A Cidade Sitiada

by Clarice Lispector

A Cidade Sitiada — terceiro romance e, para muitos, um dos melhores da autora — é a crónica ficcional de um subúrbio em crescimento, São Geraldo, na década de 20. Para a fazer, Clarice Lispector retira das suas personagens toda e qualquer dimensão anterior. Dentro dessa marca de objectividade, acompanhamos a luta de Lucrécia Neves Correia por sua expressão plena. Caprichosa, deseja enriquecer, possuir bens e subir na vida. Como as ambiciosas moças de São Geraldo, espera que o dia de núpcias a liberte.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, Brazil, Romance, Novels, Literary Fiction, 20th Century

152 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1949

About the author

Clarice 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.

Reviews

[Richard Derus · Rating 5 out of 5]

I RECEIVED A REVIEW COPY FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.

My Review: Lucrécia Neves of São Geraldo belongs to a place as only a woman who exists in Clarice Lispector's bitter, resentful, passionate novels can. Her town exists, barely, as we learn of her early life in it. During the course of her narration, we learn that São Geraldo is a place in the throes of explosive, exponential growth. This novel's bitterness is directed at the sights of Life, of Nature, being subsumed and defiled by Human actions, for Human aesthetics:

Behold the flower—showing its thick stem, the round corolla: the flower was showing off. But atop the stem it too was untouchable. When it started to wilt, you could look at it directly but by then it would be too late...

The author's organizing principle in this visually driven narrative seems to me to be the manner in which Man, used in the sense of "all humanity" but (*I* think) really aimed at human males, rapes the entire natural universe to get what he needs to be in control. Only then will he be comfortable, on the way to being contented. And I chose that pronoun consciously and exclusively, as I am of the opinion Author Lispector did as well.

It's true that Clarice Lispector, born in Ukraine in 1920 but raised from infancy forward in Recife, Brazil, spoke and thought in a highly gendered language, Portuguese. It's also true that her Jewish family was part of the long patriarchal march of the religion. Clarice was intellectually gifted, gaining admission to the best schools in Pernambuco State, and later into the law school of the national university...I think it's pretty safe to assume she was formatively aware of how little women matter to the men who make the laws and set the course. I see no evidence in anything I've read by or about Author Lispector to suggest she was anything but keenly sensitive to women's absence from the discourses that directly impacted them all her life.

The struggle to reach reality—that’s the main objective of this creature who tries, in every way, to cling to whatever exists by means of a total vision of things. I meant to make clear too the way vision—the way of seeing, the viewpoint—alters reality, constructing it. A house is not only constructed with stones, cement etc. A man’s way of looking constructs it too.

I could be reading into these words what she did not put there herself that "man's way" spoken with an authorial sniff of annoyed disdain. But, reading this least-loved of her novels, I am struck by her absolutely fierce anticipation of the ecofeminist ethos. I can't prove it. I readily admit that her life and its mysteries are outside my knowledge base. But it just *feels* like an angry woman's denunciation of the uncontrolled cancer of unrestrained capitalist "development" destroying the natural world.

I will also note that the critics whose reception of the novel were characterized as "lukewarm" were all males and writing in the 1940s. I suspect they responded to Lucrécia's rejection of two perfectly adequate suitors, Felipe (who disrespected Lucrécia's hometown quite insultingly) and Perseu (whose world was circumscribed by the few words he could be arsed to speak to her), for what felt to a man of the time like frivolous reasons. Mateus, older and "wiser" than Lucrécia, is her eventual ticket to the Big City. Where, mirabile dictu, she discovers that "{e}very man seemed to promise a woman a bigger city," but the promise carries a grim, undiscussed reality with it: She must give up her sense of place and surrender to the city's vast impersonality. It is not in Lucrécia to want this for herself. Her influence with Mateus leads them back to what was São Geraldo...and there to discover that it is not that place, that its development has created a place that is not the one Lucrécia's memories conjure when she thinks of São Geraldo.

A woman of 26, a Brazilian Jew living in Bern, Switzerland, wrote this novel. No, São Geraldo wasn't the Recife of her childhood, nor was the big city exactly Rio de Janeiro where she came of age and married. But she was a person cut off from Home. The nature of Lucrécia's relationship to her world is visually oriented. She speaks of and in images, shapes, sights and vistas; they evoke secondarily and (it feels to me) tangentially emotional responses in her. This makes sense in the context of Author Lispector's dislike for the Swiss countryside...it does, to be honest, live in my memory as shockingly, even surreally, tidy and manicured. Nothing about the place appealed to her, nor if I'm honest did it appeal to me. Visually spectacular, aesthetically wanting.

Is it, then, any wonder that woman Author Lispector looked at the astonishingly male (built, controlled, made to fit a purpose not the spectacular place it's sited within) world of Bern, of Switzerland, and wrote the story of a rather dull, fairly dim girl recording visually, passively, the consequences of male dominion on her world? Even when, after a dull marriage to Mateus palls, she finally falls in love with a man, it's one without a shred of agency to offer her. He is unavailable and uninterested in making himself so.

The world, then, is a place that acts on Lucrécia, a world made by, of, and for men, and she is reduced to eyes without a face recording recording recording the deeds of others, the way they wreak havoc and call it progress:

Upon the rubble horses would reappear announcing the rebirth of the old reality, their backs without riders. Because thus it had always been. Until a few men would tie them to wagons, once again erecting a city that they wouldn't understand, once again building, with innocent skill, the things. And then once more they'd need a pointing finger to give them their old names.

It's not what you call me, it's what I answer to. Lucrécia, her life a response and a reaction, then becomes only a queen in her imagination. She orders her mental world to suit her vision, her view...circumscribed, as always, be men and their power.

[Léa · Rating 5 out of 5]

only clarice lispector could write about a speck of dust on somebodies shoe so beautifully and introspectively

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 4 out of 5]

A story of a changing city and a changing woman—the former 'no longer at its starting point' and the latter one who 'didn't possess the futilities of the imagination but just the narrow existence of whatever she was seeing' yet will later stand up 'beating somber wings over the finished city'. Reading this cryptic novel is to take a somnambulant wander through the heavy heat of late afternoon, the darkening sky still streaked with light, punctuated by pauses at overlooks affording restless glimpses of the uneven terrain beyond, shifting as it is in constant flux.

[Teresa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ler Clarice Lispector pode ser uma experiência análoga à de viver, a qual é feita de instantes - mais ou menos longos - em que lutamos para compreender o mundo; ou cedemos de tédio e indiferença por tudo; ou nos afundamos em dor e tristeza; ou vibramos de paixão; ou, serenamente, "nos deixamos ser"... felizes... com o que somos, com o que temos...
Sempre que a leio não é por decisão prévia. Acontece, simplesmente. Tal como a vida, que só existe no presente e é sempre uma surpresa e uma dádiva - mesmo quando a consideramos monótona, ou menos boa. Um dia, li Uma aprendizagem ou o livro dos prazeres. Um tempo depois, A hora da estrela. Há dias, li dois contos: O ovo e a galinha e A quinta história. Periodicamente, passo pel'A descoberta do mundo e leio textos aleatoriamente. Agora, li A cidade sitiada e, de seguida, iniciei Um sopro de vida. Não obedeço a planos, ou regras, para ler Clarice. Gosto muito de alguns dos seus textos (romances, crónicas, contos) de outros quase nada. Mas gosto sempre de ler Clarice Lispector. Como gosto sempre de viver; quer seja a chorar, a sorrir ou a rir...

