Clarice Lispector (born Chaya Pinkhasivna Lispector; December 10, 1920 – December 9, 1977) was a Ukrainian-born Brazilian novelist and short story writer. Her unique and creative works explore themes of personal relationships and inner thoughts, using different storytelling styles. She became famous for books like Near to the Wild Heart (1943) and The Hour of the Star (1977).
She was born to a Jewish family in Podolia, Western Ukraine. As a baby, she moved to Brazil with her family during the Russian Civil War. She grew up in Recife, the capital of Pernambuco, where her mother died when she was nine years old. Her family later moved to Rio de Janeiro when she was a teenager. While studying law in Rio, she began writing and publishing journalistic articles and short stories. At 23, she became famous for her first novel, Near to the Wild Heart (Perto do Coração Selvagem), which used a style of writing called an interior monologue, a new and unusual approach in Brazil.
In 1944, after marrying a Brazilian diplomat, she left Brazil and lived in Europe and the United States for about 15 years. She returned to Rio de Janeiro in 1959 and published stories in Family Ties (Laços de Família) and the novel The Passion According to G.H. (A Paixão Segundo G.H.). In 1966, she was injured in an accident and spent the rest of her life in pain. Despite this, she continued writing and publishing books, including the well-known Água Viva, until her death in 1977.
Many books have been written about Clarice Lispector, and her work is often mentioned in Brazilian literature and music. Some of her stories have been made into films. In 2009, the American writer Benjamin Moser published Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector. Since then, her works have been retranslated by New Directions Publishing and Penguin Modern Classics, making her the first Brazilian author to join this series. Moser, who also edited her collection The Complete Stories (2015), says she is the most important Jewish writer in the world since Franz Kafka.
Early life, emigration and Recife
Clarice Lispector was born Chaya Lispector in Chechelnyk, Podolia, a small village in the Ukrainian SSR. She was the youngest of three daughters of Pinkhas Lispector and Mania Krimgold Lispector. Her family faced serious difficulties during the violent attacks that happened after the Russian Empire fell. These events were later described in her older sister Elisa Lispector’s book No exílio (In Exile, 1948). In the winter of 1921, the family left their home and eventually moved to Romania before traveling to Brazil, where her mother had relatives. They sailed from Hamburg and arrived in Brazil in early 1922, when Chaya (later known as Clarice) was just over one year old.
When they arrived in Brazil, the Lispectors changed their names. Pinkhas became Pedro; Mania became Marieta; Leah became Elisa; and Chaya became Clarice. Only the middle daughter, Tania (born April 19, 1915, and died November 15, 2007), kept her original name. The family first settled in Maceió, a city in Alagoas. During this time, Clarice’s mother, Marieta, was paralyzed and in poor health, possibly due to an injury. Later, she also suffered from tremors caused by Parkinson’s disease. After three years, the family moved to Recife, a city in Pernambuco, where they lived in the neighborhood of Boa Vista at number 367 in Praça Maciel Pinheiro and later in Rua da Imperatriz.
In Recife, Clarice’s father struggled financially. Her mother died on September 21, 1930, when Clarice was nine years old. Clarice attended the Colégio Hebreo-Idisch-Brasileiro, a school that taught Hebrew and Yiddish in addition to other subjects. In 1932, she was accepted into the Ginásio Pernambucano, the most respected secondary school in the state. A year later, after reading Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf, she decided she wanted to become a writer.
In 1935, Pedro Lispector moved with his daughters to Rio de Janeiro, the capital of Brazil, hoping to find better economic opportunities and Jewish husbands for his daughters. The family first lived in São Cristóvão, a neighborhood in northern Rio, before moving to Tijuca. In 1937, Clarice entered the Law School of the University of Brazil, one of the most respected higher education institutions in the country. Her first known story, “Triunfo,” was published in the magazine Pan on May 25, 1940. Later that year, on August 26, 1940, her father died at age 55 due to complications from a gallbladder operation.
While still in law school, Clarice worked as a journalist for the official government press service, the Agência Nacional, and later for the newspaper A Noite. She met younger Brazilian writers, including Lúcio Cardoso, with whom she fell in love. However, Cardoso was gay, and Clarice later began a relationship with Maury Gurgel Valente, a law school classmate who worked for the Brazilian Foreign Service, known as Itamaraty. To marry a diplomat, Clarice needed to become a Brazilian citizen, which she achieved when she turned 18. On January 12, 1943, she was granted citizenship. Eleven days later, she married Gurgel.
