Clarice Lispector

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Clarice Lispector
Born December 10 1920(1920-12-10)
Chechelnyk, Ukraine
Died December 9 1977 (aged 56)
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Occupation Novelist, poet
Nationality Ucranian (born), Brazilian
Literary movement Modernism
Influences Herman Hesse, Fyodor Dostoevsky

Clarice Lispector (December 10 1920 - December 9 1977) was a Brazilian writer. Acclaimed internationally for her innovative novels, she was also an accomplished writer of short stories and a journalist with a regular national column.

Considered one of the greatest Brazilian prose writers of the twentieth century, Clarice Lispector was born in Chechelnyk, a shtetl in Ukraine, while her family was in transit to Brazil. By the time of their arrival in Brazil, she was two months old. Her family first settled in Maceió, Alagoas, where her mother had family relations, and later moved to Recife, Pernambuco, where she went to elementary and high school, and wrote her first essays. After her mother's death, the family moved again, to Rio de Janeiro, when Clarice was already 14 years old. There, she studied law and married her classmate Maury Gurgel Valente. After he entered the diplomatic corps she moved to Europe, living in Naples, Berne, Torquay (England), and Washington. She returned to Brazil in 1959.

Lispector was fluent in Yiddish, English, French and also had various levels of ability and knowledge in other languages, particularly Italian and German. In later life, she supported herself by translating books from English and French. She never said that she spoke Yiddish at home, but always said that her native Portuguese was the language of her heart. She never wrote in any other language.

Her family was Jewish and spoke Yiddish at home. In 1944 she published her first novel Perto do Coração Selvagem, translated into English as "Near the Wild Heart." When the novel was published, many claimed that her stream-of-consciousness writing style was heavily influenced by Virginia Woolf or James Joyce, but she had read neither of these authors. This novel, like all of her subsequent works, was marked by an intense focus on interior emotional states.

Lispector died of cancer in 1977, just one day before her 57th birthday, and was buried in the Jewish Cemetery of Caju, in Rio de Janeiro.

Her last novel is A Hora da Estrela, translated as The Hour of The Star, where the life of Macabéa, a poor woman living in Rio de Janeiro, is described by a narrator called Rodrigo S.M., a fictional writer. Written near the end of her life, A Hora da Estrela diverged from the themes and style of most of her work, instead directly and explicitly focusing on poverty and marginality in Brazil.

Her sister Elisa Lispector (born Savran, Ukraine, July 24, 1911, died Rio de Janeiro, January 6, 1989) was also a respected Brazilian novelist.

[edit] Bibliography

  • Perto do Coração Selvagem (1944) - Near to the Wild Heart
  • O Lustre [The Chandelier] (1946)
  • A Cidade Sitiada [The Besieged City] (1949)
  • Alguns Contos [Some Stories] (1952)
  • Laços de Família (1960) - Family Ties
  • A Maçã no Escuro [The Apple in the Dark] (1961)
  • A Legião Estrangeira (1964) - [The Foreign Legion]
  • A Paixão segundo G.H. (1964) - The Passion According to G.H., University of Minnesota Press (1988), ISBN 0816617120
  • O Mistério do Coelho Pensante (1967) [The Mystery of the Thinking Rabbit](children's book)
  • A mulher que matou os peixes [The woman who killed the fishes] (1968)(children's book)
  • Uma Aprendizagem ou O Livro dos Prazeres (1969) [An Apprenticeship or the Book of Pleasures]
  • Felicidade Clandestina (1971) [Clandestine Happiness]
  • A imitação da rosa [The imitation of the rose] (1973)
  • Água Viva (1973) - The Stream of Life, University of Minnesota Press (paperback 1989), ISBN 0816617821
  • A Vida Íntima de Laura (1974) [The Intimate Life of Laura](children's book)
  • A Via-crucis do Corpo (1974) [The Stations of the Body]
  • Onde estivestes de Noite (1974) [Where Were You at Night]
  • A hora da Estrela (1977) - The Hour of the Star, tr. Giovanni Pontiero, Carcanet Press (1992), ISBN 0856359890
  • Para não Esquecer (1978) [Not to Forget]
  • Quase de Verdade [Almost True] (1978)(children's book)
  • Um Sopro de Vida [A Breath of Life] (1978)
  • A Bela e a Fera [Beauty and the Beast] (1979)
  • A Descoberta do Mundo [The Discovery of the World] (1984)
  • Como Nasceram as Estrelas [How the Stars were Born] (1987)(children's book)
  • Cartas perto do Coração (2001) [Letters near the Heart] (letters exchanged with Fernando Sabino)
  • Correspondências [Correspondence] (2002)

[edit] Further reading

  • Efraín Kristal, The Cambridge Companion to the Latin American Novel, Cambridge University Press (2005), ISBN 0521825334 - includes a chapter on The Passion According to G.H.
  • Earl E. Fitz, Sexuality and Being in the Poststructuralist Universe of Clarice Lispector: The Différance of Desire, University of Texas Press (2001), ISBN 0292725299

[edit] External links

es:Clarice Lispector eo:Clarice Lispector fr:Clarice Lispector io:Clarice Lispector it:Clarice Lispector he:קלריס ליספקטור nl:Clarice Lispector oc:Clarice Lispector pt:Clarice Lispector ru:Лиспектор, Клариси sh:Clarice Lispector sv:Clarice Lispector

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