Ler A Cidade Sitiada foi como comer uma maçã estaladiça mas pouco doce...
A linguagem é muito bonita, intimista, impar. As personagens e o enredo não os senti (compreendi?).
A sinopse refere tratar-se do "processo de libertação de uma mulher", em paralelo com a transformação da cidade onde mora. Será?
À bruta, a história é assim (cuidado com os spoilers):
Lucrécia namora com Filipe e com Perseu. Porque quer uma aliança no dedo, casa com Mateus. Vai para outra cidade e compra uns tecidos. Durante umas férias dá uns passeios com Lucas. Mateus morre e Lucrécia recebe uma carta da mãe onde diz que, lá na terra, há um homem muito bom que lhe viu um retrato e gostou. E Lucrécia parte para um segundo casamento.
Não entendo que Lucrécia se liberte; apenas se conforma com o destino (naquela época - anos 20 - e numa cidade do interior) reservado às mulheres de ascendência humilde, sem instrução e de "tosco espírito" e "pensamento quase nunca utilizado".
Mas posso estar enganada. A escrita de Clarice não é transparente. É muito simbólica, hermética, o que pode originar várias interpretações. O conto Ovo e a Galinha é um exemplo da dificuldade em entendê-la, pois até a própria Clarice disse não o entender bem. Claro que penso que ela não falava a sério. Eu, presunçosamente, estou convicta de o ter decifrado... na terceira leitura...

[nathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

“𝘞𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘢 𝘸𝘩𝘰𝘭𝘦 𝘭𝘪𝘧𝘦 𝘸𝘢𝘴 𝘴𝘩𝘦 𝘳𝘦𝘧𝘦𝘳𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘰 𝘪𝘧 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘰𝘸𝘯? 𝘈𝘯𝘥 𝘩𝘰𝘸 𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 𝘴𝘩𝘦 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘭𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘰𝘸𝘯 𝘸𝘩𝘰𝘭𝘦 𝘭𝘪𝘧𝘦 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘯 𝘪𝘧 𝘴𝘩𝘦 𝘸𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘵𝘰 𝘥𝘪𝘦 𝘢𝘵 𝘢𝘯𝘺 𝘮𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵?”

My last Lispector. I didn’t expect to cry, but I did. Not because I was sad, but burdened. Burdened by bearing my body after coming out of something like this towards the continuation of my lifeline. How does one expect to continue living after leaving Lispector? How do you go through with the living of life?

Presentation. Represention. From the line between citizen to city. What draws the line? How do you cross it? What colors and sounds ring true from the outside within? Ultimately, it’s all the questioning on how you are made. How you are made beyond birth. The filling in. The fleshing out.

“𝘛𝘦𝘭𝘭𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘺 ‘𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘺’ 𝘸𝘢𝘴 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘯 𝘩𝘢𝘳𝘥𝘦𝘳 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘯 𝘭𝘪𝘷𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘪𝘵. 𝘐𝘧 𝘰𝘯𝘭𝘺 𝘣𝘦𝘤𝘢𝘶𝘴𝘦 ‘𝘭𝘪𝘷𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘯𝘰𝘸’ 𝘸𝘢𝘴 𝘫𝘶𝘴𝘵 𝘢 𝘤𝘢𝘳 𝘥𝘳𝘪𝘷𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘩𝘦𝘢𝘵, 𝘴𝘰𝘮𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢𝘥𝘷𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘥𝘢𝘺 𝘣𝘺 𝘥𝘢𝘺 𝘭𝘪𝘬𝘦 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳 𝘳𝘪𝘱𝘦𝘯𝘴..”

I’ve often thought who was in possession of my story. Because for so long everything happened to me. The worst of the worst and I thought I was going to end it all with pills or blades or even a big big jump. Because these were choices I thought for myself outside of the circumstances that corrupted my age in a way where I always felt much older than my peers. I’ve been to more funerals than weddings, more wakes than birthday parties. Working ever since I was 8. Never knowing the kind of freedom that breeds choice.

So I left a city like LA. Went to a city like SF. Still, I wanted an end. And it’s city to city that I realize that though they have created different strengths out of me, I am the same or at least the body is. How beautiful is that, to have different endurances depending on the tilt of a skyscraper, the way it blocks out a blindness that would have stilted days, lengthened them to an oblivion.

Now I am here so far away from a country that my parents escaped to, to find the freedom in the American dream, only for me to go near war-torn territory.

Cities continue to carve hard-headed endurances out of me. Testing me. Tease. To tell the great striptease that is the nakedness Lispector always writes towards. She is always writing towards purity, one so open you confuse it for both life and death. You confuse it for God. Or even hell. Purgatory. An angel’s face. Sea foam breath. A mist that defines and divides the outer limits of our rather simple means.

And so I cried. Texting Sophie. Telling her how beautiful she is, how life is, how for centuries and centuries people have always tried tried tried to make life be beautiful. In their meanings. In their loves. In their caresses. Even in their dreams. All of me is part of that. All of me is a cityscape only trying to reach the tip of sunlight, to singe God into me.

[Matthew Ted · Rating 2 out of 5]

[24th book of 2021. Artist for this review is Venezuelan artist Carlos Cruz-Diez.]

This is a dense novel. In the beginning I could only manage working my way through a few pages at a time, and extracting any meaning was difficult; it is elusive, almost impenetrable. Throughout the novel certain images reoccur, but namely, the image of horses. They prevail throughout the entire novel, sometimes, even our protagonist is described as stamping her hooves. And though the language is beautiful at times, it felt as if it was too distant, and driving towards nothingness, that left the whole novel feeling slightly cold—as if I was witnessing something very beautiful on another shoreline, with my vision blurred and slightly distorted by ripples of heat.


“1 plate, from Chromointerférence, 1981”—1981

I wrote out some thoughts on an old receipt the other night and after some translation issues (from indecipherable to decipherable) I read it again:

At first I thought there wasn’t enough sunshine to pour into the uncooperative recesses of my brain, but then the sunshine came and instead my brain was blinded; then it was too windy and my thoughts were constantly scattering south; then there was no wind, so my thoughts settled into stillness and stagnated; then it rained and my brain was flooded. In the end I realised it was me, or the book, but not the weather.

A little abstract, but it is an abstract book. At the halfway mark I was idly flipping through the pages until I realised an appendix, which contained a review from the Brazilian critic Temístocles Linhares and then a response from Lispector herself, which she wrote twenty-two year later after happening upon the review.


