—entries that blend short story narrative, philosophical reflections on quotidian life, interviews with Brazilian writers and sculptors and painters, letters, and even transcripts of phone calls from devoted readers. What one gains by reading these cronicas is access to a lighter, more readily available, Lispector. Unlike her lofty, dense, metaphysical prose found in “The Passion According to G.H.” or “Agua Viva”, here you find sentences such describing the habits of bees, buying a backup typewriter, and and pithy thoughts on psychoanalysis, the smell of the sea, knitting sweaters, table etiquette, and quantum physics.
What struck me most was Lispector’s writing about writing. She writes that “writing is a curse…a curse that saves.” Writing has something to do with learning to live with guilt, with shame, a way to take care of the world, a way of being responsible for what exists, it’s a silent communication that breaches the chasm of loneliness between two people. Writing is an act of affection, a refusing to be numbered, a return to the original biblical creative act of naming the world. And yet with full seriousness she writes, “when I’m not writing, I have absolutely no idea how to write…what do you do with that blank sheet of paper gazing calmly up at you? I know that, however baffling, there is only one answer: by writing.”
In addition to the many entries recording her insomniac coffee-drinking late-night reflections on parenting and Brazilian politics, I enjoyed in particular Lispector’s thoughts on turtles, which happen to be my favourite animal. “What use, dear God, is a turtle?” she wonders. She queries: “how do you understand a turtle? How do you understand God?” In 2013, when I lived in Northern California, I asked myself similar questions when I watched turtles every day at a creek near my house. I love that even great writers like Lispector have these same strange puzzling questions, questions that “deepen the hours”, that act as an art of the unconscious.
Read
December 22, 2022This volume contains all the columns Lispector wrote for the Jornal do Brasil from 1967-73, as well as various columns she contributed to other publications during and after her stint there. The genre of the crônica is unique to Lusophone literature - informal essays written as daily or weekly columns for newspapers and other periodicals. This format serves as a perfect vehicle for Lispector's unique voice. Her writing is very intimate, as if it were written directly to and for the reader. She recounts conversations with famous writers, musicians, athletes, actors, and artists, but also taxi drivers, her young sons, her friends, and random strangers she's encountered. Or, she responds to correspondence, or reflects in a philosophical or social-critical vein about Brazilian life, life in general, love, suffering, and God. Or, she composes ecstatic bits of what we'd now call flash fiction. Or, she writes about her most intimate feelings and her daily experiences, as if writing an entry in a diary.
And on, and on, and on. In other words, Lispector seems to have imposed no restraints on what she would write each week, so that the hundreds of short pieces in this volume meander across a stunning range of styles, genres, and tones. The best comparison I can think of is anachronistic, but, it seems to me, apt: this is a blog avante la lettre, in which Lispector poured her creativity each week for six years until she was summarily fired from the Jornal do Brasil after an influx of Arab investment in the newspaper led to the firing of all of its Jewish writers and staff.
It's remarkable to me how versatile Lispector was. Anyone who has read difficult, mystical novels like The Passion According to G.H. and Agua Viva will find here a very different mode of writing - accessible, charming, highly personal, and funny. And yet, Lispector's voice shines through all of the formal differences among these texts - a testament to just how distinctive that voice really is.
And on, and on, and on. In other words, Lispector seems to have imposed no restraints on what she would write each week, so that the hundreds of short pieces in this volume meander across a stunning range of styles, genres, and tones. The best comparison I can think of is anachronistic, but, it seems to me, apt: this is a blog avante la lettre, in which Lispector poured her creativity each week for six years until she was summarily fired from the Jornal do Brasil after an influx of Arab investment in the newspaper led to the firing of all of its Jewish writers and staff.
It's remarkable to me how versatile Lispector was. Anyone who has read difficult, mystical novels like The Passion According to G.H. and Agua Viva will find here a very different mode of writing - accessible, charming, highly personal, and funny. And yet, Lispector's voice shines through all of the formal differences among these texts - a testament to just how distinctive that voice really is.
October 9, 2023
It took a long time to finish (being almost 800 pages in length), but every minute was worth it. I am now convinced that Clarice Lispector is a great writer and that her Too Much of Life: The Complete Crônicas is a modern day classic of literary journalism. Some 80& of the pieces were written for the Jornal do Brasil and contain some of her best work from the late 1960s to the early 1970s.
As Clarice's son Paulo Gurgel Valente writes in the afterword to the Cronicas:
I had the book out from the library for 9 weeks and had to return it last Friday. So that I could finish the final 10% of the book, I ordered it on Kindle; so it is now part of my permanent collection. I can see myself returning to it again and again for inspiration.
Now I will have to read more of Clarice's fiction. That shapes up to be a great pleasure.
As Clarice's son Paulo Gurgel Valente writes in the afterword to the Cronicas:
For me, reading Clarice was at times like watching a hummingbird in flight, its wings beating furiously, keeping itself airborne while fleetingly sipping nectar. She wrote her columns whenever inspiration struck; she didn't sit down to write simply because she had a deadline to meet....Her Cronicas exist as a vast gold mine which one can dip into and come out crusted with treasures.
I had the book out from the library for 9 weeks and had to return it last Friday. So that I could finish the final 10% of the book, I ordered it on Kindle; so it is now part of my permanent collection. I can see myself returning to it again and again for inspiration.
Now I will have to read more of Clarice's fiction. That shapes up to be a great pleasure.
