The Apple in the Dark

by Clarice Lispector, Gregory Rabassa (Translator)

Martin is convinced that he has murdered his wife. In a delirium of guilt and grief, he wanders through a forest until he comes across an isolated farm run by Vitoria - an indomitable spinster who is 'afraid to live', and her flighty, obsessive cousin Ermelinda, who is terrified of death. As Martin works on Vitoria's land he is both haunted and comforted by memories of his wife and son. In the intense heat of the Brazilian summer, drought threatens both the farm and its inhabitants, and these three very different but equally domineering characters provoke each other into a realisation of their individual psychological isolation.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, Novels, Brazil, Latin American Literature, Literary Fiction, Literature

361 pages, Paperback

First published July 24, 1961

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

[Léa · Rating 5 out of 5]

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️.75
Clarice Lispector is in such a league of her own when it comes to literature!!!

The Apple in the Dark feels slightly separated than her other novels I have read (but not from those I have next in chronological order). she experiments with so much beauty and perfectly encapsulates the human spirit, even when it torments and even when it's ugly. it talks of psychological isolation, when and how you can trust your own mind and how both guilt and desire haunt us, sometimes hand in hand.

would endlessly recommend her novels forever! (this one particularly to those who adore unreliable narration, discussions on morality AND mortality and want to examine every single quote)

[Luís · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book can only challenge. It is about the experience of a man whose all references will collapse brutally. Fleeing a probable justice, he will leave through nature, his thoughts slowly destructuring. Finally, he will arrive at a farm where he will meet other human beings. He will be collected there and will work there.
Is a man without an ego or an almost destroyed ego still a man? Can he communicate with others? Can his sensitive and beautiful communication with non-human nature be enough for him? A thousand questions arise from reading this book, a literary UFO. Its reading is demanding. It navigates on sight between meditation, mystical experience, madness, contemplation, and incomprehension; doubt reigns supreme.
At the end of the book, a final question arises. Is Martin's story over?
What will happen to Martin after he starts working at the farm?

[Katia N · Rating 4 out of 5]

In his essay, The Task of the Translator, Walter Benjamin has created the following beautiful image for the process:

“Unlike a work of literature, translation does not find itself in the centre of the language forest but on the outside facing the wooded ridge; it calls into it without entering, aiming at that single spot where the echo is able to give, in its own language, the reverberation of the work in the alien one.”

A similar image has appeared in my imagination while I was reading “The Apple in the Dark”. Very likely, it was inspired by Benjamin. It would also apply to some other works by Lispector I’ve read before, especially Passion According To G.h., The by Clarice Lispector. I imagined Clarice walking along this tall and almost impenetrable fence trying to catch a tiny movement of air across, a small beam of light or an echo from the other side. Then she would try to render this well hidden reality into a voice and a language and would try to pass her knowledge further, even if the words would not tell us much, just hint on the realm that might be out there. Long and lonely, tireless and often fruitless walk along the endless fence, often in the dark.

Therefore, I was almost startled when I came across this extract from her diary “Going backwards”:

“Reality is the raw material, language is the means by which I look for it—and do not find it. But it is by seeking and not finding that the things I did not know but instantly recognize are born. Language is my human effort. My fate is to search and my fate is to return empty-handed. But—I return with the unutterable.”

Occasionally her work makes me feel exactly that: “to recognise” the things without knowing them. When it does that, it is a very special rare feeling. Not dissimilarly, a character in this novel is trying to contemplate a shape of an apple on a tree in the total darkness.

I understood she considered this novel as her best and re-wrote it eleven times. It is less hermetic than some of her later novels. It is an allegory of a sorts and contains a story of a man who has committed “a crime” and escaped from his usual surroundings. He ended up on a ranch with two eccentric women and their servants where he experienced a sort of re-awakening. But the matter is not what happens to him; rather it is how. How he learns to see and contemplate things a new, to understand what it means to be free and how to create.

Like the author, he also grapples with the limits of expressing his “truth” in words. And long and desperate attempts, he ends up writing just one word: “That.” But instead of sheer frustration he experiences “a shiver of creation”:

“The still-wet phrase had the grace of a truth...he thought the phrase was perfect because of the resistance it was offering him: “beyond that, I cannot go!”, so that it seemed to him that the phrase had touched the very depths, he was groping its resistance with ecstasy. ...And then Martim grew contented as an artist: the word “that” contained within it everything he hadn’t managed to say!”

This situation has reminded me Borges’s famous story Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote where Menard has recreated "Don Quixote" novel that is line-for-line identical to the original. But the meaning of this recreation would depend on the context and also on the intention of Menard. The situation with Martim is more simple, but more subtle also. As in just one very simple phrase he condensed everything he could not utter otherwise. While whoever reading this novel, would very likely assign her unique meaning into this single phrase, so short but so vacuous.

However, Martim’s search for freedom is more complicated than his linguistic and expressive battles. Like Raskolnikov and many other characters after him, Martim seemed to believe that his crime would manage to set him free, presumably, from his old self. However his lesson seem to be a different one: “with pain and with fear he seemed to admit that his unknown nature was more powerful than his freedom.”

I cannot claim i understood Martim’s predicament fully, not on the first reading and not considering everything i’ve written above. Is his human nature in contradiction with his ability to be free? Is it the question of his (or human) inability to know himself? However, another meeting with Clarice’s aura was immensely fruitful. I also enjoyed another characters in this story, including the little girl, a daughter of the servant and both women of the ranch. They also were in the process of probing their “unknown” nature.

PS:

Coming back to the “task of translator”, Benjamin Moser in this case, I was not totally convinced by his choice. I understood he went for preserving Lispector’s syntax and word choices as much as he could. And i think it was a wise decision. But i wish he would sometimes deviate from his method a little. Something that sounds very musical in Portuguese occasionally comes across a bit awkward and often dry in English.

For example, this is just the beginning:

The original: Esta história começa numa noite de março tão escura quanto é a noite enquanto se dorme. O modo como, tranquilo, o tempo decorria era a lua altíssima passando pelo céu. Até que mais profundamente tarde também a lua desapareceu.

Moser’s translation: This story begins on a March night as dark as night gets while you sleep. The way that, peaceful, time was passing was the extremely high moon passing through the sky. Until much deeply later the moon disappeared too.

This double “passing-passing” is not in the original and “deeply later” (profundamente tarde) is, well, sounds little different in English.

The google-translation for the same passage: This story begins on a March night as dark as the night when you sleep. The way time passed, peacefully, was the very high moon passing through the sky. Until later, the moon also disappeared.

And as much as I do not like machines for such tasks, i cannot help, but find myself in team google for this particular passage. It is extremely difficult to balance the fidelity with creativity in translating such a creative author. But i struggled to reconcile myself with the certain aspects of this particular translation job. However, it has been praised by many critics and the readers. So it might have been my personal preferences.


PS2
A very good review of this novel:
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/ot...

[emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘The dogs were growling indecisively, holding back their impatience and the joy of a fight. The whole evening, moreover, was of great tranquil joy. A hobbling hound painfully joined the others, with the distressed expectancy of a cripple. Everything was soft and stimulatingly dangerous, deep down nobody seemed to care what was happening, and everyone was simply enjoying the same opportunity. Things were spinning around a bit, happy at the wrong time.’