“Physichromie 2232”—1988

I won’t bother delving into Linhares review, though I will record its final line: And the result is that the work circles around a life and a drama without managing to lend them more than a simulation of a novel.

Lispector’s response is worthy of some reflection. It did change an element of my reading in the second half of the novel. She begins by saying, Your review is pointed and well-done. Further down she writes, What astonishes me—and this is certainly my own fault—is that the higher purposes of my book should escape a critic. Does this mean I couldn’t bring to the fore the book’s intentions? Or were the critic’s eyes clouded for other reasons, not my own? She claims, As for the book’s “intention,” I didn’t believe it was lost, in a critic’s eyes, through the development of the narrative. I still feel that “intention” running through all the pages, in a thread perhaps fragile as I wished, but continuous and all the way to the end. Lispector’s words are more resounding here than in the novel itself, for me: The way of looking gives the appearance to reality. When I say that Lucrécia Neves [the protagonist] constructs the city of São Geraldo and gives it a tradition, this is somehow clear to me. When I say that, at that time of a city being born, each gaze was making new extensions, new realities emerge—this is so clear to me. She talks in this vein, or seeing, of creating, of reality, until the letter’s conclusion:

No, you didn’t “bury” the book, sir: you too “constructed” it. If you’ll excuse the word, like one of the horses of São Geraldo.

Clarice Lispector

[Jade]

read while in rio, clarice's home city <3 stumbled upon a used bookstore with her portrait hanging on the wall, where the bookseller said her books never stay in stock because everyone loves her work so much

[Mandy-Suzanne Wong · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite Lispector novel. She had already discovered that inscrutability is a form of resistance. In THE BESIEGED CITY, we see her struggling to tell us why, to make the point explicit. But making things perfectly explicit--"understanding" them by labeling or categorizing them--is precisely what things resist and prohibit. Even the smallest trinkets, the porcelain figure playing the flute, the field of corn, have sides to them, essential hidden faces, that evade categorization and prevent the things from being simply tools.

From her earliest days, Lucrecia sees this. So even when she devotes herself to becoming a tool of patriarchal society, a "gear" in the "superior order," assuming that she must do so for survival's sake: her unwitting inscrutability (inscrutable even to Lucrecia herself) is her shield against the men and "the system" that besiege her; and Lucrecia never permits herself to be conquered, harnessed, or used, pressed into service. She also evades becoming one of those cruel people who finds amusement in using others. And so, yes, Lucrecia triumphs. The shallowest, bluntest things, the chair, the house, the city, a man, even a doctor, a woman, even a housewife: "They're not even God's, they belong to themselves," Lucrecia cries.

A favorite bit (I have so many!): "...you'd trample ardent weeds and couldn't subjugate with a glance the dryness and the wind of the plateau--a wave of dust rising with the gallop of an imaginary horse."

And another favorite bit: "Behold the flower--showing its thick stem, the round corolla: the flower was showing off. But atop the stem it too was untouchable. When it started to wilt, you could look at it directly but by then it would be too late..."

[emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

‘Only every once in a while a glass would shatter. If at least the girl were outside its walls. What a painstaking work of patience it would be to encircle it. To waste her life trying geometrically to lay siege to it with calculations and resourcefulness in order to one day, even when she was decrepit, find the breach.’

Buried under Lispector’s ‘horses’ / equine metaphors — well suffocated. Dizzy with/by its unmistakable beauty — not sure kaleidoscopic, or just fucking labyrinthine (and not in a Borges sort of way I don’t think?) . Ultimately, I can ‘see’ nothing (else) beyond ‘beauty’ in this one. Can definitely say that it’s my least favourite (or at least most-difficult-to-appreciate) of Lispector’s work. A bit of a frantic fever dream (if anything). Maybe a second reading would offer something more — though I wouldn't know until then/if I come back to it later. But regardless, Clarice Lispector is still my all-time favourite writer, so make of that what you will.

‘—the meeting of two horses in the air, both dripping with blood—they wouldn’t stop until one was king. She had wanted him because he was an outsider, she hated him because he was an outsider. The fight for the kingdom. Lucrécia Neves elbowed the woman who was watching, eliciting a small cry of fright. She violently straightened her hat—And with her head high, holding back a dizziness that would make her fly over the smokestacks—she took her leave slowly, full of trembling ribbons.’

‘Only a disaster would fill with blood and modesty that deteriorated a face that had achieved the cynicism of eternity. And that not even love would decipher. The empty sockets. She herself hardened into a single fragment—if they grabbed her by a leg they’d dislocate the whole body—In the cold darkness geraniums, artichokes, sunflowers, melons, hard zinnias, pineapples, roses were entwining. From the barge buried in the sand, only the prow was protruding. And, in the mutilated doorway, a rooster’s head was keeping watch. Only with the coming of dawn would you see the broken column. And the flies. Around the chapiter, the feeble and shining germination of mosquitos. But suddenly something was corrupted: new mosquitos were born—The house was smelling entirely of old trees.’

‘Then she changed clothes and lay down. A gentle joy was already starting to circulate in her blood with the first warmth, her teeth were once again sharpening and her nails hardening, her heart finally becoming precise in beats hard and curt. She, succumbing to an extreme fatigue that no man would love. Fatigue and remorse and horror, insomnia that the lighthouse was haunting in silence. She didn’t want to take the path of love, it would be a too-bloody reality, the rats—the lighthouse lit her in a flash and revealed the unknown face of lust. In the phosphorescence of the darkness she was seeing once again the ballrooms immobilized in the light, and the horrified people dancing completely still, an automaton reality and pleasure—the woman withdrew pale, ah! she was saying, surprised.’

‘—what perverse past had she emerged from. To see her in her childish perdition made him inhale with delight, in blind freedom. And that freedom was so rich that its excess was kindness; he enveloped her with his gaze—She didn’t even notice him. But, anonymous like guardian angels, he was protecting that woman’s joy. That night Lucrécia didn’t want him to walk her home and stayed on the hill alone. It was dark but the constellations were blinking wet. Standing, as if on the only spot from which that view could be had, Lucrécia was looking at the darkness of the earth and of the sky. That movement was infinitely spherical, harmonious and great: the world was round. Nun or murderess, she was discovering for a moment the nudity of her spirit. Nude, covered in fault as in forgiveness—and that’s where the world was becoming the threshold of a leap. The world was the orb.’

‘Since he had time, he turned on the radio that was soon popping picking up the distant storm—the thread of music however could be detected through the crackling of electricity. Perseu was listening while standing, without dreams and without anything you might call understanding. The musical phrase, very noble, was as visible to him as the radio. He was grasping the effort of the music with the same agreeable effort, and taking pleasure in this vague rivalry. When people would ask him if he liked music, he’d say smiling charmingly that he liked it well enough, but didn’t understand it, hearing a knock at the door amounted to almost the same thing as hearing music.’