June 26, 2025
realising everything i’ve been reading lately is essentially a form of self-help
June 16, 2025
An interesting collection of vignettes that the Brazilian author wrote between 1967 and 1977 for ‘Jornal do Brasil’, Rio’s long-established newspaper. The vignettes were published in the Saturday morning edition. Her column is sometimes flippant, sometimes with news and information, reflecting her individuality, her life at the time, including descriptions of incidents she was involved in. Scattered throughout this book there are short comments on how she goes about writing, her writing experience, the time of day she wrote, the number of drafts she revised, even the typewriters she used!
This book provides the reader with an appreciation of who Clarice Lispector was, from her perspective. If you are interested in this author then I also recommend Benjamin Moser’s ‘Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector’.
This book was first published in English in 2022.
This book provides the reader with an appreciation of who Clarice Lispector was, from her perspective. If you are interested in this author then I also recommend Benjamin Moser’s ‘Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector’.
This book was first published in English in 2022.
on-hold
June 2, 2025I come with great regret to say that I’ve decided to place this on hold, for now. I have demanded too much of Lispector, and it has demanded too much of me. We will part ways for a while, but I shall return.
August 11, 2025
I wish Goodreads had a top four like Letterboxd so I could put this book at number one and recommend Lispector to everyone because this shifted my life on an atomic level and turned me inside out and back again
Read
February 16, 2023“life has always demanded too much of me”
“don’t forget that you have always demanded too much of life”
it is bittersweet that i finished this book. i will miss my daily dose of clarice immensely <3
“don’t forget that you have always demanded too much of life”
it is bittersweet that i finished this book. i will miss my daily dose of clarice immensely <3
July 29, 2024
“Soy tan misteriosa que ni yo misma me entiendo”
December 22, 2025
throughout my whole semester abroad this book accompanied me everywhere, spiritually. nobody can understand me more than Clarice, a Ukrainian born sagittarius woman. and to her i give thanks for this masterpiece of love, gratitude and mysticism.
July 30, 2025
this was probably a lot better to read while it was an actual weekly newspaper column.
overall, fun, personable, not at all like her books, some cool interviews, lots of info on brazils culture
overall, fun, personable, not at all like her books, some cool interviews, lots of info on brazils culture
February 7, 2024
“Not everything I write is fully realized, it's often only an attempt. And that is also a pleasure. Because I don't want to grasp everything. Sometimes I want only to touch. And sometimes what I touch blossoms and then other people can grasp it with both hands.”
“Literature, according to him, doesn’t bring you friends; at most it brings you a handful of friendly rivals. In literature he feels very lonely; in life he gets around a lot.”
I thought the inherent awe I was left in after The Passion According to G.H. was unrepeatable. But these crônicas make me want to crawl into Lispector’s brain. The only relevant question after devouring this volume is: did the Journal do Brasil ever realize the literary POWER BOMB they published?
“Literature, according to him, doesn’t bring you friends; at most it brings you a handful of friendly rivals. In literature he feels very lonely; in life he gets around a lot.”
I thought the inherent awe I was left in after The Passion According to G.H. was unrepeatable. But these crônicas make me want to crawl into Lispector’s brain. The only relevant question after devouring this volume is: did the Journal do Brasil ever realize the literary POWER BOMB they published?
February 5, 2025
Decidí empezar a leer Todas las crónicas de Clarice Lispector porque la cantante mexicana Julieta Venegas lo recomendó en un podcast literario. Es decir, Julieta Venegas recomendó iniciarse en la literaura de Clarice con las crónicas, luego pasar a los cuentos y finalmente terminar con las novelas.
La misma Clarice Lispector acepta que sus crónicas no sabe muy bien qué son; son como multiples reflexiones sobre infinidad de cosas. Yo puse especial interés cuando habla de su creación literaria, pero habla de todo, del hambre, de Dios, de los taxistas, de cómo vestirse para las citas románticas, de otros autores que le gustan o disgustan, disgregaciones metafísicas, porciones para hacer café, futbol, sus hijos, su incendio, sus perfumes, el mar, la belleza; su belleza que sobrevivió a un incendio.
Muchos de ustedes son jóvenes, pero hace años cuando una chica te gustaba leías su blog para conocer sus pensamientos y sus gustos. Lo digo porque lo leí con esa emoción, leyendo el blog de la chica que me gusta y algunas tardes me bebí cientos de páginas. La lectura fluye muy bien porque los temas que trata son interesantes.
Muchos de sus lectores le escriben a Clarice y ella responde las cartas más interesantes en su columna; una de las cosas que más le comentan es lo fácil que es leer las crónicas en contraposición con sus novelas. Yo no puedo opinar, pero sí me han dado ganas de seguir explorando el maravilloso cerebro de esta escritora. Si se le compara con Virginia Woolf creo entender de dónde viene su complejidad y es una complejidad que, en lo personal, me gusta mucho.
La misma Clarice Lispector acepta que sus crónicas no sabe muy bien qué son; son como multiples reflexiones sobre infinidad de cosas. Yo puse especial interés cuando habla de su creación literaria, pero habla de todo, del hambre, de Dios, de los taxistas, de cómo vestirse para las citas románticas, de otros autores que le gustan o disgustan, disgregaciones metafísicas, porciones para hacer café, futbol, sus hijos, su incendio, sus perfumes, el mar, la belleza; su belleza que sobrevivió a un incendio.
