Tag: Clarice lispector

The Besieged City by Clarice Lispector

~ winstonsdad ~ 2 Comments

The Besieged City by Clarice Lispector

Brazilan fiction

Original title – A Cidade Sitiada

Translator – Johnny Lorenz

Source – Personal copy

I’ve read three Lispector books and have reviewed two of them over the years. I’m not in a rush to read all her books; most of them are on my TBR. So when this one was a book, I could read it for this week’s 1949 club. I picked it up; she wrote it not long after she got married, in Europe, in Bern, where Lispector struggled with the city and the change from the cities in Brazil. Also, she suffered from depression and isolation at this time and struggled to write this book. She later said it was the hardest book she had ever written. The style is different from the other books by her I have read.

The late night would find them motionless in the dark. Stable and weightless. There they were, invisible, breathing. Waiting with brief intelligence. Below, in the sleeping township, a rooster was flying and perching on the ledge of a window. The hens were watching. Beyond the railroad a rat ready to flee.

Then the dapple-gray stomped its foot. Nobody had a mouth to speak with but one would give a small signal that would sound off from space to space in the darkness. They were peering out. Those animals that had one eye for seeing on each side—nothing was seen straight on, and that was the night of Sao Geraldo, the flanks of a horse quivering in a quick contraction. In the first silences a mare would open wide her eyes as if surrounded by eternity. The most restless colt was still raising its mane in a deaf neigh. Finally silence would reign.

The horses and the small place that Sao Geraldo started as !

The book follows two characters: Lucrécia Neves, a girl in her twenties who loves horses but is at an age when people think she should settle down. The book follows her and the men in her life: three men pursuing her, Felipe, a soldier; Perseu, a quiet student and a sensitive soul. Then she finally settles down with Doctor Matheus. Because each of the three men is a different kind of man. The book shows how they try to get her attention. Lucrécia is not a beauty, but she has these three men, each in their own way, drawn to her. This may be her working through her own love. Life, as I said, has two characters. The second character is São Gerardo, which, when the book opens, is a small township with horses wandering around, and as the book moves on, it becomes a boom city. This is how the book works: the two affect each other; as the city grows, we see how it almost hollows out Lucrécia’s soul. As the modern world creeps in on them.  She has many struggles living in Europe; I feel the city becomes a trap for her.

Soon she was veering off a bit, dreaming of walking alone with a dog and being seen on the hill: like the postcard of a city. Lucrécia Neves needed countless things: a checkered skirt and a little hat of the same material; for a long time now shed been needing to feel how others would see her in a checkered skirt and hat, a belt right on her hips and a flower in the belt: dressed like that shed look at the township and it would be transformed. With a dog. That’s how you composed a vision.

The girl didn’t have any imagination but a watchful reality of things that was making her almost sleepwalk; she was needing things in order for them to exist.

She is an odd character in many ways !

I must admit I often struggle with the imagery in her novels. I will go back when I have read them all and reread them. But for me, this is a woman dying on the inside after maybe making the wrong choice in a man.  This came not long after her own marriage; is she reflecting on her own life? Then there is the place: São Gerardo; like many places in this century, a small township, a rural place almost becoming a city; there is imagery of the horse once running wild, now gone. She hated the clean style of the Swiss cities compared to the wildness of her home. This book falls between the other two I have read from the debut’s stream of consciousness; it is a harsh, stark book about a place growing, and, as it does, a woman’s insides falling out of a woman who becomes empty really . Whereas the later book has a more internal narrator’s voice. Have you read Lispector ? Do you have a favourite book by her? Have you read this book did you struggle with it ?

 

The passion according to G.H by Clarice Lispector

~ winstonsdad ~ 13 Comments

IMG_20150805_144452

The passion according to G.H by Clarice Lispector

Brazilian fiction

Original title – A Paixão segundo G.H.

Translator – Idra Novey

Source – personnel copy

When you ate,
I saw your eyelashes.
Saw them shake like
wind on rushes.

In the cornfield,
when she called me

Moths surround me.
Thought they’d drown me.

And I miss your precious heart.

Dried rose petals —
redbrown circles —
framed your eyes and
stained your knuckles.

I choose this lyric from Joanna Newsom for those first two-lines anyone that read this book will know what I mean ,also  Joanna Newsom new album out soon

A couple of years ago Amanda brought me two Lispector Near to the wild heart and hour of the star , I read Near to the wild heart straight away loved it that much , I went out a few days later and brought this the another of the four Lispector books penguin had brought out at the time .So with the chance to read her collected short stories that are coming out soon .Lispector was a brazilian writer , she was born in Ukraine her family came to Brazil and then when she married she travelled the world with her husband whom was a diplomat ,before returning to Brazil and began writing , this book was midway in her career .

That was when  the cockroach began to emerge .

First the heralding quiver of its antennae .

Then , behind those dry stands , the reluctant body started to emerge until nearly all of it reached the opening of the wardrobe door .

It was brown , it hesitant as if of enormus wieght .It was now almost entirely visible

The roach appears to G.H

Well where does one start with this book ? it’s a monologue told by a women , this woman is the same one as the G.H of the title . G.H has entered her maid’s room , clean clinical white room , in which she sees this black cockroach after finding it in the wardrobe .She then decides to kill the roach , setting of a shocking reaction with in G.H herself as she watches the insect die cause a strange nightmare like state in her as she questions  what she did . All this happened the day before and G.h is reflecting on what happened .

Because inside myself I saw what hell is like .

Hell is the mouth that bites and eats the living flesh with its blood , and the one being eaten howls with delight in his eye: hell is pain as delight of the matter , and with the laughter of delight , the tears run in pain .And the tear comes from the laughter of pain is the opposite of redemption .I was seeing the inexorability of the roach with its ritual mask .

G.H later in the book seems to drift into a spirit world of her own .

Now a brief description for this is one from the heart of modernism like a distant cousin to the world of Virginia Woolf , it is easy to see why the two are often mentioned in the same breath .Like Mrs Dalloway Woolf’s book , this takes place of the course of a day . Woolf also touched in other books like this does on mental health issues , you feel G.H is a woman who has more to her than we are told and certain of her actions within this book lead you to think , she may have been in the middle of a breakdown the day she is describing .This book shows why we maybe need more woman in translation to find the effect of woman writing in english has had on female writers around the world we often miss the influence of english writers but I feel in Lispector it is clear to see how drawn she must have been as a writer to the Modernist movement , she was writing in the 60’s so would be able to have read the great voices of modernism .It is easy to see G.H as a character as a woman trying to break maybe the female bonds as the act she does cause her to think why she does it ? A book that will leave you reeling for a good while after you put it down . I can’t wait to read her short stories now , the complete collection will include all eight collections she wrote in her lifetime .

Have you read Lispector ?