Like most of Clarice’s (anglo-reading) ‘fans’, I, too, already have a copy of the previous translation but never bothered with it (to be fair, the cover wasn’t great anyway, and the translation didn’t quite entice). Like readers who have read Moser’s translation, I do very much prefer it to the last one. Personally, it’s a little weirder because Moser was so committed to translating the text so ‘closely’ to the original/Portuguese. How shall I put it? If like me, you too are familiar with Spanish but not in a way that I would be able to converse in the language trouble-free or even read full novels, then you’ll very quickly understand what I mean when you read Moser’s translation. To clarify, I am very unfamiliar with the Portuguese language. But even so, I was able to recognise/see (or at least think) that Moser deliberately used English words that have Latin-roots, or at least Latin-bent. I’m pretty sure he also tried to stick with the strange, ‘unique’, Clarice-ean style and structure, but without risking mad incoherence. This is so impressive (to me), and I think it’s so brilliant.

‘His contact with the cows was a painstaking effort. The light in the stable was different from the light outside to the point that a vague threshold was established in the doorway. Where the man stopped. Used to numbers, he cringed at disorder. That’s because inside was an atmosphere of intestines and a difficult dream full of flies. And only God feels no disgust. At the threshold, then, he stopped unwilling.’

While I can’t say I agree with every single thing that Cixous (in Reading With Clarice Lispector) wrote about Clarice (in general), and Clarice’s book, ‘Apple in the Dark’, it’s the best I’ve ever read (of a reader/anyone trying to ‘understand’ and/or appreciate Clarice (who may really be my favourite writer of all-time; I keep re-stating this, I know, yet am unwilling to rest in/with ‘certainty’) and her writing). The text complements (the experience of my reading of) Clarice’s work. I will refer to Clarice Lispector as Clarice in this review because (I am just in that sort of mood) that’s how Cixous had done in her essays/book.

‘The Apple in the Dark is a most deceptive book. It is presented like a novel, but it is the opposite. It is a mystical path of such density that it becomes perhaps even more unreadable than The Passion (of G.H.). The book is double—Clarice writes the story that would resemble someone who went away and did not come back. But she is someone who went away and did come back. The enterprise is to come back to write almost the nonreturn. She tries to write what is not written, to tell what is not told, to make the story about what has no story.’

‘Perhaps we wait for an interpellation—And a word arrives like a bird plummeting in the text. It alights with quotation marks like a little bird. The word is detached, liberated from its familial obligations through its appearance. It appears only as a word. It is a word that gives pleasure. I have taken it to be a signifier, a verbal thing to be used. Clarice opens the curtains of language, and, suddenly, a signifier that she likes appears. She works on a signifier freed from the family of language.’

‘One does not eat the apple because it is a question of being eaten. In this whole passage, everything is about being absorbed or not; of how to let oneself be absorbed without being destroyed by the other. A question of incorporation is being played out—about how to give oneself to, or how to give oneself to be understood, or to give oneself not to understand the other, how to risk oneself to the other human. There is a moment when Clarice says that it is not loving that is difficult, it is being loved—it is the story of the apple.’

Clarice’s cronicas (from Too Much of Life) was written a little after ‘Apple In The Dark’ was published, and about a couple years before ‘The Passion According to G.H.’ was published. Judging from the excerpts below (and the entire collection in mind), written by Clarice while she was alone in a hotel room on Christmas which is rather timely considering I/we are reading this again exactly sixty-one years later (and her thoughts and sentiments don’t even feel dated; or at least a lot of it resonated with me). Having re-read it again reminds me of why I ‘felt’ a strange familiarity in the text of ‘Apple in the Dark’. Her ‘thoughts’ below pose almost like a bridge between the two works. I know that in the blurb (whoever had written it had stated that) — Clarice called TAITD her ‘best’, but that’s an extremely ‘premature’ supposition (misleading as fuck, I’d say) since she made that statement before writing her later novels/work. Personally, for me, ‘The Passion According to GH’ is (so easily) the ‘better’ book (or at least the one I like better; if anything, it is structurally superior in comparison).

Dec 1962

‘(MEMORY OF A DIFFICULT SUMMER) But within that great absolute waiting, which was the only possible way of being, I called for a truce. That summer night in August was made of the finest fabric of waiting, forever unbreakable. I wanted the night to begin at last to twitch slightly, to begin to die, so that I too could sleep—wrapping my grain of insomnia, my allotted diamond, in a thousand layers of bandages like a mummy. I was standing on the corner and knew nothing would ever die. This is an eternal world. And I knew that I’m the one who must die—My deaths are not brought on by sadness—they are one of the ways in which the world inhales and exhales, the succession of lives is the breath of infinite waiting, and I myself, who am also the world, need the rhythm of those deaths—Blood that is so black in the black dust of my sandals, and my head encircled by mosquitoes as if it were a fruit. Where could I seek refuge and rid myself of the pulsating summer night that had shackled me to its vastness?—I needed to be the fruit that rots and falls. I needed the abyss. Then I saw, standing before me, the Cathedral of Berne. But the cathedral was also hot and wide-awake. Full of wasps.’

‘Depersonalisation is the stripping away of all that is pointlessly individual—the loss of everything you can lose and yet still be. Little by little peeling off yourself, so carefully that you feel no pain, peeling away yourself, like someone freeing himself from his own skin, his own characteristics. Everything that characterises me is merely the way in which I am most easily visible to others and how I become superficially recognizable to myself. Just as there is a moment when M. sees that the cow is the cow of all cows, so he wants to find in himself the man of all men. Depersonalization as the great objectification of one’s self. The greatest externalisation you can achieve. Whoever reaches himself through depersonalisation will recognise the other under any disguise: the first step in relation to the other is to find within yourself the man of all men. Every woman is the woman of all women, every man is the man of all men, and each of them could present himself as a man wherever he sees fit. But only in a state of immanence, because only some people reach that point of recognizing themselves in us. And by the mere presence of their existence, they reveal ours—.’

‘—Not everyone succeeds in failing because it’s such hard work; you need first to climb laboriously until at last you reach the height from which you can fall—I can only achieve the depersonalization of voicelessness if I have first constructed an entire voice. It is precisely through losing your voice that you can for the first time hear your own voicelessness and that of others, and accept it as a possible language—Language is my human effort. My fate is to search and my fate is to return empty-handed. But—I return with the unutterable. The unutterable can only be given to me through the failure of my language. Only when the word fails do I obtain what my language could not.’

‘Insistence is the effort we have to make, giving up is the prize. It is only reached when we have experienced the power of the voice and, despite having tasted power, prefer to give it up. Giving up has to be a choice. Giving up is the most sacred choice we make in life. Giving up is the human moment itself. And that alone is the glory of my condition. Giving up is a revelation. I give up, and I will have been a human person—it is only at the lowest point of my condition that it becomes my destiny. Existing requires of me the great sacrifice of not being strong enough; I give up, and here in my weak hand fits the entire world. I give up, and from that springs the only happiness available to my human poverty: human happiness. I know and I tremble—living leaves me so overwhelmed, living leaves me unable to sleep. I reach the point of being capable of falling, I choose, I tremble and I give up, and in finally submitting to my fall, unpersoned, with no voice of my own, without myself—everything that I do not have is mine. I give up and the less I am the more I live, the more I lose my name the more I am called, my secret mission is my condition, I give up and the more I remain ignorant of the password the more I fulfil my secret, the less I know the more the sweetness of the abyss becomes my fate. And then I can adore.’ — from ‘Too Much Of Life’

To top that all off and conclude : a letter written by Clarice (in/from Correspondance: Édition intégrale) about her ‘separation’ from her husband who was a diplomat (‘Maury’) is rather interesting (to me) especially because knowing that at the start of ‘The Apple In The Dark’, the protagonist (who Clarice had claimed to be the one she identifies with the most — ‘I am Martim’) basically ran away from his ‘family’ (which judging from the lack of sentimentality, could just even be the ‘society’ he’s stuck with in general). Not because there was an ‘issue’, or for any quickly predictable reasons. The ‘crime’ that the protagonist allegedly committed is the least interesting bit of the novel (but I don’t think it’s meant to be interesting; I didn’t experience the displeasure of its anticlimax because I had ‘suspected’ from the start that that Clarice had just used ‘it’ as an ‘excuse’ or tool to drive the narrative/plot to the direction she had wanted it to go towards). By doing this, the crime is rendered quite meaningless. In short it’s an existentialist piece of writing/work that is disguised as a romance/mystery and/or crime novel. One could even argue that it is a satire of those genres/novels.

