Patricia Duncker
The Hour of the Star
Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector
By Benjamin Moser
Haus 479pp £20 order from our bookshop
Who was Clarice Lispector? Readers who are not Brazilian may be forgiven for asking. I first encountered Lispector (1920–77) in the late 1970s, when she was taken up and celebrated by exponents of écriture féminine in France. Hélène Cixous declared that Lispector embodied what Kafka would have been if he had been a woman, ‘if Rilke had been a Jewish Brazilian born in the Ukraine. If Rimbaud had been a mother … If Heidegger could have ceased being German.’ In one of her lectures in 1984 Cixous declared that she would no longer continue to give her literary seminars ‘if a sufficiently wide world was reading Clarice Lispector’. Lispector is a constant point of reference for Cixous, in whom the writer has found her most devoted reader. Lispector’s early work has been compared to Woolf, Sartre, Proust and Joyce, none of whom she had read until she found herself associated with their influence. Her writing, notoriously difficult to translate from her distinctive, innovative Brazilian Portuguese, has attracted far more serious critical attention in France than in Britain. English translations are hard to come by, and Haus Publishing are to be congratulated on reissuing Gregory Rabassa’s translation of her fourth novel, The Apple in the Dark (A Maçã no Escuro, 1961), to coincide with their publication of Benjamin Moser’s enthralling biography.
Moser was able to interview friends, relatives and survivors, people who knew Clarice Lispector and who witnessed many of the events in her life. His decision to offer his readers an instant, detailed education in Brazilian history, literature and culture is a wise one. While more knowledgeable readers
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'It’s long been known that there is an optimum reproductive window and that women enjoy a considerably shorter one than men. For both sexes this window is opening and closing earlier than it used to.' (£)
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-end-of-babies
Sixty years ago today, the Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to enter outer space. @Andrew_Crumey looks at his role in the space race.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/one-giant-leap-for-mankind
On the night of 5th July 1809, a group of soldiers kidnapped Pope Pius VII on the orders of Napoleon Bonaparte. Munro Price looks at what happened next.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/bonaparte-meets-his-match