In December 1943, Lispector published her first novel, Perto do coração selvagem (Near to the Wild Heart). The book, which follows the inner life of a young woman named Joana, caused great excitement. In October 1944, it won the Graça Aranha Prize for the best debut novel of 1943. One critic, the poet Lêdo Ivo, called it “the greatest novel a woman has ever written in the Portuguese language.” Another noted that Lispector had “shifted the center of gravity around which the Brazilian novel had been revolving for about twenty years.” A São Paulo critic, Sérgio Milliet, wrote that Clarice Lispector’s work was “the most serious attempt at the introspective novel” in Brazilian literature. “For the first time, a Brazilian author goes beyond simple approximation in this almost virgin field of our literature; for the first time, an author penetrates the depths of the psychological complexity of the modern soul.”
This novel, like all of her later works, focused heavily on the inner emotional lives of characters. Many people believed her writing style was influenced by Virginia Woolf or James Joyce, but she only read these authors after the book was completed. The epigraph from Joyce and the title, taken from Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, were suggested by Lúcio Cardoso.
Soon after, Lispector and Maury Gurgel moved to Belém, a city in the state of Pará, located at the mouth of the Amazon River. There, Maury worked as a liaison between the Foreign Ministry and the Allies, who used northern Brazil as a military base during World War II.
Europe and the United States
On July 29, 1944, Clarice Lispector left Brazil for the first time since arriving as a child. She traveled to Naples, Italy, where her husband, Gurgel, worked at the Brazilian Consulate. Naples was a base for Brazilian soldiers fighting with the Allies against the Nazis. Lispector worked at a military hospital, caring for injured Brazilian troops. In Rome, she met the Italian poet Giuseppe Ungaretti, who translated parts of her book Near to the Wild Heart. She also had her portrait painted by Giorgio de Chirico. In Naples, she finished her second novel, O Lustre (The Chandelier, 1946), which focused on the inner life of a girl named Virgínia. This book was longer and more complex than her first novel but still received praise from critics. A writer named Gilda de Melo e Sousa said, "She has great talent and a unique personality, but these same qualities will also bring her challenges."
After a short visit to Brazil in 1946, Lispector and Gurgel returned to Europe in April 1946. Gurgel was posted to the Brazilian Embassy in Bern, Switzerland. Lispector found life in Bern boring and frustrating. She wrote to her sister, Tania, calling Switzerland "a cemetery of sensations." Her son, Pedro Gurgel Valente, was born in Bern on September 10, 1948. In Bern, she wrote her third novel, A cidade sitiada (The Besieged City, 1946).
In Bern, Lispector lived on Gerechtigkeitsgasse, or Justice Street. A statue of a woman holding scales stood outside her home. In winter, the lake near the statue froze, and in spring, red geraniums bloomed. She described living in the medieval part of the city as a way to escape the monotony of Bern. She wrote The Besieged City, which she later called one of her least favorite books. However, readers often came to appreciate it after reading it a second time.
The Besieged City tells the story of a girl named Lucrécia Neves and the growth of her town, São Geraldo, from a small village to a large city. The book uses many metaphors about vision and seeing. It received a lukewarm reception, and some critics said it was "the least loved of Clarice Lispector's novels." A friend of hers wrote that the author "succumbed beneath the weight of her own richness." A Portuguese critic added, "Its complexity is like the complexity of dreams. May someone find the key."
In 1949, Lispector and Gurgel left Switzerland and spent almost a year in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Later, they traveled to Torquay, Devon, England, where Gurgel worked for the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). They stayed in England from September 1950 until March 1951. Lispector liked England but suffered a miscarriage during a visit to London.
In 1952, the family returned to Rio de Janeiro, where they stayed for about a year. Lispector published a small collection of six short stories called Alguns contos (Some Stories), supported by the Ministry of Education and Health. These stories later formed the basis of her book Laços de família (Family Ties, 1960). She also wrote under the name Teresa Quadros as a women's columnist for a newspaper called Comício.
In September 1952, the family moved to Washington, D.C., where they lived until June 1959. They bought a house at 4421 Ridge Street in Chevy Chase, Maryland. On February 10, 1953, Lispector gave birth to her second son, Paulo. She became close to the Brazilian writer Érico Veríssimo and his wife, Mafalda, as well as to the wife of the ambassador, Alzira Vargas, who was the daughter of the former Brazilian leader Getúlio Vargas. She also began publishing stories in a magazine called Senhor, which was based in Rio. However, she grew unhappy with life in the diplomatic community. She said, "I hated it, but I did what I had to. I gave dinner parties and did everything expected of me, but I felt disgusted." She missed her sisters and Brazil and left her husband in June 1959, returning to Rio de Janeiro with her sons. She spent the rest of her life in Brazil.
Later years
In Brazil, Lispector faced financial difficulties and tried to find a publisher for the novel she had written in Washington years earlier, as well as for her book of stories, Laços de família (Family Ties). This book included the six stories from Some Stories along with seven new stories, some of which had been published in Senhor. It was released in 1960. A friend, Fernando Sabino, wrote that the book was "exactly, sincerely, indisputably, and even humbly, the best book of stories ever published in Brazil." Another writer, Érico Veríssimo, said: "I haven’t written about your book of stories out of sheer embarrassment to tell you what I think of it. Here goes: the most important story collection published in this country since Machado de Assis," a famous Brazilian novelist.