‘And maybe because of the absurdity of the name, because of the notion of time that was passing, because of the beauty of the name—she grew very tired. The little empty room, a train passing through the station, the suitcases. Everything grew dark, the scene transported itself into sleep—everything had become obscured intimately, inside the drink. And in the shadow the gentle heart of the woman, without pain, in fatigued love. I’m yours, she thought lying, a bit nauseated. The weak lamp was keeping its balance in the station. It was very nice to live but she needed to throw up. Everything was heavy. Drops of rain were streaming.’

[makayla · Rating 4 out of 5]

not my favorite lispector, but that’s not saying much since i still absolutely loved every second of the existential dread

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 5 out of 5]

In his introduction to the New Directions edition of THE BESIEGED CITY, Clarice Lispector’s third novel, Benjamin Moser, the man who has been most responsible for the recent upsurge of interest in this truly magnificent writer throughout the English-speaking world, suggests that her work, perhaps especially her prose, continually carries out what Wordsworth once said was poetry’s task, namely “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” While I think that this is indeed fundamentally the case, I think we should ammend such a concession by noting that it is more purely the case insofar as concerns her first novel, NEAR TO THE WILD HEART, than it is as regards the two she wrote immediately after it. While THE CHANDELIER and THE BESIEGED CITY still utilize a sensorially rich stream-of-consciousness, operating most elementally as an ecstatic immersion in lived experience of a decidedly heightened nature, they are more ambitious undertakings, more challenging as such, with more to unpack. They were also less successful with critics and the public than was her debut. They ask a great deal of the reader and readers can be put off by such demands. Many of Clarice’s finest later works, and I think especially of THE PASSION ACCORDING TO G.H. and ÁGUA VIVA, are fiercely streamlined, conceptually contained, plainly profound, at times producing a kind of sublime incantatory spell, and as such have more in common with the intoxicatingly pure NEAR TO THE WILD HEART than they do those other two novels of the forties, each of which seems significantly more concerned with form, with thinking through structure and revolutionizing it, subverting conventional notions of what the novel can and ought to do. I read THE CHANDELIER last year and found it dazzling; if it is a radical and ambitious novel, THE BESIEGED CITY is even more so. THE CHANDELIER moves forward from NEAR TO THE WILD HEART by incorporating a more rigorous schematics insofar as concerns narrative and point of view. THE BESIEGED CITY likewise finds its author posing challenges to herself in terms of narrative construction, but does extremely radical things at the level of point of view, and embarking upon its tricky experiments finds a way to express new and radical ideas about identity, reality, succession, and community. Moser’s introduction to THE BESIEGED CITY is perhaps the most useful he has supplied for the recent New Directions Lispector editions. He talks about the central importance to the novel of horses and “things,” and how both horses and things, objects in general, become central to how the nominal protagonist, Lucrécia Neves, frames herself in her world, how she navigates each. There is the idea of the horse and the idea of unhorsing, obyezloshadenie, a concept borrowed from Isaac Babel, who wrote of the disappearance of horses, their replacement by motors, during the process of industrial modernization. Lucrécia Neves lives in the township of São Geraldo, and the novel depicts a process of modernization in which the town is first filled with horses, brought in to do work related to building and transportation, followed later by a subsequent emptying of the emergent city of said horses. Horse and woman are presented as the basic agents of building. São Geraldo is itself every bit as much a principal character in this novel as is Lucrécia Neves, herself both a becoming-thing and a becoming-horse. Lucrécia is in dalliance with thing and horse at the centre of a community in a condition of becoming, all of these elements resonating in a beautiful and highly characteristic passage late in the book: “Impossible love piercing her with joy, she who belonged to a man as she had belonged to things—wounded in the trunk of her species, standing, jubilant, rigid…Feeling on the surface of her skin thick horse veins. And Lucas, turning around to look at her: seeing her standing, isolated, in her equestrian grace.” There are repeated references to Lucrécia’s hooves, a continual positioning of her in terms of the “dominion of the equines.” Readers of Lispector’s debut novel will recall how it culminates in a vision of its protagonist Joana, a woman focused throughout the novel on fusing with pure material flux, herself transforming into a horse. Moser at one point in his introduction to THE BESIEGED CITY makes the very interesting observation that the Greek word for horse is álogo, a word also meaning “unreasoning, without speech.” Joana was herself a character who struggled with the insufficiencies of language, lamenting for example how the word “everything” fails to encompass enough. Lucrécia Neves has even less use for language. Lispector herself later wrote about how Lucrécia was a unique character in her novels; she is fundamentally uneducated and lacking what we would think of as intelligence, certainly not possessing anything like intellectual-creative ambition. If Joana and Virginia, the protagonist of THE CHANDELIER, are precocious and brilliant, not unlike highly-stimulated amateur philosophers assimilating the phenomenal world and postulating something not unlike burgeoning ontologies, Lucrécia is something else entirely, her inborn purpose born of the command to perceive rather than to prognosticate: “The main thing really was not to understand. Not even joy itself.” Moser writes about the proximity of the publications of THE BESIEGED CITY and Simone de Beauvoir’s epochal THE SECOND SEX, suggesting that Lucrécia’s relationship with things and their status as such coincides with her roll within a patriarchal apparatus, the to-be-looked-at-ness of the feminine object, her role as something to be possessed by men. While I think this is a point of comparison available for legitimate analysis, I think we need to go deeper here, as is so often the case with Lispector, a writer always operating at a limit, a depth, in dialogue with a beyond. “Things” always have a primary ontological status in Lispector. Already in NEAR TO THE WILD HEART we have Joana insisting on how “vision consisted of surprising the symbol of the thing in the thing itself.” If I have thought of later Lispector as fundamentally Spinozist, addressing the immanent material oneness of eternal creation, her first three novels are more fundamentally Kantian, fixated on the relationship between the noumena (ideality and the transcendental subject) and phenomena (things in themselves). The New Directions edition of THE BESIEGED CITY includes something of an appendix at the back, a valuable inclusion indeed, in which a fairly negative review of the novel published in Brazil at the time of its initial appearance is followed by Lispector’s response to that review, produced for her weekly newspaper column twenty-two years later (apparently the review had just come to be made known to her). In response to the accusation that her novel consisted of