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Água Viva
This novel is considered the greatest work of fiction by the Brazilian writer: the New York Times Book Review called "the premier Latin American woman prose writer of this century." An intense and lyrical work, it chronicles its female protagonist's journey of self-discovery and self-affirmation.
88 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 1973
2,209 people are currently reading
61k people want to read
About the author
Clarice Lispector
236books6,831followersClarice Lispector was a Brazilian writer. Acclaimed internationally for her innovative novels and short stories, she was also a journalist. Born to a Jewish family in Podolia in Western Ukraine, she was brought to Brazil as an infant, amidst the disasters engulfing her native land following the First World War.
She grew up in northeastern Brazil, where her mother died when she was nine. The family moved to Rio de Janeiro when she was in her teens. While in law school in Rio she began publishing her first journalistic work and short stories, catapulting to fame at age 23 with the publication of her first novel, 'Near to the Wild Heart' (Perto do Coração Selvagem), written as an interior monologue in a style and language that was considered revolutionary in Brazil.
She left Brazil in 1944, following her marriage to a Brazilian diplomat, and spent the next decade and a half in Europe and the United States. Upon return to Rio de Janeiro in 1959, she began producing her most famous works, including the stories of Family Ties (Laços de Família), the great mystic novel The Passion According to G.H. (A Paixão Segundo G.H.), and the novel many consider to be her masterpiece, Água Viva. Injured in an accident in 1966, she spent the last decade of her life in frequent pain, steadily writing and publishing novels and stories until her premature death in 1977.
She has been the subject of numerous books and references to her, and her works are common in Brazilian literature and music. Several of her works have been turned into films, one being 'Hour of the Star' and she was the subject of a recent biography, Why This World, by Benjamin Moser.
She grew up in northeastern Brazil, where her mother died when she was nine. The family moved to Rio de Janeiro when she was in her teens. While in law school in Rio she began publishing her first journalistic work and short stories, catapulting to fame at age 23 with the publication of her first novel, 'Near to the Wild Heart' (Perto do Coração Selvagem), written as an interior monologue in a style and language that was considered revolutionary in Brazil.
She left Brazil in 1944, following her marriage to a Brazilian diplomat, and spent the next decade and a half in Europe and the United States. Upon return to Rio de Janeiro in 1959, she began producing her most famous works, including the stories of Family Ties (Laços de Família), the great mystic novel The Passion According to G.H. (A Paixão Segundo G.H.), and the novel many consider to be her masterpiece, Água Viva. Injured in an accident in 1966, she spent the last decade of her life in frequent pain, steadily writing and publishing novels and stories until her premature death in 1977.
She has been the subject of numerous books and references to her, and her works are common in Brazilian literature and music. Several of her works have been turned into films, one being 'Hour of the Star' and she was the subject of a recent biography, Why This World, by Benjamin Moser.
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July 18, 2024
I lose the identity of the world inside myself and exist without guarantees. I achieve whatever is achievable but I live the unachievable and the meaning of me and the world and you isn't obvious. It's fantastic, and I handle myself in these moments with immense delicacy. Is God a form of being:' the abstraction that materializes in the nature of all that exists:' My roots are in the divine shadows. Drowsy roots. Wavering in the dark shadows.
I am what I am,
I am sinful I am virtuous,
I am filth I am unstained,
I am ugly I am beautiful,
I am chaos I am order,
I am despair I am exultation,
I am black I am white,
I am privileged I am underprivileged,
I am fortune I am unfortune,
I am fire I am water,
I am tree I am obelisk,
I am earth I am sky,
I am the Sun I am the Moon,
I am fragment I am the whole,
I am extinct I am existing,
I am created I am annihilated,
I am known I am unknown,
I am success I am failure,
I am body I am soul,
I am logic I am nonsense,
I am captive I am free,
I am sorrow I am joy,
I am devil I am god,
I am heaven I am hell,
I am consciousness I am unconsciousness,
I am existence I am nothingness,
I am intermittent I am perpetual,
I am moment I am forever,
I was ever I will be ever,
I am dead I am alive,
I am death I am life,
I am finite I am infinite,
I am what universe comprises of
I am what universe is: I am the universe.