‘Why do you take so many tranquillisers?

— Ah, she said with simplicity, it’s like this: imagine a person is screaming and then another person puts a pillow in the other person’s mouth so as not to hear the scream. So when I take tranquillisers, I don’t hear my scream, I know I’m screaming but I don’t hear it, that’s how it is, she said.’

‘‘Here’s the water — and I no longer need to drink it. Here’s the sun — and I no longer need it. Here’s the man — and I don’t want him. Her body had lost its meaning. And she, who had concentrated herself wholly in anticipation of the day—.’’

‘Their eyes met and nothing was transmitted or said. Or maybe a god would have been needed in order to understand what they said. They might have said: we are in the nothing and touching upon our silence. Since for a fraction of a second they had looked at each other in the whites of their eyes.’

To echo what other readers (who have read Clarice’s other work before getting into this) have said, this is far from the ideal book to start (if you’re unfamiliar with Clarice’s writing). Ideally/best to read a handful of her other stuff before this, but I do think ‘Passion According To GH’ and ‘A Breath of Life’ are essential primers (but again, not the best starting point; I think her short stories might be the best way to go about it).

‘It was with a superhuman effort that Martim tried to conquer every day the vanity of belonging to a field so great that it was growing without meaning; it was with austerity that he conquered the taste he had for hollow harmony. With effort he was surpassing himself, forcing himself—against the current that was dragging him along—not to betray his crime. As if, with his contentment, he were stabbing his own rebellion. So he’d force himself harshly not to forget his commitment. And again he would place himself inside in a spiritual state of work: a kind of trance in which he’d learned to fall when he needed to.’

‘—it had been a blessing to have erred, because, if he’d done things right—man would only reach a superficial beauty, like the beauty of a verse. Which, after all, isn’t transmitted through the blood—and then look at his hands and see that there wasn’t even blood on his hands but only red ink, and then say: “I am nothing.”’

[Michael sinkofcabbages · Rating 5 out of 5]

By far the best existential novel ever written. Not even any close seconds. I know, I know!! Sartre, Camus, etc, etc..
Trust me ive read and studied all the classics(?) of the genre (both fiction and philosophy). I believe Lispector to be the existentialist par-excellance. I think too many people get interested in a movement and read all the things recommended by bibliographies, friends, etc.
They dont really explore in depth. How else can you explain that writers like Lispector, Hedeyat and Bassani never get mentioned.
Trust me read "The Apple in the Dark". Read anything by Lispector and you will understand that she is one of the truely existential fiction writers.

[Ana · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ler este livro não foi tarefa fácil, mas agora que finalmente cheguei ao fim, acho que, ainda assim, valeu a pena o esforço.

Clarice Lispector tem uma forma única de escrever, que é diferente de tudo o que li até agora. É gráfica e ao mesmo tempo onírica (parece um contra-senso, eu sei, mas é mesmo assim!). É uma escrita estranha, por vezes incompreensível, mas outras vezes muito bonita.

Houve passagens, onde me perdi nos diálogos interiores do Martim, outras onde exasperei por não conseguir entender o sentido das frases, ou as reações dos personagens, muitas vezes senti-me como se estivesse a ver no papel a transcrição dos pensamentos de um paciente de um hospital psiquiátrico. Mas logo em seguida, aparecia alguma coisa que acabava por redimir o que até aí me tinha desagradado, e me animava a continuar.

Um exemplo do que me confundiu / exasperou:

“Na noite do bosque o enorme cansaço fazia o homem perder a lucidez, e instintivamente seu pensamento cego queria buscar a fonte mais remota. Adivinhava que nessa fonte escura tudo seria possível porque nela a lei era tão primária e vasta que dentro dela caberia também a grande confusão de um homem. Só que, antes de ser admitido na primeira lei, um homem teria que perder humildemente o próprio nome. Essa era a condição. Mas um náufrago tinha que escolher entre perder a pesada riqueza ou afundar com ela no mar. Para ser admitido na fonte vasta, aquele homem sabia que tinha de acreditar apenas em claridade e em escuridão. Esta era a condição – e depois desse passo ele faria parte vencida daquilo que ele desconhecia e amava.”

anh?!

Mas depois, lá está, também havia passagens muito bonitas:

“Sem um olhar para trás, guiado por uma escorregadia destreza de movimentos, começou a descer pela sacada apoiando pés inesperadamente flexíveis na saliência dos tijolos. (...)
Num pulo macio, que fez o jardim asfixiar-se em suspiro retido, ele se achou em pleno centro de um canteiro – que se arrepiou todo e depois se fechou. Com o corpo advertido o homem esperou que a mensagem de seu pulo fosse transmitida de secreto em secreto eco até se transformar em longínquo silêncio; seu baque terminou se espraiando nas encostas de alguma montanha. Ninguém ensinara ao homem essa conivência com o que se passa de noite, mas um corpo sabe.
Ele esperou um pouco mais. Até que nada aconteceu. Só então tateou com minúcia os óculos no bolso: estavam inteiros. Suspirou com cuidado e finalmente olhou em torno. A noite era de uma grande e escura delicadeza.”

Hoje, senti um certo alívio por ter, finalmente, chegado ao fim, mas também me senti bem por não ter cedido à tentação de desistir a meio. E quem sabe, daqui a uns meses, talvez volte a pegar noutro livro de Lispector. Mas primeiro, tenho que me refazer desta experiência com umas leituras mais prosaicas...

[Ana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Uma experiência de leitura estonteante!

Foi o primeiro livro que li de Clarice Lispector. Existem alguns autores de que me arrependo ter demorado a descobrir, contudo neste caso penso que fiz bem em esperar. Sinto que teria corrido o risco de ler esta autora antes de estar preparada para a "receber". Não digo entender ou compreender, pois não sei se me será possível algum dia entender esmiuçadamente ou integralmente esta obra. Nem sei se o quereria. Mas o meu entendimento, o sentido que resulta daquilo que me foi possível assimilar e integrar em mim enquanto leitora, foi renovador e apaixonante.

Sobre a história. Um homem foge desesperadamente de um crime. Foge sem qualquer rumo ou plano, até que atinge uma situação totalmente limite. É o momento que marca o início da sua (re)construção enquanto indivíduo. É este processo que a autora nos conta de forma admirável.

