The books by Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector were recommended to me by a Brazilian friend who likes her work. I recently purchased two of Lispector's books, Near to the Wild Heart, her first novel published in 1943, and An Apprenticeship, or The Book of Pleasures, published in 1968. Two books published twenty-five years apart, just to get an idea of how she wrote and evolved as a writer. Based on these two books alone, I can truthfully say that I will not be reading more of her work. It's not that I think that she's not a good writer, I just don't think she is a great writer.
I found it very difficult to get through Near to the Wild Heart. Fragmented is the best way I can describe the book and the experience of reading it. It was disquieting to try to pull it all together, to piece together the substance of her novel. The feeling while reading it was not a pleasant one; I struggled. Not so much to understand what the story was about (a woman, her early life, her husband, his lover, and eventually her lover), but how she chose to go about it. The disjointedness and the fragmentation were jarring. The main character, Joana, is a young woman with considerable mental problems-- a hypersensitive woman who dissects herself and her thoughts continually, ad nauseam. She does not live her life, she rather observes it, as though she stands outside herself. She is hypervigilant about what each thought and utterance means, with herself and with others. She is constantly aware of herself and her thoughts, but much less so of her feelings. Or if she is aware of her feelings (hyper-aware), she analyzes them continuously, such that they are analyzed away into a state of feelinglessness. Suffice it to say that a normal person cannot live this way or does not behave this way; her behavior borders on madness, on craziness, and a normal reader can feel the madness. At least that was the effect on me. I couldn't wait to finish the book; I considered abandoning the book halfway into it, but decided to finish it so that I could evaluate it properly. There were parts of the book where Lispector pulls the narrative together into an understandable story, only to be followed by more disintegration and descent into fragmentation.
I read An Apprenticeship, or The Book of Pleasures, before Near to the Wild Heart. The same tendency toward disjointedness and fragmentation was present, but much less so than in Near to the Wild Heart. Lispector had by this time grown older (by twenty-five years) and had married and had children. Perhaps that had a stabilizing effect on her. In any case, this book had a reasonably happy ending (Lori and Ulysses end up together) but not before Lori undergoes personal tranformation/evolution in order to be able to meet Ulysses at his level. It's a strange book in that he seems to be the mentor and she the mentee, so in that sense it is an unbalanced relationship. She must evolve to his level in order for them to be lovers, per his requirement. I found his behavior to be unkind and cruel at times, and I wondered why she wanted to be with him at all.
Deciphering Clarice Lispector's writing was perhaps an ambitious title for this post. Based on the two books I've read by her, I don't think I accomplished that. But I give myself credit for forcing myself to finish these two novels. Because when she did manage to pull the narratives together, I found myself wanting her to continue to do that, because that's when the books became interesting to me. I understand that others may have different opinions about her writing, and that's fine. But I don't think reading should be a chore, and reading her books was just that.