Muchos de ustedes son jóvenes, pero hace años cuando una chica te gustaba leías su blog para conocer sus pensamientos y sus gustos. Lo digo porque lo leí con esa emoción, leyendo el blog de la chica que me gusta y algunas tardes me bebí cientos de páginas. La lectura fluye muy bien porque los temas que trata son interesantes.
Muchos de sus lectores le escriben a Clarice y ella responde las cartas más interesantes en su columna; una de las cosas que más le comentan es lo fácil que es leer las crónicas en contraposición con sus novelas. Yo no puedo opinar, pero sí me han dado ganas de seguir explorando el maravilloso cerebro de esta escritora. Si se le compara con Virginia Woolf creo entender de dónde viene su complejidad y es una complejidad que, en lo personal, me gusta mucho.
December 19, 2025
so glad i managed to finish it before the year is out!! finishing it feels like a real achievement. i've read four of lispector's novels and never really been wildly fond of any of them, but i always start each one thinking "maybe this is the one i'll like." i was beginning to think she and i just can't get on, but i'm glad to have discovered the crônicas and to realise they're the works of hers for me.
February 20, 2025
I've been reading like a few pages of this every few days for 2 years. Every passage is its own little gift.
January 23, 2025
“But there is life that is to be lived intensely; there is love. There is love. That must be lived to the last drop. Without fear. It doesn’t kill.”
November 22, 2023
From my Gagosian Quarterly article on Clarice:
https://gagosian.com/quarterly/2023/0...
I’m no expert on Clarice Lispector. I wish I could read her in the original Portuguese, though as far as I can tell the English-language New Directions translations of all her texts are comprehensive. But no, I despise expertise. May I always be an amateur, like the painter in Água Viva who writes, “This is the word of someone who cannot.” I write this as a humble someone, an “It”-being who fell inevitably into the orbit of Clarice. Friends have seen me tote around a tome of her collected columns, but this means nothing, for the more I read Clarice, the less I know her. Her gist escapes me. Maybe this is the secret: we start in the fallen state of apple-derived Knowing, then gradually shed ourselves of the nasty need to pin down and nail. We connect, ultimately, to the power of unknowing. Silence. Gaps. The desire for knowledge, stripped down, is simply the desire to be barred from the act of performing knowing. For to perform is to know, and those who know are performing. This is the Clarice lesson par excellence: “I write out of my inability to understand except through the process of writing.”
In her alienness, she is familiar. Even after reading a biography of her (Benjamin Moser’s Why This World, 2009), “knowing” that she was born in Ukraine in 1920, that her family fled in the aftermath of war, that they resettled in Brazil when she was two, that she published her first fiery novel, Near to the Wild Heart, in 1943 at the age of twenty-three and was overnight dubbed “Hurricane Clarice” by the Rio literary jet set, that she kept writing short stories and novels and newspaper columns and children’s books until her death, from ovarian cancer, in 1977, at the age of fifty-six—“knowing” all that, to me she remains removed. As right she should. She has been a Brazilian national treasure for three generations now, but she has only recently started to make a bigger impression in the United States thanks to Moser’s vast project of translating her work into English for the publishing house New Directions. Now, through a newly reintroduced Clarice, we know how much we don’t know.
Even through the poise that she maintained, she had about her a lurching/knowing aura of the senselessness of existence. From 1944 to 1959 she was married to a Brazilian diplomat, Maury Gurgel Valente, and lived in Bern, Switzerland and Washington, DC; she said of that life that she “wasn’t much at ease in that milieu. . . . I hated it, but I did what I had to do. . . . I gave dinner parties, I did everything you’re supposed to do, but with a disgust.” She maintained a lifeline to the rawness of life through friendships with some of the great creative luminaries of the twentieth century, including the writer Lúcio Cardoso and the composer Antônio Carlos Jobim. She was translated into English by the poet Elizabeth Bishop, her neighbor when both lived in Rio; in a letter to the poet Robert Lowell, Bishop said that Clarice was “the most non-literary woman 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.” Yet she loved Katherine Mansfield (“[‘Bliss’] is me!”), Spinoza, Franz Kafka, and Marcel Proust. She felt a particular affinity for the poetry of Emily Brontë: “How well she understands me. . . . It’s been so long since I read poetry, I felt I had ascended to the sky, to the open air. I even felt like crying but luckily I didn’t because when I cry it soothes me, and I don’t want to be soothed, neither for her sake, nor for mine.” Perhaps, though, as Moser points out, Bishop was making not a literal but a poetic point: Clarice sought a knowledge beyond knowledge, a wisdom that left wisdom behind. As she wrote in a 1945 letter regarding her traipse as a diplomat’s wife, “At the end of it all you end up ‘educated.’ But that’s not my style. I never minded being ignorant.”9
As I amble through Clarice’s words, especially near sleep, I dream up variations on her unsettling scenes: a girl sucking and lapping up the blood of a cooked chicken while she remembers how much she loved its uncooked form, a boy wondering for eternity how a rabbit escaped its cage, two bookish want-to-be-in-lovers not meaning what they say or saying what they mean. The situations are strangely familiar to me. Emphasis on “familiar”: when Clarice writes that her desire is to “photograph perfume,” that’s, I realize, the goal of my “I” as well: to access what was passed down to me, secretly, by the women who formed me (my mother, my grandmother, my sisters and aunts and cousins), by the movies that shaped my unconscious, by the works I wish I’d written by now. To photograph the perfume of my mothers. Yes: confronted by all Clarice represents, I am unfit to write of her, to conjure even part of her image up. I would rather hear what you, her readers, have to say.