Há tanto neste livro que me fez adorá-lo. O singular uso da palavra e a maravilhosa escrita diferenciadora por si mesma, o enredo original e uma enorme riqueza e complexidade dos personagens, a forma como me "prendeu" pelo suspense e antecipação, tudo aquilo que este livro me levou a pensar e a sentir, enfim... Mas o que para mim mais particularizou esta história, foi a forma como a autora parece percepcionar o mundo.

Nesta sequência de como o nosso fugitivo volta gradualmente a "ser", num processo de construção multifactorial, cada breve momento é dissecado com um pormenor e uma intensidade únicos, como se houvesse uma hiperactividade e ampliação dos nossos órgãos sensoriais (e por arrasto também dos cognitivos para o necessário processamento). Para mim enquanto leitora este foi o verdadeiro desafio, conseguir abandonar os pré conceitos e deixar-me apresentar a este "outro mundo" onde os limites físicos umas vezes se extremam e outras se esbatem ou fundem, onde raramente são claras as linhas que separam o eu do outro, o interno do externo , o material do imaterial e outros tantos conceitos que nos foram inculcados enquanto dicotómicos e autoexclusivos pela tradição ocidental.

E para além do "pensar" tratou-se também de um livro que senti também de variadas formas, tanto cru e forte, de emoções brutas quase (ou mesmo) de animalidade, até ao sentimento mais subtil, delicado e frágil. Uma vez mais sem dicotomias mas num contínuo partilhado e tantas vezes amálgamo.

É bem difícil falar sobre este livro... Mas em suma: uma autora tão fascinante quanto complexa e um texto tão recompensador quanto desafiante, que...adorei.

[makayla · Rating 5 out of 5]

Martim in 3 days you will wake up with a suspicious cough

[Ausma · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading Clarice = being suspended in a heavenly ethereal realm where every word becomes a vow to change your life. I feel my soul being remade when I read Clarice!!! The sheer density of her writing is unreal — I read 5 pages; gasp, overwhelmed by the miracles she makes of language, the way she creates entire religions in her sentences; and put down the book. I will worship at the church of Clarice for all time

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

The plot outline of The Apple in the Dark is simple: A man commits a crime, goes into hiding in a remote, rural area, and takes a job as a menial laborer on a farm overseen by two women until things cool off. Trios lend themselves to conflict: in this case, the situation sparks underlying tensions of sex, dominance, and violence. Yet, what in other hands might make for the premise behind a noir novel, Clarice Lispector uses to explore metaphysical questions of being, of existence expressed in a coiling language in which concrete nouns torque into abstract conceptions pushing sense to the limits of coherence, much in the manner of, say, the Quentin section of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury or much of Light in August.

No one in life talks as Lispector’s characters do—they are ciphers she imbues with life to work out her own philosophical interests. Lispector the creator comes across as a person whose most satisfying experiences occur in her head, where she seems to have spent most of her time. Lispector’s characters, too, live in their heads, often trapped in thoughts they would rather not have yet are compelled to explore.

In The Apple in the Dark, Martim is a man on the run—from what isn’t at first clear. We know he’s committed a crime of passion, but neither the specific nature of the crime nor its result are stated. He is a man for whom a spontaneous act of rage initiates his freedom from cultural constraints: He no longer needs to act “intelligent,” has no need of speech, no need to fit in. Starting from zero, his re-birth will be based on actions taken, not in useless thoughts and conformity.

"And what was keeping him going was the extraordinary impersonality that he’d reached, like a rat whose only individuality is whatever he inherited from other rats. That impersonality, the man kept it up by a slight repression of himself as if he knew that, as soon as he became himself, he would collapse capsized onto the ground. . .

"His knowledge was slight, but his hands had earned a wisdom. 'A man is slow and takes a long time to understand his hands,' he thought looking at them. His thoughts were almost voluntarily enigmatic. . . By not knowing, there was in the man a joy without a smile just as the plant fulfills itself, thick."

Apple acts as Lispector’s critique of both existentialism and what is now called toxic masculinity.

The farm that Martim comes across is run by a woman named Vitória who has taken in her cousin, Ermelinda, who has used, for the past three years she’s been living on the farm, her status as a former invalid to avoid work. The interior lives of Vitória and Ermelinda churn merely from Martim’s presence. Vitória is driven to a kind of rage because Martim accepts without grudge or argument her constant nagging to take up one set of repairs before another is finished. Those farming projects he does finish are “perfect” (her word), and she becomes angrier that he leaves her nothing to complain about. Her farm is becoming, in her word, “beautified.” Ermelinda falls in love with Martim for his stoicism, although her notions of love are expressed in a kind of twisted Faulknerian logic:

"she was trying to recover in the field that minute in which she had daringly accepted loving the man: she was trying to recover the minute in order to destroy it. But, stunned, she might have known that the need to destroy love was also love itself because love is also a struggle against love, and if she realized it that’s because a person knows."

The Apple in the Dark represents Lispector at the height of her creative powers. It is with this intellectual and artistic triumph that New Directions ends its multi-year project to translate all Lispector’s works into English. Barry Moser should be commended for his success in conveying the richness of Lispector’s thought and prose.

For more of my reviews, please see https://www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/...

[Mandel]

The first time I read this novel, it was in Gregory Rabassa's translation, and as much as I've enjoyed Rabassa's translations of Marquez and Cortázar, my sense is that he dropped the ball with Lispector. Of course, I don't read Portuguese, so my assessment here is very indirect. However, what made me fall in love with Lispector was reading the recent translations of Lispector's corpus from New Directions, done or overseen by Benjamin Moser. It was these that drew me to read everything Lispector published under her own name (excepting her correspondence, the vast bulk of which which has yet to be translated). However, the one book that fell flat for me was precisely the one that until now hadn't been released by New Directions: The Apple in the Dark (Texas Pan American Series), hitherto only available in Rabassa's translation.

Until now. For me, Moser's new translation transforms this book from one that I initially found tedious into one that I find just as riveting as everything else by Lispector.

Martim, a man who has committed a crime that isn't revealed until the end of the book, is on the run from the law. At the opening of the novel, he's holed up in some remote hotel, but suspects that its proprietors are on to him, so he climbs out the window and escapes on foot into a dark, hostile wilderness. Eventually, he comes upon a farm inhabited by three women, a little girl, and a hired hand. Vitoria, the owner of the farm, suspects he's on the run, but hires him to work there nevertheless, and Martim awaits the hour in which his crime will finally catch up with him.

However, as with most of Lispector's novels, the bare-bones plot is only a tiny part of what this novel is doing. The Apple in the Dark is at its heart an incredibly nuanced study of the intricacies and flows of mood. A mood is, as Heidegger understood, a way of understanding and being attuned the world as a whole. Philosophers sometimes spend an entire career articulating a single mood into a systematic metaphysics. For most of us, though, moods are profoundly inarticulate. Yet, that doesn't make them any less comprehensive visions of everything. In this novel, Lispector gives literary expression to this dimension of human life - the way that the fluctuations of mood from one moment to the next constitute kaleidoscopic shifts in the characters' ways of envisioning themselves and the entire world they inhabit.

The viewpoint constantly shifts between Martim, Vitoria, and Ermelinda (Vitoria's cousin, a young widow). For most of the novel, they are concatenated solipsisms, deeply isolated from each other because their attunements to things fail to resonate with one another. As Martim struggles with the collapse of self that has resulted from burning his life to the ground through his crime, Ermelinda flails in visions of love for him, and Vitoria oscillates between a desire to dominate him and a hatred for his willingness to be dominated. Very little happens plot-wise. Instead, the text is propelled by its startling, beautiful evocations of how the characters move through the ebbs and flows of their moods, as if, in an act of poetic generosity, Lispector is articulating on their behalf what they themselves are incapable of expressing in their radical inarticulacy.