A Maçã no escuro (The Apple in the Dark), which Lispector started in Torquay, was completed in 1956 but was repeatedly rejected by publishers, causing her great sadness. Her longest novel and possibly her most complex, it was finally published in 1961 by the same publisher that released Family Ties, Livraria Francisco Alves in São Paulo. The story focuses on a man named Martim, who believes he has killed his wife and flees into the Brazilian interior, where he works as a farm laborer. The novel’s main themes are language and creation. In 1962, the book won the Carmen Dolores Barbosa Prize for the best novel of the previous year. Around this time, Lispector began a relationship with the poet Paulo Mendes Campos, an old friend. However, Mendes Campos was married, and the relationship did not last.
In 1964, Lispector published one of her most famous books, A paixão segundo G.H. (Passion According to G.H.), which tells the story of a woman who has a mystical experience in her Rio penthouse and eats part of a cockroach. That same year, she also published another book of stories and other writings, The Foreign Legion.
Gregory Rabassa, an American translator who first met Lispector at a conference on Brazilian literature in Texas in the mid-1960s, said he was "flabbergasted to meet that rare person [Lispector] who looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf."
On September 14, 1966, Lispector suffered a serious accident in her apartment. After taking a sleeping pill, she fell asleep with a lit cigarette in her bed and was seriously injured. Her right hand nearly had to be amputated. She later wrote, "The fire I suffered a while back partially destroyed my right hand. My legs were marked forever. What happened was very sad and I prefer not to think about it. All I can say is that I spent three days in hell, where—so they say—bad people go after death. I don’t consider myself bad and I experienced it while still alive."
The next year, Lispector published her first children’s book, O Mistério do coelho pensante (The Mystery of the Thinking Rabbit), a translation of a book she had written in Washington in English for her son, Paulo. In August 1967, she began writing a weekly column ("crônica") for Jornal do Brasil, a major Rio newspaper, which greatly increased her fame beyond the intellectual and artistic circles that had long admired her. These writings were later collected in the posthumous work A Descoberta do mundo (The Discovery of the World, 1984).
In 1968, Lispector participated in political demonstrations against Brazil’s military dictatorship and published two books: her second children’s book, A Mulher que matou os peixes (The Woman Who Killed the Fish), in which the narrator, Clarice, confesses to forgetting to feed her son’s fish, and An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures. Her first novel since G.H., Uma Aprendizagem ou O Livro dos Prazeres, is a love story between a primary school teacher, Lóri, and a philosophy teacher, Ulisses. The book used material from her newspaper columns, as she conducted interviews for the magazine Manchete. A new translation of the book was published in April 2021 by New Directions. The Cleveland Review of Books called it "a novel about the distance between people, but also the distances between the self and the self, the self and 'the God.'"
In 1971, Lispector published another book of stories, Felicidade clandestina (Covert Joy), which included stories that reminded her of her childhood in Recife. She began working on a book many consider her finest, Água Viva (The Stream of Life), though she struggled to complete it. Olga Borelli, a former nun who became her assistant and friend, recalled: "She was insecure and asked a few people for their opinion. With other books, Clarice didn’t show that insecurity. With Água Viva, she did. That was the only time I saw Clarice hesitate before handing in a book to the publisher. She herself said that."
When the book was published in 1973, it was immediately praised as a masterpiece. One critic wrote, "With this fiction, Clarice Lispector awakens the literature currently being produced in Brazil from a depressing and degrading lethargy and elevates it to a level of universal perennity and perfection." The book is an interior monologue told by an unnamed first-person narrator to an unnamed "you," and has been described as having a musical quality, with the frequent return of certain passages. Água Viva was first translated into English in 1978 as The Stream of Life, with a new translation by Stefan Tobler published in 2012.
In 1974, Lispector published two books of stories: Onde estivestes de noite (Where Were You at Night)—which focuses in part on the lives of aging women—and A via crucis do corpo (The Via Crucis of the Body). Though her previous books had often taken years to complete, The Via Crucis of the Body was written in three days after a challenge from her publisher, Álvaro Pacheco, to write stories about themes related to sex. Part of the reason she wrote so much may have been due to her being unexpectedly fired from Jornal do Brasil at the end of 1973, which increased her financial pressure. She began painting and worked more as a translator, publishing translations of works by Agatha Christie, Oscar Wilde, and Edgar
Death
After The Hour of the Star was published, Lispector was taken to the hospital. She had a type of cancer that could not be cured, but she did not know she had the illness. She passed away on the night before her 57th birthday and was buried on December 11, 1977, in the Jewish Cemetery of Caju, Rio de Janeiro.