I first heard Clarice’s name in a class on Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. A friend, Sofia, had mentioned something about a story concerning a chicken and a hen and an egg. I read “A Hen.” Interesting. Then I took a class on Bishop, who was an advocate of Clarice’s stories (though not of her novels, interestingly) and had translated her story “The Smallest Woman in the World.” I still remember the shock of reading certain rushes of paragraphs in that story of what happens when a white explorer discovers the smallest woman in the world in the jungles of the eastern Congo. I was particularly taken by the narrator’s description of the small woman’s laughter as she soaks in not only the alienness of a white man gazing at her, not only the explorer’s boots, but also the state-of-not-being-devoured:
There is an old misunderstanding about the word love, and, if many children are born from this misunderstanding, many others have lost the unique chance of being born, only because of a susceptibility that it be me! me! that is loved, and not my money. But in the humidity of the forest, these cruel refinements do not exist, and love is not to be eaten, love is to find a boot pretty, love is to like the strange color of a man who isn’t black, is to laugh for love of a shiny ring. Little Flower blinked with love, and laughed warmly, small, gravid, warm.
The love of the unknown is humanity’s sole redemption—and the doom of the most hearted of us. I’d never encountered language that conveyed this fundamental truth so starkly and complexly, yet with cool serenity. As if it were all a mere afterthought. Now I was entranced. Of course I love Bishop to this day, but I was doubly curious as to the woman she translated: Well, who is this “Lispector” when she’s at home?
I’ve never written about Clarice before and it frightens me. So I will focus on the three books I treasure the most: two novels, An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures (1967) and Água Viva (1973), and a collection of her newspaper columns, Too Much of Life: The Complete Crônicas (1967–77). What are the fundamental questions of existence? How to love (Apprenticeship), how to work (Água Viva), and how to live (Crônicas). The Clarice I unconsciously admire the most, it seems, is the Clarice of a period of great political and personal turmoil—the late 1960s, a time of civil unrest, student uprisings, and right-wing dictatorship in Brazil, but also a time when Clarice was recovering from the greatest physical catastrophe of her life: in September 1966, she had nearly died after she fell asleep holding a lit cigarette. The resulting fire left her with third-degree burns all over her body and badly burned her writing hand. The material that finds its way into both An Apprenticeship and Água Viva stems from the newspaper columns that Clarice published each Saturday in the Jornal do Brasil, Rio’s leading paper, between 1967 and 1973. Through these texts emerges the struggle of life: how to live each day, what the painful process of loving is, why one should pick up a pen and respond to indignity in the first place.
Perhaps I’m most attached to An Apprenticeship because it teaches me how to love. And how love lies in spaces. In waiting. The fright of staying still is what my nervous “I” aspires to; too often, the “I” is mired in the agony and energy of capricious Passion. Not for nothing are the two could-be lovers in An Apprenticeship teachers: the woman, Lóri, teaches the fundamentals of math and letters to primary school kids while the man, Ulisses (named after, not James Joyce or Homer, but an ex-psychoanalyst of Clarice’s who had fallen in love with her), philosophizes to university students. Is it Lóri who is being taught, or is it Ulisses? In the book as in love, the lines blur. For though language can feel solid after a given period of time, inevitably it must give in to the flux-blur, those in-between states that refuse the coherent, adoring instead the asymptotic, the never-quite-here. To be finished is to be on the side of death. And though Clarice no longer “lives,” more than when she was present (for that is love’s linger), what she is “writing to you goes on. Which is good, very good. The best is not yet written. The best is between the lines.”
Yet we craven humans demand the lines. We want a plot, a straightforward path (the hubristic “I know where I’m going”), or else prepackaged and glossily labeled sentiments that signify, weakly, Existence: a hot selfie, a confession watered down by the cold blue heart emoji, a public story. In our faith in the image, we daily kill the mystery of the nothing and the God. If those strange words “the God” make your skin crawl, well, same: I’m not particularly religious. And though Clarice came from a faith-based Jewish family, the traditions and rituals of religious institutions appear only fleetingly in her texts. You could say that she and “the God” had a secret affair. What that “the God” signifies, to me, is the limit of language and the visible: mystery, the mystical, the eruptive force of the contingent. And in that I surely believe.
What do we do after we’ve made our way through desire’s fragments? Love can feel, in retrospect, like a fever dream, an invention of the mind. Is there no way to collect evidence that what has happened has truly happened? And inform others of what the other side is like? Yes, we have the final crystallization of being: art. And a text like Água Viva is a shining result of such posttraumatic crystallization. Plot: a painter. What else do you need?
The painter wants to say something. To go somewhere with her canvases. But she doesn’t know how to start. Nor how to achieve clarity of expression. So, briefly retiring hues and curves, she says an “m,” and then an “e”: she writes. The ending: she writes an “I,” and then a “t”: she sees herself in everything. From the process of clearing her throat emerges a bewitching, jewellike eighty-eight pages unlike anything in modern literature. Água Viva baffles and inspires me as much as the 3,000 pages of Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu (1913–27). The Brazilian singer Cazuza read Água Viva 111 times. Each word of the book lands with the sweet force of a blade: “May the God help me: I am lost. I need you terribly. We must be two. So that the wheat can grow tall. I am so earnest that I’m going to stop.”
