Clarice Lispector’s Short Stories
Clarice Lispector takes you on dangerous adventures that make you feel you’re reading for the first time.
Her novels, stories and countless crônicas (or newspaper columns: delightful prose vignettes blurring fiction and non-fiction that range from a couple of sentences to a couple of pages, often republished as short stories) challenge our conventions of writing just as they challenge our conventions of reality. Sensual, surreal and profound, her work breaks down the barriers of normality and erases the borders of expectation. Her characters and plots are bumped either into enemy territory – into nightmares or violence – or else into somewhere stranger, a nether zone of abnormality, eccentricity, incongruity and discomfort. Lispector is the glamorous queen of the experimental avant-garde and, once encountered, her pioneering, highly idiosyncratic, work becomes a dark addiction, a sinister compulsion of pleasure and pain.
Often, when artists are innovative or obscure, we promote them by ensnaring them in comparison to other, more orthodox or recognizable, names. Usually this is done both as high praise and with the best of intentions, but it can be a little disingenuous, undermining a writer’s/composer’s/painter’s vitality and originality. More often than not, however, artists wriggle free of the trap anyway, swimming through the net of resemblance to whirl unabashed, unique and free.
Lispector has often been compared to Kafka, Mansfield, Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Sartre, Borges and Beauvoir – many of whom, Lispector said, she read for the first time only after the similarities to her own work had been pointed out. Of course, all these literary giants, Lispector included, are by and large incomparable, offering their own exceptional and inimitable vision of the world – indeed, it is their very distinctiveness that either draws us to them or keeps us in their thrall. And few writers of that most peculiar of centuries, the twentieth, are as distinctive as Clarice Lispector.
She was born in Ukraine in 1920, and her family fled violent anti-Jewish pogroms the following year, ending up on the other side of the world, in Brazil. She grew up in Recife and Rio and enrolled as a law student, during which time she wrote her first stories, many of which start to showcase her characteristic style, with its blend of enigma, intimacy and introspection. Soon, her revolutionary, semi-autobiographical novel Near to the Wild Heart (1943), with its wonderfully modern interior monologue, propelled her to fame (and the nickname ‘Hurricane Clarice’). Glitzy and desirable, Lispector’s beauty was legendary – tall, blonde, sunglassed, she seemed an unlikely subversive – and, almost immediately, marriage to a diplomat took her to Europe and America for fifteen years, though she returned to Brazil for nearly two decades before her early death from cancer the day before her fifty-seventh birthday.
Her nine novels are an extraordinary body of work and should not be missed; neither should the unmatched curiosity and lapidary intuition of the crônicas, those Lispectorian specialities. But it is perhaps in the malleable, eccentric and constantly uncertain form of the short story where Lispector’s gifts are most readily apparent (especially to new readers). Told in an enormous range of styles and conveying a multitude of numinous, hallucinatory and epicurean experiences, her stories spy beyond surfaces, holding their breath and glimpsing individuals, events or ideas less visible to the naked eye, often shadowing people caught in delicate or difficult situations – abusive relationships or dreary workplaces.
Nevertheless, however terrifying or precarious things might seem, however forbidding the fictional worlds constructed, with her tenderness and humour Lispector bestows great humanity on her creations and their predicaments, giving housewives (a familiar Lispector figure) dignity or slighted lovers self-respect. It beguiles and bamboozles, but Lispector’s is an art which invites kindness, too, which attracts and provokes empathy, concern and love. And they are connected, of course, the compassion and the confusion.
Lispector seems to keep on staring when the rest of us would rather keep our eyes shut. She wants to see the other side of a locked door, dive into the deep, fumble along the gloomy corridor. Like many a mystic or sorcerer, she is keen to experience the world in manifestations beyond the usual, outside the everyday – and this naturally takes us to some dark places, emotionally and metaphysically. Epiphanies come raw; they come with vertigo and a shudder. Her work is rarely far from paradox and narrative or tonal shifts; uncertainty fills each moment, syntax slithering all over the place, making the stories frightening and exhilarating, ambiguous and intense – they are perilous escapades in prose.
In ‘The Fifth Story’, a woman tries to deal with a recurrent cockroach problem (hello, Kafka!). We witness her prepare a mixture of flour, water and plaster to kill them, these ‘evil secrets’ that emerge each night. This would be unnerving enough, one might think. But Lispector turns this three-page short story into a cubist masterpiece, a mesmerizing nightmare exploring time, death and mortality, by beginning it five times. The story breaks up and reassembles itself in different forms; perspectives alter and transmute into new contexts that are wider, narrower, stranger, funnier.
Lispector’s labyrinths are infinitely compelling, even and especially because they alarm us, they confront us, they confound us. They have an aura, a supernatural and cryptic power, that amends our comprehension of both writing and the world. Truth relocates when you contend with her work, as you become drawn in and distorted by her prose potions, spellbound and entranced by her literary necromancy. Yet this magic is a revelatory force, not a controlling one, and to read Clarice Lispector is to – fleetingly, exquisitely – catch sight of the hidden realities of existence. There are wonders within.
Recommended Works:
Complete Stories (Penguin, trans. Katrina Dodson)
‘The Egg and the Chicken’
‘The Fifth Story’
‘He Drank Me Up’
‘The Sound of Footsteps’
‘The Sharing of Loaves’
‘Love’
‘The Solution’
Too Much of Life: Complete Crônicas (Penguin, trans. Margaret Jull Costa & Robin Patterson)
The Apple in the Dark (Penguin, trans. Benjamin Moser)
Hour of the Star (Penguin, trans. Benjamin Moser)
The Passion According to G. H. (Penguin, trans. Idra Novey)
The Besieged City (Penguin, trans. Johnny Lorenz)
Dr David Vernon is the author of four books: Disturbing the Universe: Wagner’s Musikdrama, Beauty and Sadness: Mahler’s 11 Symphonies, Ada to Zembla: The Novels of Vladimir Nabokov and Beethoven: The String Quartets. His next book, Sun Forest Lake: The Symphonies and Tone Poems of Jean Sibelius, will be published in November 2024, while a study of Yukio Mishima’s novels is planned for 2026.