little more than extremely good poetic “phrases” and fleeting impressions, many perhaps of interest, failing to add up to a proper novel, Lispector writes: “The struggle to reach reality—that’s the main objective of this creature who tries, in every way, to cling to whatever exists by means of a total vision of things. I meant to make clear too the way vision—the way of seeing, the viewpoint—alters reality, constructing it. A house is not only constructed with stones, cement etc. A man’s way of looking constructs it too.” The world as synthesis born above all else of perception. Precisely because the evolving township of São Geraldo is every bit as much a main character as is Lucrécia Neves, what Lispector sees as the real subject of THE BESIEGED CITY is “collective construction.” Indeed. That is exactly right. Note this sentence in the novel itself: “Oh, but things were never seen: people were the ones who saw.” And of course the reader is also involved in this collective construction, making the whole practice all the more communal. What the novel is emphatically not about is the construction of rigid consensus reality. Lucrécia does not have much of a mental life, as we have already established. She is not invested in the work of imagination or the making intelligible of her relations within the context of a grander scheme. “Lucrécia who didn’t possess the futilities of the imagination but just the narrow existence of whatever she was seeing.” As such, the true radical break of THE BESIEGED CITY is that it is far less a novel of the inner life of a woman, the way we can still say NEAR TO THE WILD HEART and THE CHANDELIER are essentially that, and more a novel of the inner life of sets of relations, sets of relations provisionally named São Geraldo, in which Lucrécia occupies a central position (as builder, as becoming-horse, as becoming-thing). Horse, woman. Want to know the name of another great builder? We call this builder the Unconscious. Because she is not an intellect, because she operates beneath the seat of the intellect in a condition of oscillation and drift—subdural, subconscious, subliminal—Lucrécia’s inner life is that of the percolating Unconscious. As such the poetics of THE BESIGED CITY are more vaporous and diffuse than I have found them to be anywhere else in Lispector. That being said, Lucrécia is in consonance with São Geraldo itself, a microcosm that though not exactly a product of dream is very much built with heavy support of the Unconscious (derfracted across the inchoate field it straddles). This is why we are hardly talking about rigid consensus reality. The boarder between dream life and waking life is itself addressed. The chapter “In the Garden” commences with an evocation of falling asleep surrounded by objects from childhood. “A little camel. The giraffe. The elephant with raised trunk. Ah, bull, bull! crossing the air among the fleshy vegetables of sleep.” Falling into things is coupled here to falling into sleep, and the novel everywhere finds things suspended in a dripping syrup, constructed in cloudy movements, metaphors very often precipitating real material transformation. If Lucrécia is caprice and dreamy drift, São Geraldo and reality itself are constructed in kind. This caprice is interesting. A thing among things, often hijacked by fancies, committed to nothing but thingness and the raw content of experience, Lucrécia drifts through São Geraldo and drifts from man to man. She drifts from Felipe to Perseu Maria. Late in the novel we get to the chapter titled “The Exposed Treasure” and find that she is now Lucrécia Correia, wife of Mateus. She will be widowed. There will be Lucas. Her mother will write, sending word of yet another man, a hazy numeral x, and the novel will end with Lucrécia's flight in this man's uncertain direction. Lucrécia lives on Market Street, and she drifts through the free market of men and things on offer, bound to nothing but what passes through her senses, what she thereby constructs or helps to construct, if only in passing, if only sketching an ephemeral diagram. If São Geraldo is not a dream world it has something of a dream geography and is never fixed in place, not only because of the predations of progress but because of how unstable our constructions cannot help but be to begin with. Early in my reading of THE BESIEGED CITY I thought a little of Orson Welles’s 1942 film adaptation of Booth Tarkington’s THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS, that preeminent Hollywood movie about the effect on a community of unhorsing and the rise of the motor, but the further I went into Lispector’s vision the more it reminded me of Bruno Schulz’s THE STREET OF CROCODILES, perhaps the greatest work we have of the slippages and propensity to spontaneously morph of an urban community build to the specifications of the fugitive Unconscious. It is not so much about retreating into dream as it is about unleashing the Unconscious on the day, or a suspension between these poles, a plane of tremulous, somnolent synthesis. “She finally fell into a deeper sleep. Awake as the moonlight is erect. She was sleeping so deeply that she’d become enormous. Dragging her body, searching.” Consider that passage, like as it is to something from Bruno Schulz. I believe I understand Clarice Lispector. At the heart of this understanding lies a conviction that when she writes that a character becomes enormous on account of sleeping very deeply, this is not a metaphor or a product purely of dream, but rather an event within the real, evidence of how creation opens itself to our creations as material fact. Does she mean that moonlight is literally erect? Certainly she does. We create into the world that is itself the infinite creating, the reader and the writer and the symbols on the page creating their concerto, and the horse seeing everything clearly. Lucrécia Neves may not know much, not being anything like an intellectual sort of a person, but she knows that a horse knows how to see a house better than the rest of us. So she knows a lot. There is no thing waiting there to be seen. There is only the thing we see. A transcendental synthesis. Okay. But the idea here is that you might best leave this seeing to the horses. I think of OUT OF THIS WORLD: DELEUZE AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF CREATION, a book on Fench philosopher Gilles Deleuze in which Peter Hallward, its author, looks at the etymological connection that makes a "creature" and thing "created" and a thing "creating." A creature without language might well be a more adequate creater than a creature saddled (if you will excuse a term highly charged in this context) with language. Separation from the thing in itself is not just central to Kant but also to structural linguistics, lest we forget. Lispector would continue to move further in her later work from the transcendental subject and toward an immanentist spiritual materialism. It is no surprise that the poetic sensibility might have ocassion to take exception to our analytical containers, might even pause to compare them to prisons. Us people? How well do we ultimately creature? We have our moments. Our vision can definitely DO THINGS. But: “Like a bat the city was blind by day.” Well, that line might indeed be Clarice Lispector’s final word on what I previously called “rigid consensus reality,” a phenomenon wherein we comprehensively pull the wool over our own eyes, kill off the horse in us. What of the horse? Dehorsing, the motor, progress, the looming extinction we seem to have manufactured for ourselves? Well, of course you can take the horses out of the city with the caveat that at one and the same time you also cannot.