The abovementioned fragments of thought define essence of the book, if you just want to have superficial taste of the book then I guess that would be sufficient but if you are still reading it then welcome to the world of unconformity. These snippets pop up in front of me, when I finished the book- Agua Viva by Clarice Lispector. One of the most popular phrases- Nihilo ex Nihilo- of philosophy keeps knocking my mind right through the book, which translates to- nothing out of nothing. In other words, it means that universe is created from nothing, there is no break in-between a world that did not exist and one that did, since it could not be created from nothing in the first place. Life starts again with every stroke of death, its perpetual. The universe of Lispector also works on the principle of perpetuity, it may be realized only in instantaneous moments which reduce to nothingness as soon as you try to get hold of them. The title translates to ‘stream of life� as it follows in rhythm wherever it finds way, logic doesn’t have much to say in it, like music or painting, you do not understand it, fully, yet you dance to the tunes of its music. It is life seen by life, may not have meaning but it has the same lack of meaning that pulsating vein has. The world of Clarice lispector is strange but absolutely like our own, formed about a strange vortex in which the matter, antimatter and soul of the universe is being churned up through the labor pains of creation to produce life, as we know in our everyday sense. Does it mean it’s about the act of creation? Or about the very act of writing about that ‘act�. Well one may not be able to tell about it confidently, it’s not in binary, it’s infiniteness and that’s the universe of Lispector, perhaps that what life itself is.
The book, as some of you might have already guessed by now, is without any characters, storylines, narrators, messages or anything else since there is no need of anything or anyone for that matter, as there is no such need in life itself. It moves on no matter what, perpetually, people, places, monuments, forms of life, planets, galaxies, universes are all temporary, just silly moments in the infiniteness of time which is perpetual. Lispector uses the meditation on the creation and the individual to convey what life is- boundless, free, incomprehensible by any logic or being. She uses the words she write as raw materials for the act of creation instead of using them as any vehicles to convey something else, as authors usually do. She keeps on creating- recreating the world through her words by instantaneous moments which vanishes to thin air as soon as one tries to comprehend them. She formulates a dense web of thoughts, facts and objects through the words, an interior monologue through which she reflects on life, what constitutes it, its being.
Agua Viva reminds me of The Book of Disquiet by Frenando Pessoa as both seem to address the similar issue- the life. You must have read about minimalist approach adopted by Ernest Hemingway and Samuel Beckett, which is characterized by an economy with words and a focus on surface description, but Lispector’s approach is somewhat different than that. It’s like trimming of grass until you find what you are looking for, the author here trims the narrative till its bare of everything which is superfluous and truth, just naked truth, manifests itself from underneath it. Clarice Lispector herself said once that it was ‘spineless� writing which did not have any figure, reference or object to hold upon. The text has Nietzsche-esque aphorisms, which have being of their own gleaming from the words themselves, which questions the reality, its finiteness, identity, existence as the aphorisms of Pessoa force you to. These highly styled and remarkably condensed paragraphs may be read in stand alone manner however, the author manages to weave them in together through theme of being and nothingness, the flow of sentences she manages to maintain help her to transcends the ordinary limits of expression. It is somewhat like music which you hear to enjoy the rhythm though you do not always understand it or like painting, there are sensations which transform into ideas which free themselves from the slavery of words.