As with so many other texts by Lispector, despite the fact that this is a novel, the prose here is as dense and rich as some of the best poetry. For that reason, I think the best approach is to read it as a very long prose poem - slowly, carefully, savoring and reflecting as much as possible on each sentence, each turn of phrase. I don't know if Lispector had these works in mind, but thematically, the most illuminating comparisons might be Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment or Camus' The Stranger. No doubt, these comparisons are the source of the oft-repeated idea that this is an existentialist novel. However, this couldn't be further from the truth, it seems to me. Lispector does indeed address the significance of crime and guilt for one's self-understanding here. However, unlike Camus, her primary concern in dealing with this theme is the struggle, not for freedom, but rather for a sense of embeddedness in the world. Lispector is, if anything, a Spinozist, not an existentialist.

[Joshua Burns · Rating 5 out of 5]

Apple in the Dark

This book really made me want to move out on a farm. The amount of interiority that these characters display is truly staggering, hanging up the plot for pages on end. Comparing this to any other existential novel, or even lumping it under the existential umbrella, unnerves me. Not only does this book carry with it much more developed characters than either The Stranger’s or Nausea’s but we are also not cramped up in some stuffy French man’s head for the entirety of the piece. We spread through our unnamed protagonist’s point of view into the owner of the farm and her disjointed sister, all in pursuit of peace, quiet, and love, which I do not remember in the previously mentioned books.

At this point, in the review, I would like to move out completely from under any references because this book in its interior dialogues at the beginning refuses to name or to explain. In fact, what one could call interior is not wholly true, since the third person perspective merely strays at any one point into their thoughts. One could call the pace meandering even intestinal in its probing of the darkness of thought and that would only be to complement the piece.

Lispector’s other books, say Hour of the Star or The Passion According to G.H., were either too intrusive or paper thin in the first place or too interior and nonchalant in the second. This is not to say that either do not have their graces, but Apple in the Dark moves at an amble through wide rolling hills, the tangle, and the knot of cows lolling in the barn. Its main character sits up late at night, contemplating the start of a letter and goes to no end while the farm owner’s sister lies in bed quietly parsing the molecules of love. I find this to be an unintrusive and peaceful trek through the k/not of love and work. Need I sing the praises of the main character working the well or the thrum of heat on the farm owner’s sister as she contemplates him? Check it out.

[Joana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Se para Platão o Homem adquire o mal através dos olhos, em Clarice os olhos permitem-nos buscar a verdade. Se a luz nos ilumina a vista e, por isso, nos permite procurar quem somos; a escuridão é o inferno na terra, o salto que se parte numa ladeira e que nos interrompe a marcha. Através de Martim, irrompemos numa história tematicamente e psicologicamente densa, o que não é novidade para quem conhece a escrita da autora.

Somos convidados a entrar neste mundo onde o espírito, o corpo, a natureza, o amor, o medo, a cólera converge. Somos maravilhados pela densidade narrativa de Clarice que nos mostra o poder espiritual da literatura. Torcemos, sofremos, gritamos e vivemos com Martim. Acompanhamos as suas dúvidas, as suas metamorfoses, as suas sensações, os seus receios e, reflectimos sobre "o que é ser humano". Estará Clarice a dizer-nos que ser humano é não pertencermos a lado algum e, só e apenas a nós mesmos?

"Corajosamente fizera o que todo o homem tinha que fazer uma vez na sua vida: destruí-la.
Para reconstruí-la em seus próprios termos.
(...)
Se não conseguisse reconstruí-la? Pois olhou o vazio perfeito da claridade, e occorreu-lhe a possibilidade estranha de jamais conseguir reconstruir. Mas se não conseguisse, não importava sequer. Ele tivera a coragem de jogar profundamente. Um homem um dia tinha que arriscar tudo. Sim, ele fizera isso."

A Maçã No Escuro reúne tudo aquilo que eu mais aprecio na escritora: o seu poder reflexivo, o seu tom deflacionário, a densidade temática, a fragmentação de ideias/imagens e as suas descrições (onde música, natureza, corpo, alma, escuridão, luz, dor, amor ... fazem parte da mesma dimensão).

[Luke · Rating 2 out of 5]

1.5/5

I've a habit of picking up works by women in translation with which I am unfamiliar, as anything that manages to make its way along the much marginalized gender and non-Anglo paths of literature is worth trying out at least once, for these works are not afforded the same level of adulating assumptions of their male Anglo counterparts on the international scale of things, and thus need all the helping hands they can get. Lispector is far from being this sort of worldly unknown, but a similar principle guided me to buy this that I had been thus far unaware of, with the added incentives of previously admired and even beloved works in her repertoire and the magical number four of her bibliography just within sight. Alas, much like Faulkner, Lispector seems to appeal more when she succumbs less to clarity, and all and all, this termed existentialist work read as if someone thought the women in 'The Mandarins' were given too much free reign and/or weren't punished enough for acting on the basis of humanity, not gender. The bloated length of this work in comparison to other Lispector works also didn't help, and by the end of it I was willing to read through the last hundred or so pages in one fell swoop so as to not be subjected to the slow ripping off of the band aid any more. A rather flop of an ending, that.

I don't expect my narrators to be saints. I simply prefer them to not be absolutely pathetic in their society sanctioned self deception to the point that the larger issues of murder and rape are obfuscated by the first/close third person bemoaning their bastardization of a hero's journey as enacted on the backs of others who are less afforded the time for such sadistic solipsistic nonsense. As such, I would rather have the odiousness of The Autumn of the Patriarch compared to many of the 'nice guys' I've run into many a time, as enough of the world has been compromised and set back by such pathetic filth spewed out by those in power that I'll not be normalizing it in the media I design to consume for my own personal entertainment. One could argue that both the man and the women look down upon each other, but only the women get the nasty incidents of misogyny and misogynoir (the writing turns to trash every time the persistently unnamed mulatto women and her child show up), and it is only the man whose implications of gender are as of a wellspring of strength and deity-like levels of creation. Metaphors, then, are the assumptions that spell this narrative's doom, for it's hard to build a story off of piled up iterations of static shadows if the reader knows countless iterations of real figures who are anything but, and thus has no incentive to render themselves as reader more human on the backs of dehumanized figures in the dark. Unlike the tenor that my initial good intentions took, then, this particular work of Lispector's can afford to remain unread.

This was my fourth Lispector, and as I have been doing of late with bibliographies, after reaching that magic number I'l be taking a break and searching out other fellow pastors on the cusp of destabilizing my most read author count. I can imagine myself coming back, but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth when considering how much heartrending brilliance I had encountered previous to this, and how little of it I found here. Unlike my sentiments upon first picking up this work, I don't mind so much that this is less well known on the anglo side of things, as there's enough navel gazing gobbledegook in this world that treats murder as an instance of self expression. I don't mind that so much in video games, but that's mostly because I can shoot holes in the offending trouble specimen, rather than sit in place and be forced to contemplate them for the majority of 300+ pages. Perhaps the same can be said of 'The Stranger', but at least that one dies at the end.

[Hao T · Rating 2 out of 5]

Probably meaningful and interesting, but required 120% of my brainpower to process each sentence.