[Cristina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Una reflexión metafísica y a la vez poética sobre el encaje de la mujer libre en el mundo. Para ello, Lispector utiliza un juego de espejos entre el desarrollo de la ciudad brasileña de S. Geraldo a partir de los años veinte y la transformación interna de Lucrécia Neves, la protagonista de la novela.

No es una lectura fácil, porque la prosa puede llegar a resultar exasperante, pero reconozco que me pudo el tema. Por ello, 4 *.

[Katrina · Rating 1 out of 5]

Probably one of the worst books I’ve ever read. It was like watching a David lynch movie where it’s just a free association of someone’s thoughts that you hope will start to make sense at some point in the book, but the more you read the more frustrated and disappointed you become. Waste of my time and money.

[Cosimo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tutto è terra altrui dove gli altri vivono contenti

“Anche se di sé non dava nulla – se non la propria chiarezza incomprensibile. Il segreto delle cose stava nel fatto che, manifestandosi, si manifestavano uguali a sé stesse”.

La scrittura è così misteriosa che nemmeno lei riesce a capire sé stessa, eppure al tempo stesso si percepisce che non ci sia alcun mistero, ogni cosa è in superficie, trasparente, talmente logica da apparire visionaria, da portare allo spaesamento. Lispector induce il lettore nell'intermittenza della percezione: cosa sono le cose? domanda ossessivamente, sono un medium tra mondi lontani, sono un tramite tra il mondo che vorrebbe sentire vivo e invece trova irraggiungibile. Così procede per descrizioni, enumerazioni, sequenze: cerca così una fusione tra il dentro e il fuori, tra la chiusura e l'esperimento dell'incontro. Ma sempre sembra fallire lo scambio doloroso con l'altro, tutto resta separato, controllato, consumato. Quindi la protagonista entra in una stanza ed è estremamente lucida, si aspetta una ricompensa per questa sua tensione conoscitiva, ma l'incantesimo trasforma tutto in un testo surreale privo di rivelazioni. Le ribellioni ombrose e le meraviglie materiali connotano in modo ambivalente i tratti di Lucrécia, I bisogni sono apparentemente vacui, alleviano il peso del pensiero, mentre nel fluire dei sentimenti conflittuali che la abitano si animano la malinconia e l'attrazione per la trascendenza, quella sembianza persuasiva che non si placa e che sembra distruggere ogni immagine sublime e ogni silenzio meditativo. Nessuno ha mai scritto come lei; lei che aveva coraggio definendosi ”una russa che non parla russo”, naturalizzata nel linguaggio e nel corpo, nessuno aveva mai fatto coesistere indipendenza e rapporti con altri scrittori e poeti, versante depressivo che sconfinava nella prostrazione e resistenza di idee e progetti, ermetismo psicologico con multiforme espressività.

“Significava indagare se nella vita vissuta c'era qualcosa che si fosse compiuto. E c'era, eccome. Era un pensiero difficilissimo rendersene conto, sì. Oh, nulla di importante, soltanto insostituibile. Si erano compiute cose molto mute: di oggetto in oggetto, una certa ascesa quotidiana sempre indipendente dal pensiero, il tempo che incalzava. In quale momento e accanto a quale oggetto lei aveva detto, per esempio: 'Sono Lucrécia. La mia anima è immortale' – quando? Ecco, mai. 'Ma supponiamo che lo abbia detto'. Fu così che la donna si sentì obbligata a ragionare. Perché della vita reale, vissuta giorno per giorno, le era rimasta – se non avesse voluto mentire – solo la possibilità di dire, in una conversazione fra vicine, in un misto di lunga esperienza e di scoperta dell'ultimo momento - sì, sì, anche l'anima è importante, non credi? Raccontare la sua storia era ancora più difficile che viverla. Anche perché il 'vivere adesso' era soltanto un'automobile che procedeva nel calore, qualcosa che avanzava giorno per giorno come ciò che diventa maturo, l'oggi era la nave in alto mare”.

[Krys · Rating 5 out of 5]

A towering achievement, and thematically so close to my heart in many ways. It's remarkable how ambitious and singular, and apparently maligned, this novel was in relation to the modernism of her time. Stripped of the existence of any interior life and lacking the audacity of imagination, Lucrecia Neves, for whom "the impression is the expression", takes up the extraordinary commitment of attempting to perceive reality in "a total vision of things". To see is to construct in one's gaze its subject, to conjure it into pure being, and through Lucrecia Neves' way of seeing the reader too is implicated in the construction of every object, the city, this novel.

"And the night in São Geraldo elapsed clean, astonished.

Ants, rats, wasps, pink bats, herds of mares emerged sleepwalking from the sewers.

What the girl was seeing in her sleep was opening her senses as a house opens at dawn. The silence was funereal, tranquil, a slow alarm that couldn't be rushed. The dream was this: to be alarmed and slow. And also to look at the big things that were coming out from the tops of the houses just as you'd see yourself differently in someone else's mirror: twisted in a passive, monstrous expression.

But the girl's monotonous joy was carrying on beneath the noise of the currents. The dream was unfolding as if the earth weren't round but flat and infinite, and thus there was time. The second floor was keeping her in the air. She was breathing herself out."

[Elettra · Rating 3 out of 5]

Non è assolutamente facile entrare nello spirito di questo libro. Penso che il messaggio che la scrittrice vuole trasmetterci sia piuttosto complesso e sfaccettato, come lo è la sua scrittura in generale. Non si tratta di un messaggio univoco e facilmente decodificabile, ma piuttosto di un'esplorazione profonda dell'animo umano, delle sue contraddizioni, dei suoi desideri e delle sue paure. La protagonista, Lucrécia, è alla ricerca di un'identità autentica, che sembra sfuggirle costantemente. La troviamo spesso a confrontarsi con un senso di estraneità nei confronti del mondo esterno, sia esso la città o il salotto della sua casa, come pure con sè stessa. La città che è inizialmente vista come luogo di realizzazione e di fuga, si rivelerà un'ulteriore prigione, un labirinto in cui è difficile orientarsi. Lucrècia cerca di dare un senso al mondo e a sè stessa. Le risposte non mi sembrano definitive, ma piuttosto in fieri e non risolte. Il linguaggio è ricco di metafore e la narrazione non lineare e frammentaria, perché accompagna il flusso di coscienza della protagonista.

[Tomás ☁️ · Rating 4 out of 5]

estoy leyendo a clarice lispector de una forma un tanto extraña:

empecé con "cerca del corazón salvaje", su primera novela. escrita con 19 años y dejando ya patente el que iba a ser su estilo lírico-onírico-filosófico a lo largo de las pocas novelas que llegó a escribir. la forma, la sustancia era lo importante y la historia solo adorno.

aquel libro me dejó absolutamente asombrado. descubrí una nueva forma de escribir y una nueva forma de leer.

de ahí fui a tiro fijo a sus obras más notables "la hora de la estrella (la última) - la pasión según gh (la difícil) - agua viva (la mejor)" y me quedó claro que estaba ante una escritora superior. una forma diferente de escribir y de leer.

después, con las pocas que me quedaban, tal vez sus obras "menores", decidí ir en orden cronológico. esta es la tercera, me queda solo una.

las dos anteriores, aun gustándome, se me quedaron flojas, pero se puede sacar mucho de su lectura:

es alucinante ver la evolución de estilo, ver cómo va quitando y quitando (y quitando) cosas a la historia. cada vez más incoherente a simple vista, pero cada vez las ideas, la forma, lo que a ella le importa, gana coherencia en ese meollo.

"la ciudad sitiada" me ha gustado mucho. es una historia de comparación entre el crecimiento personal de una mujer con el crecimiento urbanístico de una ciudad: de lo pequeño a lo maduro, el salvajismo urbano y el hormonal, los desastres arquitectónicos y los personales...

una maravilla.

y la mejor escritora del mundo.

[Alejandro · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hermosamente escrita y cargada de imágenes. Una novela sensorial antes que narrativa. Por ahí te da la impresión de que no entendés un choto, pero la historia es una boludez.

[Bruna Rangel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Projeto de leitura Clarice - Romances 3/9

4,25.

Me surpreendi, pois achei que seria um livro monótono. Pelo contrário, após as primeiras 30 páginas tudo fica muito bom.

Reflexões interessantes e gostei da personagem principal. É ótimo acompanhar a "evolução" da escrita da Clarice. Neste romance a narração externa é bem feita e a conexão entre o mundo é a personagem é interessante e fluída.