The book takes you through the ticklish sojourn of being and nothingness, about the being of an individual, being of the text itself and the underlying meaning or non-meaning it might be conveying; how it takes birth from nothingness to eventually become one with nothingness. And what this being comprises of, what is it about? Is it something which lies beneath us, hidden deep inside our heart to be guarded against the ravages of hell of nothingness? Or is it something related to our soul or the soul itself? Is it something from our brain, what we call consciousness which may act on our voluntary actions or unconsciousness which is beyond our voluntary control? Is it what our appearances comprise of- shape, size, color, or anything else tangible or is it intangible- the infinite, so does it mean it’s God. Actually, being comprises of everything about an individual, his color, shape, size, body, soul, consciousness, unconsciousness, thoughts, feeling everything constitutes the being. The being of an individual is not separated from that of other individuals, an object, world, or universe per se since everything originates from the same soup, in fact it was there forever and will be there forever. It all branches off the plant primula, which transforms into variegated forms which eventually annihilate, only to give birth life again- it is perpetual. We are one- the same universe which we comprise of, which we hold in ourselves, which hold us in it.
That very spring I was given the plant called primula. It's so mysterious that in its mystery is contained the inexplicable part of nature. It doesn't look at all unique. But on the precise day when spring starts its leaves die and in their place are born closed flowers that have an extremely dumbfounding feminine and masculine perfume.
The author takes you through the excruciating, probing questions of existence as it is. It may not be easy ride through the life since existence may be absurd, demanding, surprising and unmanageable since, at times, you may have to do away with morals which may not sustain the probing look of existence. The words of this wonderful book may sometimes pierce your heart like a dagger as they speak about bare truth which is generally harsh, probing and penetrating. However, the un-named narrator of the book is as brave as an individual could be in life, as she/ he does not surrender to the vagaries of life, the savage inquiry about her/ his being, authenticity of her/ his existence; instead the narrator chooses the joy of life over it. The existence itself may be cruel but the narrator realizes that perhaps the salvation lies in impersonal love and he rebels against the ‘God' (who may be the author), realizes ephemerality of existence-his being and chooses joy over sadness- the joy of being, joy of being alive.
My only salvation is joy. An atonal joy inside the essential it. Doesn't that make senser Well it must. Because it's too cruel to know that life is just one time and that we have no guarantee outside our faith in shadows-because it's too cruel, so I respond with the purity of an untamable happiness. I refuse to be sad. Let us be joyful.
Clarice Lispector pushes the limits of her language as far as she could without risking incoherence. Despite the obvious strangeness and non-confinement of her text due to her unique choices of words, syntax and grammar, she manages to produce vibrant, lively sentences which veer towards abstraction without ever quite reaching there, as if she wants to rearrange the conventional language through subtle but surprising juxtapositions to find meanings which are unthinkable and unimaginable. I really can’t say how her prose appears in its original language but translating her must have been an extremely challenging task, for the place of one punctuation might change the meaning of these highly refined sentences. It is a non-novel, a non-narrative, and yet it works within a carefully constructed framework that manages to contain its strangeness inside a unified flow of thought. The narrative is completely devoid of any traditional notions, literature is associated with, you may forget all after finishing the novel but the quintessence, the soul of it will be with you thereafter, perhaps that’s exactly what the author intended with it.
As one would expect, the prose of Lispector is highly emblematic, she talks about death which as been one of the greatest fascinations of human kind, right from the outbreak of civilization. However the treatment given by the author is as unique as her prose, death may be just an event in the continuum of time, perhaps a sort of conclusion of our existence which annihilates itself to transcend again to a living (or non-living) form, but in any case it becomes one with universe and remains so. So death may actually be a kind of explosion as body no longer bear to be a body, and it may be actually a kind of pleasure, selfish though. The mirror is being represented as some sort to portal to understand the enigma of things- life, one has to approach its depth without leaving any traces of his/ her own image upon it. The author uses emblematic beings- “he� and “she� to symbolizes the masculine and feminine spirits of the world- feminine ostensibly being the creative, pro-genitor, caring while masculine full of pride, narcissism and other traits of destruction.