But the texts I return to most regularly are without a doubt the Crônicas. They were only published in their entirety in English, as a 733-page set, in October 2022, yet I have already treasured them for what feels like a lifetime. Clarice thought of her columns, or so she publicly claimed, as afterthoughts to her writing, which already hum in a profoundly afterthoughtish zone. But no: they are the hierophantic chronicle of a life being daily lived.
Clarice had only barely survived the fire that nearly killed her in 1966. She badly needed money to support herself. In 1967, Rio’s Jornal do Brasil approached her to start a column for its Saturday-morning newspaper. She could write about anything. The lengths of the columns could be variable. Sometimes she serialized short stories over a period of weeks; sometimes she wrote as short as a sentence. (Here’s the full text of her column for July 13, 1968, published under the title “My Own Mystery”: “I am so mysterious that I cannot understand myself.”) She often seemingly wrote from the top of her head. Too Much of Life is an extraordinary collection of fragmented, essayistic, fictive thoughts, as vast, playful, and volcanic as Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet (1982). Fragments from the columns make appearances in both Água Viva and An Apprenticeship. What draws me to them is their nearness to the raw material that powered Clarice’s gift of seeing and being. Certain columns I have scored in pen to hell and back, returning to them again and again. One paragraph from “The Cry” could stand in for all of them:
"I know that what I write here cannot really be called a crônica or a column or even an article. But today I know it is a cry. A cry of exhaustion. I am so tired! It’s obvious that my love for the world has never stopped wars or deaths. Loving has never prevented me from weeping tears of blood inside. Neither has it prevented fatal partings. Children bring a lot of happiness. Yet I suffer birth pangs every day. The world has failed me and I have failed the world. Therefore, I no longer wish to love. But what then is left for me? Living on autopilot until my natural death arrives. But I know I cannot live on autopilot: I need a refuge, and love is that refuge."
From a refusal to do the very task she had been assigned, to accepting the void of the task, to swiftly rejecting the void, to finishing the task, then starting all over again in the next paragraph: Clarice lived for this ebb and flow.
There is something in Clarice’s voice that I have never encountered before: the hyperelegance of being unable to speak. I was reared to write clearly, neatly, with the express purpose of being understood; here is someone who knew this was a lie. Attention, though: one must be careful not to gorge on Clarice all at once. I made that wretched mistake. Don’t—or you, too, will feel the acrid bitter when faced with oak-solid truth as she describes it in The Chandelier: “actually what she was feeling was just a difficult taste, a hard and persistent sensation like that of insoluble tears too quickly swallowed.” Avoid the quick. We are fed enough of that. Clarice is best picked up at an interval of desert thirst and weakness. Then she should be forgotten, until suddenly she rematerializes like a ghost, her vicious, untidy, yet crystalline words coursing through the veins once more: “I who come from the pain of living. And I no longer want it. I want the vibration of happiness, I want the impartiality of Mozart. But I also want inconsistency.” Her novels generally begin with a strong narrative thread but quickly devolve into the viscous, milky-silvery matter that defines her unstylish style. We may begin with a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown (The Passion According to G.H., 1964), or a painter struggling to spill something on her canvas (Água Viva), or a man struggling to tell the socially conscious story of a poor woman who survives on hot dogs (The Hour of the Star, 1977)—but we don’t stay in this territory for long. For Clarician sentences are like the sun. They cannot be stared at for too long. One loses sight itself.
https://gagosian.com/quarterly/2023/0...
I’m no expert on Clarice Lispector. I wish I could read her in the original Portuguese, though as far as I can tell the English-language New Directions translations of all her texts are comprehensive. But no, I despise expertise. May I always be an amateur, like the painter in Água Viva who writes, “This is the word of someone who cannot.” I write this as a humble someone, an “It”-being who fell inevitably into the orbit of Clarice. Friends have seen me tote around a tome of her collected columns, but this means nothing, for the more I read Clarice, the less I know her. Her gist escapes me. Maybe this is the secret: we start in the fallen state of apple-derived Knowing, then gradually shed ourselves of the nasty need to pin down and nail. We connect, ultimately, to the power of unknowing. Silence. Gaps. The desire for knowledge, stripped down, is simply the desire to be barred from the act of performing knowing. For to perform is to know, and those who know are performing. This is the Clarice lesson par excellence: “I write out of my inability to understand except through the process of writing.”
In her alienness, she is familiar. Even after reading a biography of her (Benjamin Moser’s Why This World, 2009), “knowing” that she was born in Ukraine in 1920, that her family fled in the aftermath of war, that they resettled in Brazil when she was two, that she published her first fiery novel, Near to the Wild Heart, in 1943 at the age of twenty-three and was overnight dubbed “Hurricane Clarice” by the Rio literary jet set, that she kept writing short stories and novels and newspaper columns and children’s books until her death, from ovarian cancer, in 1977, at the age of fifty-six—“knowing” all that, to me she remains removed. As right she should. She has been a Brazilian national treasure for three generations now, but she has only recently started to make a bigger impression in the United States thanks to Moser’s vast project of translating her work into English for the publishing house New Directions. Now, through a newly reintroduced Clarice, we know how much we don’t know.