[Ensaio Sobre o Desassossego · Rating 3 out of 5]

"se em um instante se nasce, e se morre em um instante, um instante é bastante para a vida inteira." 💭

Nunca sei como começar a falar sobre um livro de Clarice. Talvez possa começar por afirmar que foi o terceiro livro que li da autora (quero ler tudo dela, um livro por ano), mas foi - até agora - o livro que gostei menos.

Quem já leu Clarice, sabe que a autora é especialista em livros "viagem na maionese" (não sei como é que esta categoria ainda não existe de forma oficial). E eu adoro ler este género, mesmo que passe a maior parte do livro a pensar "não estou a perceber nada". Nos livros de Clarice o que importa é o processo, é a jornada da personagem. Não há propriamente um enredo, são só personagens completamente doidivanas.

E o que acontece, então, neste "a maçã no escuro"? Nada de especial. Um homem que comete um crime e decide fugir para um hotel e depois para uma fazenda. É curioso o facto de Clarice ter escolhido um protagonista homem (normalmente, são mulheres), mas mais não digo 😅
É o relato da vidinha de Martim na fazenda, as pessoas que ele encontra, os devaneios que ele tem. Basicamente, é só isto. Mas por se tratar de um livro de Clarice Lispector, claro que não é SÓ isto.

A escrita de Clarice é lindíssima, sublinhei muito este livro, assim como também comentei muitos "o quê???" e "ah??" (arrastem para o lado para ver o que é ler Clarice muito resumidamente 😂). Assim como os outros dois livros de que li da autora, este também acabou bastante sublinhado e é inegável que Clarice tem o dom de impactar o leitor.

E assim como os outros livros que li, também um dia vou querer reler este. Espero que, com a sapiência da idade, e depois de muitas releituras, um dia possa entender (ou descortinar 😉) totalmente um livro de Clarice Lispector

[Hugo Santos]

partia te toda clarice 🙏🙏

[Vanessa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Haveria Martim de romper a escuridão? Sim. Como alguém que funda um rio; como um Adão a povoar o mundo. Seria a maçã – o fruto proibido – um fosso imenso em que se abre o pecado e se espia para fora? Mas o que há do outro lado? Martim cria para si uma natureza própria, livre das regras limitadoras da sociedade. No entanto, descobre (ou redescobre) que o homem está livre para desgraçar a si mesmo. “O homem inventa o homem”. Mas Martim não quer enxergar: a escuridão lhe é reconfortante, conciliatória com o mundo.
Aqui há duas escuridões: a da ignorância, na qual o homem não se questiona, mas vive; e a escuridão enquanto esconder-se do mundo – uma fuga das mais primitivas. Cada vez mais elementar (como a maioria das personagens de Clarice), Martim se perde (a si mesmo e geograficamente) e se aparta de tudo: da linguagem, dos gestos, das expressões. É um desmemoriado de mundo. Talvez as trevas iluminem seu caminho tortuoso.
Neste primoroso romance, publicado em 1961 , Clarice nos dá o que tem: a poesia do olhar. Nós, que queremos tanto enxergar. Ao nomear uma outra realidade, Martim estabelece princípios, ainda que confusos, mas se abstém de toda e qualquer responsabilidade: seja no seu mundo novo, seja no contexto que acaba por abandonar. Um Adão sem raízes, sem culpa.
Vitória e Ermelinda estão em seu encalço porque precisam validar a experiência de viver. Precisam do outro e dizem: estamos sós, como pássaros engaiolados.
Tal qual em Marguerite Duras, há um vazio no mundo ficcional de Clarice. Preenchido, cuidadosamente, com pequenas epifanias, devaneios, fabulações existenciais das mais refinadas – personagens que vivem com bravura, cientes ou não, da discórdia do mundo. E a estrutura narrativa, com suas digressões e ações mínimas, elevam a linguagem à um nível poético sem precedentes.
Mas o crime maior de Martim é tentar perpetrar, na escuridão, uma imagem que não se sustenta, um esboço de memória que se esvanece.

Mais comentários livrescos em: https://chacomproustblog.wordpress.com/

[Gregory Duke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every inhalation while reading this novel scores the lungs like shards of glass, and the resulting scar tissue marks your insides with an unforeseen strength, with a capacity beyond. You toil in the rubble of the consciousness until bits of light peek in between the fallen slats and pylons, and you eventually rise to the occasion. Like a frog acclimating to soon-to-boiling water, except the boiling cleanses rather than eradicates. No synopsis of Lispector's novel can do much justice, because The Apple in the Dark is a work unconcerned with narrative expectation in any standard sense. There's a plot, but it's thin and shrouded in layers of nightmare. There are characters, but their identities are muddied by their incomprehension of themselves. What you get to experience is an experience: the experience of learning to be, to face the absurdity of living, to realize the horrific beauty of unknowing. Lispector's language asserts its own register (I can't even begin to try to describe the tone of much of this book) and interjects sentence constructions I have never seen. I was overly optimistic in thinking I'd read this in a week earlier in November while I was on vacation. The novel is WAY too difficult for that. Yet its difficulty didn't deter me. Rather, it challenged and provoked me enough that The Apple in the Dark became the only book this year/in recent memory to make me take notes as I read it. I think my journal has 20-25 pages of scribblings (a lot of questions and fewer answers).

Unlike most, if not all, existential novels I've read, Lispector's technique engages with life in the least solipsistic manner. The typical existentialist novel has a narrator engage with the world around them, questioning everything, experiencing life ambivalently or with much ennui. That remains here. But this is a novel of deep passion and connection. The trio of main characters are constantly perceiving each other and guessing at what others think in relation to their conceptions of themselves. And the natural world is key. Flora and fauna are essential to Martim's initial project of reforming/recreating himself into a man freed of thought and expectation. The existential debacle is one of interlinking. How is one's identity to be formed and purpose (if there is one) to be found and happiness to be achieved when caught in a web among people, nature, metaphysics, incomprehension, and language (which, in this novel, is really nothing but a series of allusions). How can all those voices and countervoices achieve harmoniousness?

One of the essential books of my year.

[nathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

READING VLOG

in this derridean existential book, i at once thought this was her retelling of Plato's cave. but then the cave became a womb and in her usual fashions of the complications of masculine and feminine, i began to realize the book is a lot more about limitations. now i'm begged to look back at the work i've read to see if she was trying to address limitations or was more interested in the freedoms of the lonely imagination.

this is her most challenging work i've read thus far. i thought 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘊𝘩𝘢𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘭𝘪𝘦𝘳 was a lot, but this one, in its removal of self, hard-resetting it, losing language, and learning to become human again is perhaps the very pit of her work. learning to yearn, again. wanting to dream and hope. but needing so much to understand how to exist in hard reality.

this is definitely something i'll revisit with the new translation in october, but a slog of a book to get through in the long august heat. there's a lot more literal movement in this work outside of the way the mind races.

Lispector herself said this was her favorite of the bunch, and i can see why. she ties in what we love most about her while also trying to incorporate what appears to be a thin plot, but, in Lispector's world, is quite a lot, split up into many different phases and trusts within interaction and place. i found it all to be a bit clunky, but this is perhaps due to Rabassa's translation as it feels too close to literal translation without the buoyancy of interpretation.