There are apparent traits of post-modernism in the novel wherein anything conventional is strictly denied to realize its existence by the god like hands of the author. She forays into world unconventional through the jagged, hypnotic and mystical prose to come up with cerebrally demanding but intellectually rewarding text which is intuitively sonorous. There is a perpetual ‘you� throughout the novel, to which the un-named narrator addresses to, whenever he/ she wants, you ponders upon the possibilities of 'you', only to realize that the ‘you� is actually you- the reader. The author gives freedom to the narrator to communicate his/ her feelings with the reader through the broken but alive sentences of her, we could sense the feel of metafiction. The text of the novel is self-reflective in nature, as if it has being of its own radiating through its existence, as the other book- The Hour of The Star- of Lispector is. It reminds me of Maurice Blanchot since the text negates itself to reveal true existence of it, it is true being truly self- reflective. Clarice Lispector uses her personal experience and transformed it into an universal poetry through the rearrangement of language and the inter play between the gaps of reality and fiction.
The instant is. You who read me.
Agua Viva is my second read by Clarice Lispector after The Hour of the Star and I enjoyed every bit of it. The book is truly existential as the other ones by the author are. However, if you are looking for something with easy flow of narrative in which you may dive to get fast-moving expedition then this book is not for you. If you are interested in experimental fiction, to make effort to understand what may lies beneath the words and between the lines, then it is for you.
I hear the hollow boom of time. It's the world deafly forming. If I can hear that is because I exist before the formation of time. "I am" is the world. World without time. My consciousness now is light and it is air. Air has neither place nor time. Air is the non-place where everything will exist. What I am writing is the music of the air. The formation of the world. Slowly what will be approaches. What will be already is. The future is ahead and behind and to either side. The future is what always existed and always will exist. Even if Time is abolished? What I'm writing to you is not for reading-it's for being. The trumpets of the angel-beings echo in the without time. The first flower is born in the air. The ground that is earth forms. The rest is air and the rest is slow fire in perpetual mutation. Does the word "perpetual" not exist because time does not exist? But the boom exists. And this existence of mine starts to exist. Is that time starting?
I am what I am,
I am sinful I am virtuous,
I am filth I am unstained,
I am ugly I am beautiful,
I am chaos I am order,
I am despair I am exultation,
I am black I am white,
I am privileged I am underprivileged,
I am fortune I am unfortune,
I am fire I am water,
I am tree I am obelisk,
I am earth I am sky,
I am the Sun I am the Moon,
I am fragment I am the whole,
I am extinct I am existing,
I am created I am annihilated,
I am known I am unknown,
I am success I am failure,
I am body I am soul,
I am logic I am nonsense,
I am captive I am free,
I am sorrow I am joy,
I am devil I am god,
I am heaven I am hell,
I am consciousness I am unconsciousness,
I am existence I am nothingness,
I am intermittent I am perpetual,
I am moment I am forever,
I was ever I will be ever,
I am dead I am alive,
I am death I am life,
I am finite I am infinite,
I am what universe comprises of
I am what universe is: I am the universe.
The abovementioned fragments of thought define essence of the book, if you just want to have superficial taste of the book then I guess that would be sufficient but if you are still reading it then welcome to the world of unconformity. These snippets pop up in front of me, when I finished the book- Agua Viva by Clarice Lispector. One of the most popular phrases- Nihilo ex Nihilo- of philosophy keeps knocking my mind right through the book, which translates to- nothing out of nothing. In other words, it means that universe is created from nothing, there is no break in-between a world that did not exist and one that did, since it could not be created from nothing in the first place. Life starts again with every stroke of death, its perpetual. The universe of Lispector also works on the principle of perpetuity, it may be realized only in instantaneous moments which reduce to nothingness as soon as you try to get hold of them. The title translates to ‘stream of life� as it follows in rhythm wherever it finds way, logic doesn’t have much to say in it, like music or painting, you do not understand it, fully, yet you dance to the tunes of its music. It is life seen by life, may not have meaning but it has the same lack of meaning that pulsating vein has. The world of Clarice lispector is strange but absolutely like our own, formed about a strange vortex in which the matter, antimatter and soul of the universe is being churned up through the labor pains of creation to produce life, as we know in our everyday sense. Does it mean it’s about the act of creation? Or about the very act of writing about that ‘act�. Well one may not be able to tell about it confidently, it’s not in binary, it’s infiniteness and that’s the universe of Lispector, perhaps that what life itself is.
