Clarice Lispector’s paradoxical certainties
“What gets in the way of writing is having to use words.”
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Clarice Lispector (1920–1977)
The other week, I unexpectedly had some time to kill in the middle of the day, so I popped into Skylight Books in search of something to read while I sat at a bar for an hour. The right book would have been short and light; instead, I found myself dropping thirty bucks on a 742-page collection of the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector’s complete newspaper columns, published between 1967–73 and collected last year in a very sexy New Directions paperback.
What was I thinking? I’m already in the middle of a few books, and I already have a different Lispector book at home that I haven’t read yet. But this brick of fifty-year-old journalism turned out to be an inspired choice for bar-reading. Above, I described the contents as newspaper columns; that’s not exactly right. These are crônicas, described by Giovanni Pontiero as “aphorisms, diary entries, reminiscences, travel notes, interviews, serialized stories, essays: a genre peculiar to Brazil which allows poets and writers to address a wider readership on a vast range of topics and themes.”
The genre was a good match for Lispector, who—like all writers I’m drawn to?—generally found writing terribly difficult. Lispector wrote her first novel, Near to the Wild Heart, in 1942 while she was a 22-year-old law student1 and also working as a journalist. The book began as ideas that she jotted down in a notebook as they occurred to her; over time, “groping in the darkness,” she assembled the fragments into a novel. “When I reread what I’ve written,” she told her lover at the time, “I feel like I’m swallowing my own vomit.”