[C.S. Ennen · Rating 5 out of 5]

- You are aware that from now on, wherever you go, you'll be stalked by hope?
- Are you ready to accept the heavy weight of joy?
- But, my son! you know that's almost impossible?
- You know at least that hope is the great absurdity, my son?
- You know that you have to be an adult to have hope!!!
"I know, I know, I know!"
- Then go, my son. I command you to suffer hope.


This is the most disturbing, mindboggling, senseless book I have ever read and it was worth every second.

[prashant · Rating 4 out of 5]

her novels are so challenging so much so the prose can become convoluted (since she intentionally disregards grammar and punctuation) but her philosophy and character-work make it worthwhile. clarice we love youuuu

��he was aged as if everything that could be given him were already arriving too late”

“he’d sought to understand more than was allowed and to love more than was possible”

“all i’ve got is hunger. and that unstable way of grasping an apple in the dark — without letting it fall.”

[Tracy Gaughan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A dense and adroit odyssey in fiction. A retelling of the jewish creation myth that probes our dark interiors. Clarice Lispector IS writing. I cannot really tell you what this book is about, all I can say is that it has given me all I've ever needed from a book. Read it.

[wutheringthoughts · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dense, complex, and intimate.

[Sadnan R. Swachho · Rating 4 out of 5]

Her magnum opus I think

[Carlos Valladares · Rating 5 out of 5]

Your move, Camus. (Half of this, I read in the Rabassa translation, the other half in the new Ben Moser translation; the latter is slightly more musical and closer to the jagged rhythm of Clarice, but the first is by no means invalidated: it’s hard, diamondic in its own way. More soon, I’m writing a review for Frieze.)

“He also started to understand women once again. He didn't understand them in a personal way, as if he were the owner of his own name. But he seemed to understand why women are born when a person is a man. And that was a tranquil strong blood that would enter and leave his chest rhythmically. While dealing with the cows, the desire to have women was reborn with calm. He recognized it immediately: it was a kind of solitude. As if his body in itself weren't enough. It was desire, yes, he did remember that. He remembered that woman is more than the friend of a man, woman is the very body of the man. With a slightly pained smile, he then caressed the feminine hide of the cow and looked around: the world was masculine and feminine. This way of seeing gave him a deep physical contentment, the still and contained physical excitement that he had every time he “unveiled." A person has highly spiritual pleasures that nobody suspects, other people's lives always seem empty, but a person has his pleasures.”

“Martim had now started to get entangled in a curious sensation of having grasped some extraordinary thing. He'd gone through the mystery of wanting. As if he'd touched on the pulse of life. He who had always been dazzled by the spontaneous mystery of his body's being body enough in order to want a woman, and his body's being body enough to want food—he now had touched on the source of all that, and of living: he'd wanted…In a general and profound way, he'd wanted.”

“Suffering? He thought with his face irreparably offended facing the blank paper. But how could he not love even the Prohibition? if it had pushed him as far as he could go? if it had pushed him up to that final resistance where... Where the only unreasonable solution was great love. When a man is intimidated only great love occurs to him. Suffering? Only not being able to is how a man would know. A man anyway was measured by his neediness. And touching upon the great lack might be a person's aspiration. Would touching the lack be art? That man was savoring his impotence the way a man recognizes himself. He was frighteningly enjoying what he was. Since for the first time in life he was learning how much he was. Which was aching like the root of a tooth.”

“…because I don't want grace, because I'd rather die without ever having seen than to have seen a single time! because God in his goodness allows, you hear, allows and advises people to be cowardly and to protect themselves, His favorite sons are those who dare but He is severe toward those who dare, and benevolent toward those who don't have the courage to look straight on and He blesses those who abjectly take care not to go too far in rapture and in the search for joy, disappointed He embraces those who don't have the courage. He knows that there are people who can't live with the happiness that's inside them, and so He gives them a surface they can live off of, and gives them a sadness, He knows that there are people who need to fake it, because beauty is arid, why is beauty so arid? and so I said to myself ‘be afraid, Vitória, because being afraid is salvation.’ Because things mustn't be seen straight on, nobody's that strong, only those who are damned have strength. But for us joy has to be like a star smothered in the heart, joy has to be nothing more than a secret, our nature is our great secret, joy ought to be like a radiance that the person never, never ought to let escape. You feel a pang and you don't know where: that's how joy ought to be you shouldn't know why, you should feel like: ‘but what's wrong with me?’ and not know.”

“And then Martim became actually frightened.
—Are you aware, my son, of what you're doing?
—I am, my father.
—Are you aware that, with hope, you'll never again have rest, my son?
—I am, my father.
—Are you aware that, with hope, you'll lose all your other weapons, my son?
—I am, my father.
—And that without cynicism you'll be naked?
—I am, my father.
—Do you know that hope is also not believing, my son?
—I know that, my father.
[…]
—My son. You are aware that from now on, wherever you go, you'll be stalked by hope?
—I am, my father.
—Are you ready to accept the heavy weight of joy?
—I am, my father.
—But, my son! you know that's almost impossible?
—I know, my father.
—You know at least that hope is the great absurdity, my son?
—I know, my father.
—You know that you have to be an adult to have hope!!!—I know, I know, I know!
—Then go, my son. I command you to suffer hope.

But already in the first nostalgia, the final one as if just before never again, Martim cried for help:

—What's that light, papa? he cried already solitary in hope…”

______

‘But now, having removed the layer of words from things, now that he’d lost the language, he was finally standing in the calm profundity of the mystery.’

After encountering the scandalous, miraculous writings of the Brazilian author Clarice Lispector, a new morality becomes visible, one that rejects a surface-level identification with the mirrored self. This new morality, in the dazzling world of Clarice – as her Brazilian disciples refer to her – sets the self at a healthy remove, an odd angle, in order to feel comfortable with the unknown. It’s a realm in which words need not clarify; instead, she takes the reader through a vortex of meanings and contradictions, clashing with each other yet harmonizing upon certain key principles – which, as it turns out in her 1961 novel The Apple in the Dark, are mystery, hope, love.

Until Benjamin Moser’s new translation, Apple has been the most difficult of Clarice’s novels to find in English. Its republication brings a fitting conclusion to New Directions’s project to retranslate all Clarice’s novels for a new English-speaking generation who will now be weaned on her alongside Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, Marcel Proust, Marguerite Duras, Katherine Mansfield and the Brontë sisters, her closest siblings. (Her extraordinary collected newspaper columns and children’s books were published in English last year. Now, all that’s left is her correspondence, which already exists in Portuguese and French editions.)

It’s fitting that Apple came last in the project – it takes a bit more getting used to than Clarice’s other novels. If you’re new to her world, I wouldn’t recommend jumping into it – unless you are into cold showers. One of the later novels – An Apprenticeship (1967) or Agua Viva (1971) or The Hour of the Star (1977) – might be a better first read. Apple will ask a lot of you. It’s a descent into madness – the splintering-away of the real in language – without ever becoming mad itself. One can only think so much, whether on a crowded Metro or a Proustian bedroom!

Plot: a man called Martim has committed a crime and is on the run. A Raymond Chandler yarn, this ain’t. His crime is so immense he has been banished from his ‘normal’ life, banished even from the realm of language. He cannot speak. He sits on a rock and crushes a bird, a majestic, weirdly engaging scene that takes nearly 30 pages to describe. He must find the will to speak again.