The book, as some of you might have already guessed by now, is without any characters, storylines, narrators, messages or anything else since there is no need of anything or anyone for that matter, as there is no such need in life itself. It moves on no matter what, perpetually, people, places, monuments, forms of life, planets, galaxies, universes are all temporary, just silly moments in the infiniteness of time which is perpetual. Lispector uses the meditation on the creation and the individual to convey what life is- boundless, free, incomprehensible by any logic or being. She uses the words she write as raw materials for the act of creation instead of using them as any vehicles to convey something else, as authors usually do. She keeps on creating- recreating the world through her words by instantaneous moments which vanishes to thin air as soon as one tries to comprehend them. She formulates a dense web of thoughts, facts and objects through the words, an interior monologue through which she reflects on life, what constitutes it, its being.
Agua Viva reminds me of The Book of Disquiet by Frenando Pessoa as both seem to address the similar issue- the life. You must have read about minimalist approach adopted by Ernest Hemingway and Samuel Beckett, which is characterized by an economy with words and a focus on surface description, but Lispector’s approach is somewhat different than that. It’s like trimming of grass until you find what you are looking for, the author here trims the narrative till its bare of everything which is superfluous and truth, just naked truth, manifests itself from underneath it. Clarice Lispector herself said once that it was ‘spineless� writing which did not have any figure, reference or object to hold upon. The text has Nietzsche-esque aphorisms, which have being of their own gleaming from the words themselves, which questions the reality, its finiteness, identity, existence as the aphorisms of Pessoa force you to. These highly styled and remarkably condensed paragraphs may be read in stand alone manner however, the author manages to weave them in together through theme of being and nothingness, the flow of sentences she manages to maintain help her to transcends the ordinary limits of expression. It is somewhat like music which you hear to enjoy the rhythm though you do not always understand it or like painting, there are sensations which transform into ideas which free themselves from the slavery of words.
The book takes you through the ticklish sojourn of being and nothingness, about the being of an individual, being of the text itself and the underlying meaning or non-meaning it might be conveying; how it takes birth from nothingness to eventually become one with nothingness. And what this being comprises of, what is it about? Is it something which lies beneath us, hidden deep inside our heart to be guarded against the ravages of hell of nothingness? Or is it something related to our soul or the soul itself? Is it something from our brain, what we call consciousness which may act on our voluntary actions or unconsciousness which is beyond our voluntary control? Is it what our appearances comprise of- shape, size, color, or anything else tangible or is it intangible- the infinite, so does it mean it’s God. Actually, being comprises of everything about an individual, his color, shape, size, body, soul, consciousness, unconsciousness, thoughts, feeling everything constitutes the being. The being of an individual is not separated from that of other individuals, an object, world, or universe per se since everything originates from the same soup, in fact it was there forever and will be there forever. It all branches off the plant primula, which transforms into variegated forms which eventually annihilate, only to give birth life again- it is perpetual. We are one- the same universe which we comprise of, which we hold in ourselves, which hold us in it.
That very spring I was given the plant called primula. It's so mysterious that in its mystery is contained the inexplicable part of nature. It doesn't look at all unique. But on the precise day when spring starts its leaves die and in their place are born closed flowers that have an extremely dumbfounding feminine and masculine perfume.