Even through the poise that she maintained, she had about her a lurching/knowing aura of the senselessness of existence. From 1944 to 1959 she was married to a Brazilian diplomat, Maury Gurgel Valente, and lived in Bern, Switzerland and Washington, DC; she said of that life that she “wasn’t much at ease in that milieu. . . . I hated it, but I did what I had to do. . . . I gave dinner parties, I did everything you’re supposed to do, but with a disgust.” She maintained a lifeline to the rawness of life through friendships with some of the great creative luminaries of the twentieth century, including the writer Lúcio Cardoso and the composer Antônio Carlos Jobim. She was translated into English by the poet Elizabeth Bishop, her neighbor when both lived in Rio; in a letter to the poet Robert Lowell, Bishop said that Clarice was “the most non-literary woman 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.” Yet she loved Katherine Mansfield (“[‘Bliss’] is me!”), Spinoza, Franz Kafka, and Marcel Proust. She felt a particular affinity for the poetry of Emily Brontë: “How well she understands me. . . . It’s been so long since I read poetry, I felt I had ascended to the sky, to the open air. I even felt like crying but luckily I didn’t because when I cry it soothes me, and I don’t want to be soothed, neither for her sake, nor for mine.” Perhaps, though, as Moser points out, Bishop was making not a literal but a poetic point: Clarice sought a knowledge beyond knowledge, a wisdom that left wisdom behind. As she wrote in a 1945 letter regarding her traipse as a diplomat’s wife, “At the end of it all you end up ‘educated.’ But that’s not my style. I never minded being ignorant.”9
As I amble through Clarice’s words, especially near sleep, I dream up variations on her unsettling scenes: a girl sucking and lapping up the blood of a cooked chicken while she remembers how much she loved its uncooked form, a boy wondering for eternity how a rabbit escaped its cage, two bookish want-to-be-in-lovers not meaning what they say or saying what they mean. The situations are strangely familiar to me. Emphasis on “familiar”: when Clarice writes that her desire is to “photograph perfume,” that’s, I realize, the goal of my “I” as well: to access what was passed down to me, secretly, by the women who formed me (my mother, my grandmother, my sisters and aunts and cousins), by the movies that shaped my unconscious, by the works I wish I’d written by now. To photograph the perfume of my mothers. Yes: confronted by all Clarice represents, I am unfit to write of her, to conjure even part of her image up. I would rather hear what you, her readers, have to say.
I first heard Clarice’s name in a class on Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. A friend, Sofia, had mentioned something about a story concerning a chicken and a hen and an egg. I read “A Hen.” Interesting. Then I took a class on Bishop, who was an advocate of Clarice’s stories (though not of her novels, interestingly) and had translated her story “The Smallest Woman in the World.” I still remember the shock of reading certain rushes of paragraphs in that story of what happens when a white explorer discovers the smallest woman in the world in the jungles of the eastern Congo. I was particularly taken by the narrator’s description of the small woman’s laughter as she soaks in not only the alienness of a white man gazing at her, not only the explorer’s boots, but also the state-of-not-being-devoured:
There is an old misunderstanding about the word love, and, if many children are born from this misunderstanding, many others have lost the unique chance of being born, only because of a susceptibility that it be me! me! that is loved, and not my money. But in the humidity of the forest, these cruel refinements do not exist, and love is not to be eaten, love is to find a boot pretty, love is to like the strange color of a man who isn’t black, is to laugh for love of a shiny ring. Little Flower blinked with love, and laughed warmly, small, gravid, warm.
The love of the unknown is humanity’s sole redemption—and the doom of the most hearted of us. I’d never encountered language that conveyed this fundamental truth so starkly and complexly, yet with cool serenity. As if it were all a mere afterthought. Now I was entranced. Of course I love Bishop to this day, but I was doubly curious as to the woman she translated: Well, who is this “Lispector” when she’s at home?
I’ve never written about Clarice before and it frightens me. So I will focus on the three books I treasure the most: two novels, An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures (1967) and Água Viva (1973), and a collection of her newspaper columns, Too Much of Life: The Complete Crônicas (1967–77). What are the fundamental questions of existence? How to love (Apprenticeship), how to work (Água Viva), and how to live (Crônicas). The Clarice I unconsciously admire the most, it seems, is the Clarice of a period of great political and personal turmoil—the late 1960s, a time of civil unrest, student uprisings, and right-wing dictatorship in Brazil, but also a time when Clarice was recovering from the greatest physical catastrophe of her life: in September 1966, she had nearly died after she fell asleep holding a lit cigarette. The resulting fire left her with third-degree burns all over her body and badly burned her writing hand. The material that finds its way into both An Apprenticeship and Água Viva stems from the newspaper columns that Clarice published each Saturday in the Jornal do Brasil, Rio’s leading paper, between 1967 and 1973. Through these texts emerges the struggle of life: how to live each day, what the painful process of loving is, why one should pick up a pen and respond to indignity in the first place.
Perhaps I’m most attached to An Apprenticeship because it teaches me how to love. And how love lies in spaces. In waiting. The fright of staying still is what my nervous “I” aspires to; too often, the “I” is mired in the agony and energy of capricious Passion. Not for nothing are the two could-be lovers in An Apprenticeship teachers: the woman, Lóri, teaches the fundamentals of math and letters to primary school kids while the man, Ulisses (named after, not James Joyce or Homer, but an ex-psychoanalyst of Clarice’s who had fallen in love with her), philosophizes to university students. Is it Lóri who is being taught, or is it Ulisses? In the book as in love, the lines blur. For though language can feel solid after a given period of time, inevitably it must give in to the flux-blur, those in-between states that refuse the coherent, adoring instead the asymptotic, the never-quite-here. To be finished is to be on the side of death. And though Clarice no longer “lives,” more than when she was present (for that is love’s linger), what she is “writing to you goes on. Which is good, very good. The best is not yet written. The best is between the lines.”