What was the crime? We don’t know. Maybe he killed someone he loved. Maybe he abandoned them, or they him. Whatever the crime, he rediscovers what it means to say the word ‘crime’ on a secluded ranch overseen by ‘a strong woman’, Vitória, and her cousin Ermalinda, who is nervous and tetchy and falls into a weird love spell with Martim. But it’s not quite love, it’s something both less and more. (Here, Clarice lays the seeds for the manic situationship at the heart of the all-too-relatable An Apprenticeship.) These two women help this man find his tongue again. More than that, though: the women find themselves, independent of the tethers of conventional speech to which society would otherwise doom them. All three of these swirling lost souls come to realize ‘that we are born to love, and then you don’t understand yourself.’

Sudden shifts of pronouns like that are strewn throughout the novel, and they come refreshed by the new translation. Apple has already been translated into English once before – in 1967, by Gregory Rabassa, the grand doyen of Latin American literature who introduced Julio Cortázar and Gabriel García Márquez to English-speaking audiences. Indeed, it was the first novel of Clarice’s to appear in English. What has been added to the out-of-print Rabassa translation, of which Clarice herself approved?

Let’s compare. First, read the original Portuguese in which the writer describes the awesome force of Vitória, from the beginning of chapter five: ‘Vitória era uma mulher tão poderosa como se um dia tivesse encontrado uma chave. Cuja porta, é verdade, havia anos se perdera. Mas, quando precisava, ela podia se pôr instantaneamente em contato com o velho poder.’

Now, here is how it was first translated by Rabassa: ‘Vitória was such a strong woman that somewhere in the past she must have found a key. The door it opened had been lost many years back, of course. But when she needed to, she could bring back her old power at once.’

Finally, here is the new Moser translation: ‘Vitória was a woman as powerful as if she’d one day found a key. Whose door, it’s true, had been lost years before. But, when she needed to, she could place herself instantly in touch with her former power.’

A cursory glance shows how closely the new translation hews to Clarice’s original syntax and punctuation: that comma after the ‘but’ that adds a necessary rhythmic breath (‘But, when she needed to […]’), those weird sentences of hers which, with a period, start and stop where you’re not ‘supposed’ to: ‘a key. Whose door […]’

Whereas Rabassa elegantly transposes the content of Clarice’s gist to English, easing our understanding, Moser directly transposes the form of her harsh, loopy sentences. To my ear steeped in the other New Directions translations of Clarice’s Portuguese, Moser’s was a smoother read. We need not necessarily prefer one translation over the other. But when we consider an author who wants to look directly at the stuff of life – and, by extension, derange our sense of reality – it’s clear that Moser preserves that volcanic Clarician intensity so central to her Portuguese original. That sudden ‘é verdade.’ The fact that Vitória does not ‘bring back her old power’ (Rabassa) but is rather ‘plac[ing] herself instantly in touch’ with it (Moser).

Apple is Clarice’s longest novel: nearly 400 pages. Compare that to the slim-yet-just-as-packed Agua Viva, an 80-page diamond pressed for seven years. Much of Apple could have been baggy and saggy, but strangely it isn’t. It’s something of a sister-piece to The Passion According to G.H. (1964), except that in Apple, beyond the vague crime, there are no active scenes pushing Martim’s, Vitória’s or Ermalinda’s thoughts forward. Correction: everything pushes them forward, such as the questions why was I cursed to life? How much of myself should I know? Where can I find the words to express the suffering I feel? And if I find those words, will anguish dissipate for the night – for that is all I ask for, I who is so strange to me? Obviously, we get no answers. But the questions feel like they’re being asked in entirely new ways, antiquity and modernity collapsing into each other like failing stars. May we all, after reading The Apple in the Dark, ‘stand in the calm profundity of the mystery.’

[ciel · Rating 5 out of 5]

i worship the floor above which clarice lispector's spirit floats.

PHENOMENAL !!! this is how you merge metaphysics and literature. or express metaphysics? or write literature.

absolutely brilliant. there is nothing quite like clarice's writing - as in, she's the crème de la crème of the greatest 20th century writers & no question, my favourite writer/ thinker/ creator if i had to pick one.

i would say that 'The Apple in the Dark' is best enjoyed after having read some of her shorter experimental novels to get into her style before plunging into this magnificent masterpiece. so start your engines & get reading!

[Pedro Santos · Rating 3 out of 5]

após 9 meses sem ler um romance de Clarice, decidi: é a hora. eu já tinha lidos 5 dos 9 romances, os mais bem-avaliados e benquistos, amei todos eles, e eu de repente me encontrei diante uma muralha. tentei ler cada um dos 4 remanescentes, mas todos me entediavam ou eram muito fechados em si. como maior desalento, parecia um consenso entre os leitores: esses realmente eram os "piores" da obra dela. matutei, matutei, enfim criei coragem e fui determinado, começando pelo maior de todos.

A Maçã No Escuro é um livro complexo e estranho, nele são perceptíveis as sementinhas para os trabalhos futuros da Clarice, o que é interessante, mas ao mesmo tempo ele traz algo distinto. o tema da existência é muito recorrente em Clarice, aqui além dele encontramos o tema da humanidade (o que faz um humano, o que é ser humano?). o livro é dividido em 3 partes e narra a jornada de Martim desde sua fuga do crime, sua despersonalização e desumanização até sua volta à individualidade e à humanidade. se fosse tentar definir o livro seria (re)fazer-se.

AMNE se constrói por altos e baixos muito discrepantes entre si. nos altos temos passagens geniais, reflexões revigorantes, mergulhos interessantíssimos na psique de personagens como Ermelinda e Vitória, eu sentia "meu deus, isso é a melhor coisa que já li". os baixos eram baixíssimos, abstrações enfadonhas e circulares diferentes de outras tão boas que vemos em G.H. e Água Viva, descrições cansadas sobre natureza e uma escrita somente confusa. quando eu estava nos picos, eu estava para me ajoelhar de tão bom, mas os vales eram realmente muito entediantes. o pior é que o livro termina nessa nota enfadonha e é tão difícil relembrar os momentos incríveis do percurso, quando o fim lhe deixa com um gosto insosso na boca. minhas partes preferidas foram a primeira e o início da terceira, antes de degringolar. alguns destaques são os capítulos 3 & 4 da terceira parte, cenas e diálogos geniais, ambientação perfeita, escrita ímpar. a primeira parte "como se faz um homem" também é muito bem construída e quando a terminei, pensei comigo que ela até funcionaria como uma peça a parte, a progressão do homem é muito clara e bem feita.

Clarice é inigualável, um mostro e merece todas as flores, mas quem não erra? dentro desse livro há outro melhor ainda, mais conciso e pungente, ele está lá sem dúvida, era preciso escavar um pouco mais talvez. ansioso pelas minhas próximas leituras de Clarice, ainda a escritora da minha vida. saio com ótimas frases e páginas atrás de páginas grifadas, riscadas, anotadas; além disso, saio com uma certeza: não duvidem da falta que um bom editor faz.

[Anna Palmer · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was certainly a challenge. At times it felt like I was hacking through something quite dense and confusing, but I enjoyed the journey. Essentially, you’re left asking yourself why we do what we do and whether we really have any control over our actions. I’ve not come to an answer. Metaphysical and really hypnotic, I’ve not read anything like it. There’s not really a plot - although things happen - it’s more of a rolling observation inside the characters heads.

[Castles · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning, mesmerizing, cinematic, philosophical, and very deep psychologically. This book begins (and joins) her later works, where the experimental writing takes her work to new heights of genius.