The author takes you through the excruciating, probing questions of existence as it is. It may not be easy ride through the life since existence may be absurd, demanding, surprising and unmanageable since, at times, you may have to do away with morals which may not sustain the probing look of existence. The words of this wonderful book may sometimes pierce your heart like a dagger as they speak about bare truth which is generally harsh, probing and penetrating. However, the un-named narrator of the book is as brave as an individual could be in life, as she/ he does not surrender to the vagaries of life, the savage inquiry about her/ his being, authenticity of her/ his existence; instead the narrator chooses the joy of life over it. The existence itself may be cruel but the narrator realizes that perhaps the salvation lies in impersonal love and he rebels against the ‘God' (who may be the author), realizes ephemerality of existence-his being and chooses joy over sadness- the joy of being, joy of being alive.
My only salvation is joy. An atonal joy inside the essential it. Doesn't that make senser Well it must. Because it's too cruel to know that life is just one time and that we have no guarantee outside our faith in shadows-because it's too cruel, so I respond with the purity of an untamable happiness. I refuse to be sad. Let us be joyful.
Clarice Lispector pushes the limits of her language as far as she could without risking incoherence. Despite the obvious strangeness and non-confinement of her text due to her unique choices of words, syntax and grammar, she manages to produce vibrant, lively sentences which veer towards abstraction without ever quite reaching there, as if she wants to rearrange the conventional language through subtle but surprising juxtapositions to find meanings which are unthinkable and unimaginable. I really can’t say how her prose appears in its original language but translating her must have been an extremely challenging task, for the place of one punctuation might change the meaning of these highly refined sentences. It is a non-novel, a non-narrative, and yet it works within a carefully constructed framework that manages to contain its strangeness inside a unified flow of thought. The narrative is completely devoid of any traditional notions, literature is associated with, you may forget all after finishing the novel but the quintessence, the soul of it will be with you thereafter, perhaps that’s exactly what the author intended with it.
As one would expect, the prose of Lispector is highly emblematic, she talks about death which as been one of the greatest fascinations of human kind, right from the outbreak of civilization. However the treatment given by the author is as unique as her prose, death may be just an event in the continuum of time, perhaps a sort of conclusion of our existence which annihilates itself to transcend again to a living (or non-living) form, but in any case it becomes one with universe and remains so. So death may actually be a kind of explosion as body no longer bear to be a body, and it may be actually a kind of pleasure, selfish though. The mirror is being represented as some sort to portal to understand the enigma of things- life, one has to approach its depth without leaving any traces of his/ her own image upon it. The author uses emblematic beings- “he� and “she� to symbolizes the masculine and feminine spirits of the world- feminine ostensibly being the creative, pro-genitor, caring while masculine full of pride, narcissism and other traits of destruction.
There are apparent traits of post-modernism in the novel wherein anything conventional is strictly denied to realize its existence by the god like hands of the author. She forays into world unconventional through the jagged, hypnotic and mystical prose to come up with cerebrally demanding but intellectually rewarding text which is intuitively sonorous. There is a perpetual ‘you� throughout the novel, to which the un-named narrator addresses to, whenever he/ she wants, you ponders upon the possibilities of 'you', only to realize that the ‘you� is actually you- the reader. The author gives freedom to the narrator to communicate his/ her feelings with the reader through the broken but alive sentences of her, we could sense the feel of metafiction. The text of the novel is self-reflective in nature, as if it has being of its own radiating through its existence, as the other book- The Hour of The Star- of Lispector is. It reminds me of Maurice Blanchot since the text negates itself to reveal true existence of it, it is true being truly self- reflective. Clarice Lispector uses her personal experience and transformed it into an universal poetry through the rearrangement of language and the inter play between the gaps of reality and fiction.
The instant is. You who read me.
Agua Viva is my second read by Clarice Lispector after The Hour of the Star and I enjoyed every bit of it. The book is truly existential as the other ones by the author are. However, if you are looking for something with easy flow of narrative in which you may dive to get fast-moving expedition then this book is not for you. If you are interested in experimental fiction, to make effort to understand what may lies beneath the words and between the lines, then it is for you.