Ao ler as entrelinhas é possível perceber descrições de ideologias da época e críticas sociais. Somado a isso, é marcante o cotidiano e os desafios da convivência familiar. Tem-se, aqui, a busca pela linguagem da visão: vemos as coisas através da visão que temos de nós mesmos. O que acho mais interessante na literatura da Clarice são esses simbolismos e como tudo foi posto de propósito e com significados diversos (inclusive a escolha dos nomes)

Em suma, achei muito agradável e marquei o livro praticamente todo.

"Desde que o amava encontrara simplesmente o sinal de fatalidade que tanto procurara, esse insubstituível que mal se adivinhava nas coisas, o insubstituível da morte: como o gesto, o amor reduzia até encontrar o irremediável, com o amor se apontava o mundo."

[Tommi · Rating 3 out of 5]

[3.5] No time to write reviews, just jotting down a few things. This was right up my alley. Nearly indecipherable and hence even grueling at times, but certain motifs surface every now and then: horses (with which the protagonist identifies) retreating from the sprawling, industrializing city; her yearning to understand her immediate reality and the materiality of objects; and seeing vs. being seen. There was a sense of rush to the writing and it feels unpolished here and there. Surely not the place to get acquainted with Lispector, but I enjoyed it anyway and look forward to exploring her much better known works in the future.

[Peter Crofts]

Even for Lispector, this was an exercise in masochism. I'll have to try it again at some later date, maybe.

[Aaron · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Besieged City in one way or another is a tale of creation: the creation of a city, the creation of a person, the creation of modernity. The book concerns itself with how these creations come about. In remarkable language and structure, Lispector charts the creation of a woman and the world around her.

It begins hazily, with the main character, Lucrécia moving through her city, São Geraldo, on the brink of modernity. The narrative is slippery initially before slowly coming into focus on Lucrécia.

She is of indeterminate age, but young, potentially an older teen or in her early twenties. She is seeing two men, one of whom is more provincial, less experienced, and another, more worldly, a soldier. This is the first symbolic representation with her being pulled between the comfortable past and the modern--a struggle that continues throughout the book. Lucrécia's initial motivations and thoughts are explored through her relationship with these two men, in beautiful language often evoking symbols of the traditional and the progressive. When two characters step apart, "a clearing opened up between them." Or Lucrécia's wants: "The desire to go to a dance would sometimes emerge, grow, and leave sea-foam on the beach." But Lucrécia is not wholly drawn toward the earthy and traditional: "ah, I'd love to have the strength of a window. The metaphors extend to her lovers. When she considers her choices, we are told, "but Perseus dressed like a farmhand. And the girl was already needing, in her iron streets, the armed forces."

These metaphors demonstrate Lucrécia's navigation of the pull of moderntiy against the comfort of nature and the past. How to reconcile them, this new world that her emerging city presents. The metaphor of the besieged city is presented in this context, an impossible situation in which Lucrécia is already within a city and still feels she needs to break into it, to understand it. She is living inside modernity without understanding how to inhabit it.

In perhaps the most remarkable chapter, "The Public Statue," Lucrécia is alone she she explores her world, the objects around her, and we see her world created before our eyes. "Wasn't that what happened to things?--inventing out of powerlessness a mysterious and innocent sign that could express her position in the city, choosing her own image and through it the image of the objects. Lucrécia is trying to identify herself in the world around her. She clings to scraps, takes the smallest sign that she is seen, she exists, that her experience is not unique. But she fails over and over. At the same time, she feels others trying to invent her and she resists their invention: "and people would say: that's Lucrécia Neves's favorite color, and she'd have to explain: but I like other colors, too!" This entire chapter, told through dreams and her observations of quotidian objects in her living room, was one of the most remarkable things I've ever read.

Seemingly all of a sudden, Lucrécia is married. Even though it appears she has no great fondness for her husband before they marry, she marries him because he is the best financial choice. She begins to inhabit a world that billions of women have inhabited before her, a world that has been ready-made. Her self-directed searching stops. She only searches for what she is supposed to. She's good at it, understand what she's meant to do as a married woman, and "amidst all this she was so happy that she was suffocating." In her marriage, doing what a "good wife" does feels like a game in her hands. She finds it entertaining at first. We watch Lucrécia see her life being created around her and her confusion about where it is coming from.

At this point, the narrative becomes hazy again, a cloud of marital interactions jumping around in time. Somehow (I may have missed it) Lucrécia is flirting with the possibility of an affair. She doesn’t have one, but we see her considering other options for her life.

Then, in true Lispector fashion, out of nowhere we are treated to an update on one of Lucrécia’s suitors when she is younger, Perseus, and what has become of him a few years later. Compared to Lucrécia’s interior monologue, Perseus is far less searching, less sure of himself. He has looked for a role, that of a doctor, to create his world. The interaction between him and an older woman in a bar is fascinating. Perseus is confused how to interact and she reflects on what she must look like to him and what she can even make of the interaction.

Finally, back to Lucrécia’s point of view, her husband dies and she is left alone in the modernized city. Her mother contacts her, telling her she has a new man interested in her in the country. At this point, the narrative describes many updates to the city, it is no longer the sem-rural township it was at the beginning of the book, but a city, to the point where its name may even change. Lucrécia hasn’t been keeping up, she’s been too busy with her marriage, and when she is thrust back into having to establish what her life will look like in the modern world, she rejects this challenge. She decides to escape, go to the country, and marry this man. Ultimately, she rejects her city, ends her siege, and lives in what is comfortable, what she knows, rather than what could be.

Ultimately, The Besieged City read as a tale of failed creation, to me. After her valiant struggle, her absconding, Lucrécia refuses to capitulate to modernity. She cannot create a new story for herself, she chooses to live the one she has known all along.

[Frederick · Rating 5 out of 5]