Yet we craven humans demand the lines. We want a plot, a straightforward path (the hubristic “I know where I’m going”), or else prepackaged and glossily labeled sentiments that signify, weakly, Existence: a hot selfie, a confession watered down by the cold blue heart emoji, a public story. In our faith in the image, we daily kill the mystery of the nothing and the God. If those strange words “the God” make your skin crawl, well, same: I’m not particularly religious. And though Clarice came from a faith-based Jewish family, the traditions and rituals of religious institutions appear only fleetingly in her texts. You could say that she and “the God” had a secret affair. What that “the God” signifies, to me, is the limit of language and the visible: mystery, the mystical, the eruptive force of the contingent. And in that I surely believe.
What do we do after we’ve made our way through desire’s fragments? Love can feel, in retrospect, like a fever dream, an invention of the mind. Is there no way to collect evidence that what has happened has truly happened? And inform others of what the other side is like? Yes, we have the final crystallization of being: art. And a text like Água Viva is a shining result of such posttraumatic crystallization. Plot: a painter. What else do you need?
The painter wants to say something. To go somewhere with her canvases. But she doesn’t know how to start. Nor how to achieve clarity of expression. So, briefly retiring hues and curves, she says an “m,” and then an “e”: she writes. The ending: she writes an “I,” and then a “t”: she sees herself in everything. From the process of clearing her throat emerges a bewitching, jewellike eighty-eight pages unlike anything in modern literature. Água Viva baffles and inspires me as much as the 3,000 pages of Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu (1913–27). The Brazilian singer Cazuza read Água Viva 111 times. Each word of the book lands with the sweet force of a blade: “May the God help me: I am lost. I need you terribly. We must be two. So that the wheat can grow tall. I am so earnest that I’m going to stop.”
But the texts I return to most regularly are without a doubt the Crônicas. They were only published in their entirety in English, as a 733-page set, in October 2022, yet I have already treasured them for what feels like a lifetime. Clarice thought of her columns, or so she publicly claimed, as afterthoughts to her writing, which already hum in a profoundly afterthoughtish zone. But no: they are the hierophantic chronicle of a life being daily lived.
Clarice had only barely survived the fire that nearly killed her in 1966. She badly needed money to support herself. In 1967, Rio’s Jornal do Brasil approached her to start a column for its Saturday-morning newspaper. She could write about anything. The lengths of the columns could be variable. Sometimes she serialized short stories over a period of weeks; sometimes she wrote as short as a sentence. (Here’s the full text of her column for July 13, 1968, published under the title “My Own Mystery”: “I am so mysterious that I cannot understand myself.”) She often seemingly wrote from the top of her head. Too Much of Life is an extraordinary collection of fragmented, essayistic, fictive thoughts, as vast, playful, and volcanic as Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet (1982). Fragments from the columns make appearances in both Água Viva and An Apprenticeship. What draws me to them is their nearness to the raw material that powered Clarice’s gift of seeing and being. Certain columns I have scored in pen to hell and back, returning to them again and again. One paragraph from “The Cry” could stand in for all of them:
"I know that what I write here cannot really be called a crônica or a column or even an article. But today I know it is a cry. A cry of exhaustion. I am so tired! It’s obvious that my love for the world has never stopped wars or deaths. Loving has never prevented me from weeping tears of blood inside. Neither has it prevented fatal partings. Children bring a lot of happiness. Yet I suffer birth pangs every day. The world has failed me and I have failed the world. Therefore, I no longer wish to love. But what then is left for me? Living on autopilot until my natural death arrives. But I know I cannot live on autopilot: I need a refuge, and love is that refuge."
From a refusal to do the very task she had been assigned, to accepting the void of the task, to swiftly rejecting the void, to finishing the task, then starting all over again in the next paragraph: Clarice lived for this ebb and flow.
There is something in Clarice’s voice that I have never encountered before: the hyperelegance of being unable to speak. I was reared to write clearly, neatly, with the express purpose of being understood; here is someone who knew this was a lie. Attention, though: one must be careful not to gorge on Clarice all at once. I made that wretched mistake. Don’t—or you, too, will feel the acrid bitter when faced with oak-solid truth as she describes it in The Chandelier: “actually what she was feeling was just a difficult taste, a hard and persistent sensation like that of insoluble tears too quickly swallowed.” Avoid the quick. We are fed enough of that. Clarice is best picked up at an interval of desert thirst and weakness. Then she should be forgotten, until suddenly she rematerializes like a ghost, her vicious, untidy, yet crystalline words coursing through the veins once more: “I who come from the pain of living. And I no longer want it. I want the vibration of happiness, I want the impartiality of Mozart. But I also want inconsistency.” Her novels generally begin with a strong narrative thread but quickly devolve into the viscous, milky-silvery matter that defines her unstylish style. We may begin with a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown (The Passion According to G.H., 1964), or a painter struggling to spill something on her canvas (Água Viva), or a man struggling to tell the socially conscious story of a poor woman who survives on hot dogs (The Hour of the Star, 1977)—but we don’t stay in this territory for long. For Clarician sentences are like the sun. They cannot be stared at for too long. One loses sight itself.
May 5, 2025
“God, make sure those I love do not survive me, because I could not bear their absence. That’s all I ask.”
