The World's Literature in India discussion

Family Ties, short stories by Clarice Lispector, do seem like she is at her best in this genre.

Story 1 "The Daydream of a Drunk Woman": a woman who asks,

"...What is wrong with me?
It was unhappiness."

This story and the next are about women whose lives are being a mother and a wife. Each copes differently with the experience. The nameless woman in "The Daydream..." gets pleasure from briefly being away from the children and from dining out one evening with her husband and a businessman. The story reveals her constantly thinking.

Story 2 "Love": In taking the tram home from shopping, Anne feels shocked seeing the posture of a blindman chewing gum as the tram goes by, thus missing her stop and musing awhile in a botanic garden,

"The trees were laden, and the world was so rich that it was rotting. When Anna reflected that there were children and grown men suffering hunger, the nausea reached her throat as if she were prenant and abandoned. The moral of the garden was something different. Now that the blind man had guided her to it, she trembled on the threshold of a dark, fascinating world where monstrous water lilies floated. The small flowers scattered on the grass did not appear to be yellow or pink, but the colour of inferior gold and scarlet. Their decay was profound, perfumed. But all these oppressive things she watched, her head surrounded by a swarm of insects, senby by some more refined life in the world. The breeze penetrated between the flowers. Anna imagined rather than felt its sweetened scent. The garden was so beautiful that she feared hell.

Story 3 "The Chicken": Clarice Lispector's story is also in Oxford Anthology of the Brazilian Short Story. A chicken, fearing it will be Sunday's dinner, flees over the rooftops, is caught, but lays an egg and thereby saves her life for years.

Story 4 "The Imitation of the Rose", apparently a parallel with Thomas à Kempis's Imitation of Christ mentioned in the story: The object of Laura's thinking about pleasure and sacrifice is fresh roses.

Story 5 "Happy Birthday": A family gets together yearly to celebrate the birthday of their eighty-nine year old, mostly silent mother, who muses about the awfulness of most of her children, their spouses, and their children:

How could she have given life to those grinning spineless, and indulgent creatures? The rancour groaned in her empty breast. A bunch of communists, that's what they were--communists. She looked at them with senile scorn. They looked like a nest of jostling rats, and this was her family. Irrespressible, she turned her head away and, with unsuspected force, she spat on the floor.

After her favorite son Jonga had died, to whom she had given "approval and respect" and thus "confidence", this bitterness was how she regarded the remaining family.

Story 6 "The Smallest Woman in the World": Line I liked most is

...the French explorer, Marcel Pretre, hunter and man of the world...discovered, in fact, the smallest pygmies in the world. And--like a box inside another box, inside yet another box--among the smallest pygmies in the world, he found the smallest of the smallest pygmies in the world, answering, perhaps to the need that Nature sometimes feels to surpass herself.

Herself refers to pregnant, smiling Little Flower.

Story 7 "The Dinner": The narrator observes the movements of a sixty-ish man dining on salad, meat, wine, and dessert at a restaurant until he, a "great horse", departs, noting how the diner's behavior affects him.

When I have been betrayed and slaughtered, when someone has gone away forever, or I have lost the best of my possessions, Or when I have learned that I am about to die--I do not eat. I have not yet attained this power, this ruin. I push away my plate, I reject the meat and its blood.

Story 8 "Preciousness": An intelligent, self-conscious, fifteen-year-old girl, feels uncomfortable at the prospect of others looking at her and she looking at others.

'They are going to look at me, I know!' But she tried, through the instinct of a previous life, not to betray her fear. She divined what fear was unleashing. It was to be rapid and painless. Only for a fraction of a second would their path cross, rapid, instantaneous, because of the advantage in her favour of her being mobile and of them coming in the opposite direction...But what in fact followed had no explanation.

Story 9 "Family Ties" [title story]: The story begins with the end of a mother's/mother-in-law's visit to her daughter Catherine, her son-in-law Tony, and her grandson in/near Rio de Janeiro, looking at Catherine's roles as adult daughter, as wife of an engineer, and as mother to the four-year-old, describing each character and her relationship with each one. The theme seems to be how each relationship solidifies, breaks apart, and re-solidifies. The women and child do the goings and comings while the man Tony has his Saturday in the flat and anticipates an evening together with Catherine.

Story 10 "The Beginnings of a Fortune". The ironic title alludes to an adolescent boy Arthur asking his parents for money over his allowance. The reader and parents do not yet know why he wants the money and there is suspicion of ulterior purposes.

Contrary to what is hinted at by his parents, the schoolboy Arthur and his friend Charlie discuss taking Glorinha and her friend to the movies, Arthur being persuaded to borrow the fee from Charlie to pay for Glorinha's and his own ticket. Afterward, he wonders about the implications of paying for two tickets: did Glorinha exploit him? did Charlie take advantage of Glorinha's friend? what is a promissory note? The story questions the status quo in dating and in lending/borrowing.

Story 11 "Mystery in São Cristóvão": One of my favorites so far in the collection. For the reader, the incident with the masqueraders in the moonlit hyacinth garden then at the non-Carnival ball is humorous; the family of the house and garden are also a delight with a satisfactory wrinkle.

Story 12 "The Crime of the Mathematics Professor": The ominous beginning set at nighttime on a mountaintop over a city with church bells. A man has brought a sack with him, drawing out of it a dead dog. This unknown dog for which he digs a grave and later unburies symbolizes the man's "sin" of betraying a trusting, loyal real dog, the family dog Joe abandoned upon the family's urging before they moved elsewhere:

...he had buried an unknown dog in tribute to his abandoned dog, trying, after all, to pay the debt which, disturbingly, no one was claiming--trying to punish himself with an act of kindness and to rid himself of his crime.

Story 13 "The Buffalo": The last in the collection, presumably the best and memorable, it was also printed in Oxford Anthology of the Brazilian Short Story. On rereading it, I can appreciate the main character's complex feelings, a nondescript woman resentful and grieving after her boyfriend spurned her. Lispector chooses a springtime afternoon in the zoological gardens to set her resentment. Nowhere there in the flush of life among the lions, giraffe, hippopotamus, monkeys, ape, elephant, camel, and coati does she see reflected her anger. In fact, she finds it easier to love and to be compassionate than to hate:

...where would she find the animal tht might teach her to keep her own hatred?"

She has felt a lot of sentiments but never hatred of man until she meets the huge, black, hairy buffalo, whose eyes reflect back "mutual assassination." How she responds to this recognition is quite interesting.

"Afterword" by translator Giovanni Pontiero: Clarice Lispector's literary techniques and Sartrean existentialist writing:

stream of consciousness
sustained interior monologue
commonplace mixed with dream
human suffering and bitterness of failure

Lispector's short stories are among her best writing. And her literary work still is read and discussed today ( http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-t... ; at the bottom of that page is an article about Elizabeth Bishop viz. "Brazil").

Elizabeth Bishop also came to live in Brazil. Her poem ““Brazil: January 1, 1502”” parallels her traveling there with the arrival of explorers and Europeans and describes the lush, multicolor landscape.