[Note: I'm writing this having read the entire novel but not the Appendix, in which Clarice Lispector responds to a newspaper review of her book. I plan to read that Appendix, but I don't want it to influence my thinking before I say what I thought of this book.]
I read the 2019 translation by Johnny Lorenz, published by New Directions. The mastermind behind these New Directions translations is Benjamin Moser, whose biography of Clarice Lispector, WHY THIS WORLD, published in 2009, introduced to the English-speaking world one of the most innovative novelists of the 20th century. Moser oversees New Direction's translations of Clarice Lispector's stories and novels. He is a public intellectual himself, fluent in many languages. His talks on Lispector (which you can see on Youtube) have been given in English, French and Portuguese. His championing of Lispector is a major service to literature.
Clarice Lispector, born in the Ukraine in 1920 and raised in Latin America, wrote in Portuguese. She died in 1977, having written in a style which, if THE BESIEGED CITY (which was published in 1949) is representative, is reminiscent of Virginia Woolf, Willam Faulkner and Samuel Beckett. THE BESIEGED CITY also made me think of Marilyn Robinson. You will note, of course, that my frame of reference is limited to authors who have written in English. I did not see in this book any resemblance to the works of Machado de Assis, who is generally regarded as Brazil's greatest writer (or who was considered Brazil's greatest writer until Lispector eclipsed him, in stages, first in her own country and now, decades later, in the United States) and, though I tried, I did not notice any hearkening back to Cervantes, which I do in Bolaño, Borges and Fuentes. I didn't detect a prose equivalent of a Frida Kahlo painting. If there is a strain of Magic Realism in it, I am probably not the person who can point it out; a scholar of Latin American fiction would be able to address this. What I will say is that this book doesn't seem to me to be the product of a school of thought. Clarice Lispector seems to me to be an individualist. The prose in this translation of A CIDADE SITIADA is vibrant and shimmering. Lispector describes extremely remote impressions her protagonist has of her surroundings. As sheer language, this book (or at least this translation of this book) is luminescent. I did not find myself stumbling. Whether I was able to grasp exactly what was going on even half the time is doubtful, but I am quite sure repeated readings will reward a lover of literature.
There is a surface story which comes through whenever Lucrécia Neves encounters either of the four loves of her life. When she is alone, though, we are immersed in her seeming identification with horses and with the city of São Geraldo. When she becomes a bit like Madame Bovary; that is, when THE BESIEGED CITY starts to resemble a satire of bourgeois existence, or when she flirts with a soldier, toys with a young man who cares about her or tries to win the heart of a doctor, we are jolted out of the apparent realism by Lispector's descriptions of Lucrécia's hooves, or of her sense that she is, herself, the city of Sáo Geraldo. Strictly in terms of style, I think Lispector reminds the reader, every so often, that if she chose to, she could have written something entirely realistic. The paradox here is that her descriptions of Lucrécia's thoughts quite probably are realistic. There is one point, about halfway through, when the narration seems to imply that Lucrécia is mad. But Lispector does not continue this thread. Toward the end, Lucrécia is described as clairvoyant, or at least as considering herself to be clairvoyant.
The long and the short is this, though: This is the story of a strong woman. Read it through without kicking yourself for not quite picturing what's going on at any given moment. The large picture is one of a survivor.

[Catie · Rating 3 out of 5]

**3.75 Stars**

Lispector’s word flow and style is challenging and jarring at times, but so beautiful and worth the work. Think Woolf’s stream of conscious and beautiful yet convoluted sentence structures. I don’t usually read the introductions to books until afterwards (they tend to be filled with rampant spoilers), but I did read this one, since I was unfamiliar with the author, and I’m so glad I did. Apparently Lispector herself found this book challenging, obtuse and hard to swallow, and it nearly ruined her career. But, at a time, when women were objectified and worth was based upon how they related to men, she tried to show through her words “how women see and are seen”. Published in 1949, the book’s theme revolves heavily on entering a modern era and the transformations or changes this causes. The main character, Lucrécia transforms from a girl to a woman, a small town transforms into a bustling modern city, and the world enters an era when the role and importance of women are questioned and determined.

I admire authors who challenge the literary norm, and I think I’ve fallen head over heels in love with Lispector and her writing. I have a feeling I’ll be chewing over this book and her words for quite some time. One final plug for her brilliance, in a letter to a friend, Lispector anguishes about writing this novel, and states, “I’m struggling with the book, which is horrible...I don’t know how to forgive the thoughtlessness of writing. But I’ve already based myself entirely on writing and if that desires goes, there won’t be anything left. So that’s the way it has to be. But I’ve reached the conclusions that writing is what I want more than anything else in the world, even more than love”.

Copy received from The Boxwalla Book Box - June 2019

[Carolina · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Let's stay friends", said the man [...]. "Friends?", mumbled the woman in soft surprise, "but we were never friends" — she breathed with pleasure — "we're enemies, my love, forever".

Depois de me apaixonar pelo livro "Uma Aprendizagem ou O Livro dos Prazeres", quis explorar mais obras da Lispector, esperando reencontrar o mesmo grau de análise introspectiva detalhada e delicada nesta nova leitura. Em "A Cidade Sitiada", essa captura de pensamentos e emoções pelos próprios encontra-se detrimentada, surgindo as personagens quase meramente enquanto observadoras da modernização de uma pequena cidade rural, quase alienadas da sua própria experiência, quase desprovidas de profundidade emocional. Quase. De qualquer forma, um livro muito bonito com uma escrita muito bonita, definitivamente merecedor de uma releitura sem interrupções.

[Matt Miles · Rating 5 out of 5]

If this is a “bad” Clarice Lispector book, I can’t even imagine what the “better” ones must be like. By presenting a character who seems to lack perception, depth, and complexity, Lispector sketches a beautiful and profound meditation on perception, reality, change, community, the significance of objects, and what it means to see/be seen. This novel is at least as worthy as her collection of short stories of being considered a masterpiece.

[fiordiligi · Rating 4 out of 5]

il dipinto di una vita tratteggiato con le sole parole da scene luminosissime e incredibilmente buie, felicità accecante e disperazione più profonda. Forse il mio preferito di Lispector <3

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

I struggled getting through the prose. It felt poetic and beautiful but the meanings seemed out of my reach. That grasping for understanding left my experience with the book wanting.

[Daniela M · Rating 5 out of 5]

Phenomenal. Its sense of spatiality and its constructedness through the feminine is sensational.

[Christopher Murtagh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reads like bats flapping in her brain.

Once more it's captivating to me. Most of it is hard to understand, as if she can't write a sentence properly, as if she is struggling to express all sorts of odd internal philosophies about how the world may work. Something draws me along.

The story is about a girl with a few suitors. She lives in a town becoming a city. At first invaded by horses, bringing commerce. Horses statues or horses in her dreams, or horses like she is a horse somehow. She doesn't quite like the men for various reasons. The dialogue is dialogue written by a person who has never spoken to anyone. The girl is unknowable and plain and obvious. Is what it is. Like the horse. She doesn't like the changes as the town besieged becomes the city. As she besieged becomes a woman. Forever quiet.

Thinking the city belongs to the objects. She belongs to the objects of the city. The people of the city remake, create the objects as the city sees itself. This kind of is like those old philosophical ideas about subjects and objects, and everything being remade in the mind. I can't quite grasp if she is trying to express that idea but in an odd way or something similar to it of her own making.

The story moves on, she marries, the city continues to change.

It is the most dreamlike of her books. Not yet completely metaphysical, focused on the internal life of this simple woman. It felt to me like days when you have nothing to do but wait. The life of someone unemployed or an old fashioned housewife. Relishing the simple knowledge of her knicknacks, her city, her horses, her man.

At the end there is a review from a reviewer who didn't get it. Thought she was lost too much in the language, in the phrase. I think a similar thing. She is obtuse. Difficult. Perhaps she just can't write something like everyone else, because why would you? But is this just hiding in the image, in the art without the meaning? It is like looking at the paintings of those great early to mid twentieth century painters, who had to do things a little differently, to make their art great. She responds to his review reassuring that she did honestly try to express things, a thin thread through all the actions, every phrase purposeful for Clarice. Really, she seems aware of how it is to read Clarice Lispector and not be Clarice Lispector. Still she makes it like this. What else could she do?

Something draws me along even though...