Clarice Lispector

Clarice Lispector (born December 10, 1920, Chechelnyk, Ukraine, Russian Empire—died December 9, 1977, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) was a novelist and short-story writer, one of Brazil’s most important literary figures, who is considered to be among the greatest women writers of the 20th century.

Escaping the Jewish pogroms that were part of life in Ukraine and other parts of the Russian Empire in the late 19th–early 20th century, Lispector at age five immigrated with her parents and two older sisters to Brazil. There her mother died some four years later of syphilis, contracted from a group of Russian soldiers who had raped her. Lispector studied law for a time and then took up journalism.

Her first novel, Perto do coração selvagem (1944; Near to the Wild Heart), published when she was 24 years old, won critical acclaim for its sensitive interpretation of adolescence. In her later works, such as A maçã no escuro (1961; The Apple in the Dark), A paixão segundo G.H. (1964; The Passion According to G.H.), Água viva (1973; The Stream of Life ), A hora da estrela (1977; The Hour of the Star), and Um sopro de vida: pulsações (1978; A Breath of Life), her characters, alienated and searching for meaning in life, gradually gain a sense of awareness of themselves and accept their place in an arbitrary, yet eternal, universe. In 2011 the publishing company New Directions issued a new translation of A hora da estrela and in 2012 issued new translations of Perto do coração selvagem, Água viva, and A paixão segundo G.H.

Lispector’s finest prose is found in her short stories. Collections such as Laços de família (1960; Family Ties) and A legião estrangeira (1964; The Foreign Legion) focus on personal moments of revelation in the everyday lives of the protagonists and the lack of meaningful communication among individuals in a contemporary urban setting. English translations of her stories were collected as The Complete Stories (2015).

Lispector achieved international fame with works that depict a highly personal, almost existentialist view of the human dilemma and are written in a prose style characterized by a simple vocabulary and elliptical sentence structure. She is notoriously difficult to translate. In contrast to the regional or national social concerns expressed by many of her Brazilian contemporaries, her artistic vision transcends time and place; her characters, in elemental situations of crisis, are frequently female and only incidentally modern or Brazilian.