I hear the hollow boom of time. It's the world deafly forming. If I can hear that is because I exist before the formation of time. "I am" is the world. World without time. My consciousness now is light and it is air. Air has neither place nor time. Air is the non-place where everything will exist. What I am writing is the music of the air. The formation of the world. Slowly what will be approaches. What will be already is. The future is ahead and behind and to either side. The future is what always existed and always will exist. Even if Time is abolished? What I'm writing to you is not for reading-it's for being. The trumpets of the angel-beings echo in the without time. The first flower is born in the air. The ground that is earth forms. The rest is air and the rest is slow fire in perpetual mutation. Does the word "perpetual" not exist because time does not exist? But the boom exists. And this existence of mine starts to exist. Is that time starting?
November 3, 2019
”I know that my gaze must be that of a primitive person surrendered completely to the world, primitive like the gods who only allow the broad strokes of good and evil and don’t want to know about good tangled up like hair in evil, evil that is good.�
There is an unnamed narrator, an artist who is turning his/her talents away from canvas and paint, and exchanging his/her brush for a pen to try and express himself/herself with words. Now that I finished the book I realize that I have no idea of the sex of the narrator. Maybe there was a designation, but I was happily content to see the narrator as androgynous. Does it really matter if the wisdom being shared is from a man or woman as long as that being shared is wise?
The book is a collection of thoughts loosely tied together with the struggles of the narrator to express a philosophy of life, of feelings, of being. The book shouldn’t really be categorized as fiction, philosophy, or anything. To designate it, to name it, is to tie straps to a book that was meant to be free.
I caught glimpses of the author, Clarice Lispector, peering out at me from where she was squeezed behind every letter I, quietly watching my reactions to her creation. As she was writing this book, she scribbled down thoughts on whatever was handy, ”a check, a piece of paper, a napkin� and shoved it into her purse. They all ended up “smelling of her lipstick�.
She knew she created a lot of anxiety for her editor with every manuscript she sent him, but this one in particular she knew would stretch the capacities of even his kind understanding. Translators had an equally difficult time trying to express what she was portraying without bringing a natural neatness and in the process eviscerating the concept. ”The world has no visible order and all I have is the order of my breath. I let myself happen.�
Lispector had doubts about this book, this “spineless book� that lacked a plot and each sentence was connected only by the fact that they came from the same brain, thoughts born as neighbors, but sometimes as different as Earth to Venus. Writers have always complained about some of their best writing ending up crumpled on the floor because it did not fit the plot. In this book, all Lispector kept was the best writing. All the connecting words that we use to keep the plot on a linear course are missing. The narrative is derailed, and now the train is moving as the crow flies. She wanted to cut a new path over hill and dale, through fences, crosscutting roads, so that her train can be seen where no train was meant to be seen. Words moving like an ocean liner gliding across the plains of Kansas.
The narrator talks about music. The way it makes us feel beyond, in many ways, where paint and pen can take us. ”I gently rest my hand on the record player and my hand vibrates, sending waves through my whole body; and so I listen to the electricity of the vibrations, the last substratum of reality’s realm, and the world trembles inside my hands.� When I can let myself go and just exist, a difficult thing for me, music is different. It penetrates deeper, making the core of me shiver, waking up slumbering DNA, and making me remember things that must exist in a future, or a lost present, or a different past.
”I want a clock woven from threads of solar gold.�
In the beginning, as I was licking the lips as the words were first cast, I was scared. The concepts threw my brain into a panic. I could feel myself sinking through the floor, merging with my chair, becoming something other than me. Things needed to be quiet. I needed just a dash of vodka to calm my nerves. I needed to stay away from mired thoughts caught in quicksand. A log of sanity held me up.
”I am before, I am almost, I am never.�
I was reading her sentences several times, grasping just a little bit more each time until I was nuzzling the edges of understanding. I kept holding the book closer and closer to my eyes as if thoughts were escaping as the words came from the page to my mind. At page fourteen, the mystical language of my brain turned some ancient keys, bricks shifted, walls buckled, and I was suddenly able to see more clearly what she was trying to tell me.