I don't think that there's anything I can say about Clarice Lispector that I haven't attempted to verbalize before. Her writing is like no other, whether it's fictional or not.
Too Much of Life is a series of texts from her time spent working for Rio's leading paper. Texts includes excerpts from her columns, letters, stories, and life experiences.
I'm at a loss for words. I feel as though I highlighted sentences on every page, though I will try to list some of my favorite quotes.
“I ask only one thing: when I die, I want to have someone I love at my side, holding my hand. Then I won’t be afraid, and I will have company when I cross the great divide. I would like it if there were such a thing as reincarnation: that I could be reborn after death and give my living soul to a new person. I would, though, like forewarning of that. If reincarnation really does exist, the life I lead now is not really mine: a soul was given to my body. I want to be reborn over and over. And in my next incarnation, I will read my books like any other interested reader, and I will not know that I was the one who wrote them in this incarnation.”
“The weariness of loving another person. Hatred would be better. What would save me from this sense of satiety—is it satiety or freedom being put to no use?—would be rage. Not one of those rather soppy rages. But a simple, violent rage. The more violent the better. Rage at those who know nothing. ”
“I miss myself. I’m easily distracted, I answer the phone too much, I write quickly, I live quickly. Where is me?
I need to go on a spiritual retreat and find myself at last—yes, at last, but I’m so afraid—of myself."
“It is a lie to say people cannot be helped. I am helped by the mere presence of a living person. I am helped by the gentle ache of missing those I loved. And I am helped by my own breathing. And there are moments of laughter or good cheer. Of joy, of the very highest order.”
“The most important thing in the world is love, the most important thing for the individual is the integrity of the soul, even if, from the outside, it might seem a little grubby. When the soul says Yes, it’s yes, when it says No, it’s no. And you just have to get used to that. Setting aside all that is good and all that is bad. As for what love is, love is giving, giving, giving yourself. Not according to your own needs—many people think they’re giving themselves when they’re doing nothing of the sort—but according to the needs of the person you love. Anyone who doesn’t give themselves ends up hating themselves, even castrating themselves. Solitary love is nonsense.”
“Nascent pleasure hurts our chest so much that we prefer to feel the pain we are used to rather than unaccustomed pleasure. There is no possible explanation for true happiness, it defies understanding—it resembles the beginning of some irrecoverable loss. That total fusion is unbearably good—as if death were our final, greatest good, except that it isn’t death, it is life so incommensurable that it resembles the grandeur of death. One should allow oneself to be flooded by happiness only very gradually—because it is life being born. And for those who lack the necessary strength, they should first cover every nerve with a protective film, with a film of death so that they can tolerate life. That film can consist of any protective formal act, a silence or a few meaningless words. Because pleasure is not to be trifled with. It is us.”
I don't think that there's anything I can say about Clarice Lispector that I haven't attempted to verbalize before. Her writing is like no other, whether it's fictional or not.
Too Much of Life is a series of texts from her time spent working for Rio's leading paper. Texts includes excerpts from her columns, letters, stories, and life experiences.
I'm at a loss for words. I feel as though I highlighted sentences on every page, though I will try to list some of my favorite quotes.
“I ask only one thing: when I die, I want to have someone I love at my side, holding my hand. Then I won’t be afraid, and I will have company when I cross the great divide. I would like it if there were such a thing as reincarnation: that I could be reborn after death and give my living soul to a new person. I would, though, like forewarning of that. If reincarnation really does exist, the life I lead now is not really mine: a soul was given to my body. I want to be reborn over and over. And in my next incarnation, I will read my books like any other interested reader, and I will not know that I was the one who wrote them in this incarnation.”
“The weariness of loving another person. Hatred would be better. What would save me from this sense of satiety—is it satiety or freedom being put to no use?—would be rage. Not one of those rather soppy rages. But a simple, violent rage. The more violent the better. Rage at those who know nothing. ”
“I miss myself. I’m easily distracted, I answer the phone too much, I write quickly, I live quickly. Where is me?
I need to go on a spiritual retreat and find myself at last—yes, at last, but I’m so afraid—of myself."
“It is a lie to say people cannot be helped. I am helped by the mere presence of a living person. I am helped by the gentle ache of missing those I loved. And I am helped by my own breathing. And there are moments of laughter or good cheer. Of joy, of the very highest order.”
“The most important thing in the world is love, the most important thing for the individual is the integrity of the soul, even if, from the outside, it might seem a little grubby. When the soul says Yes, it’s yes, when it says No, it’s no. And you just have to get used to that. Setting aside all that is good and all that is bad. As for what love is, love is giving, giving, giving yourself. Not according to your own needs—many people think they’re giving themselves when they’re doing nothing of the sort—but according to the needs of the person you love. Anyone who doesn’t give themselves ends up hating themselves, even castrating themselves. Solitary love is nonsense.”
“Nascent pleasure hurts our chest so much that we prefer to feel the pain we are used to rather than unaccustomed pleasure. There is no possible explanation for true happiness, it defies understanding—it resembles the beginning of some irrecoverable loss. That total fusion is unbearably good—as if death were our final, greatest good, except that it isn’t death, it is life so incommensurable that it resembles the grandeur of death. One should allow oneself to be flooded by happiness only very gradually—because it is life being born. And for those who lack the necessary strength, they should first cover every nerve with a protective film, with a film of death so that they can tolerate life. That film can consist of any protective formal act, a silence or a few meaningless words. Because pleasure is not to be trifled with. It is us.”
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