Gregory Rabassa, who translated one of her books into English, dedicated a whole chapter to her in his memoir. “The first thing I remember of her?� he said in an interview with the Forward. “Her physical beauty. When I first met her, I was entranced by her; she looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf � a good combination. She had eyes that may go back to her Ukrainian past, what Thomas Mann called krirgiesen Augen in ‘Magic Mountain.’� She may have been born in the Ukraine, but she was a Brazilian through and through.
”I follow the tortuous path of roots bursting the earth, I have a gift for passion, in the bonfire of a dry trunk I contort in the blaze.�
Don’t be afraid. Take hold of the snake’s tail and let yourself be pulled through the tall grass. What better way to meet a different version of yourself.
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There is an unnamed narrator, an artist who is turning his/her talents away from canvas and paint, and exchanging his/her brush for a pen to try and express himself/herself with words. Now that I finished the book I realize that I have no idea of the sex of the narrator. Maybe there was a designation, but I was happily content to see the narrator as androgynous. Does it really matter if the wisdom being shared is from a man or woman as long as that being shared is wise?
The book is a collection of thoughts loosely tied together with the struggles of the narrator to express a philosophy of life, of feelings, of being. The book shouldn’t really be categorized as fiction, philosophy, or anything. To designate it, to name it, is to tie straps to a book that was meant to be free.
I caught glimpses of the author, Clarice Lispector, peering out at me from where she was squeezed behind every letter I, quietly watching my reactions to her creation. As she was writing this book, she scribbled down thoughts on whatever was handy, ”a check, a piece of paper, a napkin� and shoved it into her purse. They all ended up “smelling of her lipstick�.
She knew she created a lot of anxiety for her editor with every manuscript she sent him, but this one in particular she knew would stretch the capacities of even his kind understanding. Translators had an equally difficult time trying to express what she was portraying without bringing a natural neatness and in the process eviscerating the concept. ”The world has no visible order and all I have is the order of my breath. I let myself happen.�
Lispector had doubts about this book, this “spineless book� that lacked a plot and each sentence was connected only by the fact that they came from the same brain, thoughts born as neighbors, but sometimes as different as Earth to Venus. Writers have always complained about some of their best writing ending up crumpled on the floor because it did not fit the plot. In this book, all Lispector kept was the best writing. All the connecting words that we use to keep the plot on a linear course are missing. The narrative is derailed, and now the train is moving as the crow flies. She wanted to cut a new path over hill and dale, through fences, crosscutting roads, so that her train can be seen where no train was meant to be seen. Words moving like an ocean liner gliding across the plains of Kansas.
The narrator talks about music. The way it makes us feel beyond, in many ways, where paint and pen can take us. ”I gently rest my hand on the record player and my hand vibrates, sending waves through my whole body; and so I listen to the electricity of the vibrations, the last substratum of reality’s realm, and the world trembles inside my hands.� When I can let myself go and just exist, a difficult thing for me, music is different. It penetrates deeper, making the core of me shiver, waking up slumbering DNA, and making me remember things that must exist in a future, or a lost present, or a different past.
”I want a clock woven from threads of solar gold.�
In the beginning, as I was licking the lips as the words were first cast, I was scared. The concepts threw my brain into a panic. I could feel myself sinking through the floor, merging with my chair, becoming something other than me. Things needed to be quiet. I needed just a dash of vodka to calm my nerves. I needed to stay away from mired thoughts caught in quicksand. A log of sanity held me up.
”I am before, I am almost, I am never.�
I was reading her sentences several times, grasping just a little bit more each time until I was nuzzling the edges of understanding. I kept holding the book closer and closer to my eyes as if thoughts were escaping as the words came from the page to my mind. At page fourteen, the mystical language of my brain turned some ancient keys, bricks shifted, walls buckled, and I was suddenly able to see more clearly what she was trying to tell me.
Gregory Rabassa, who translated one of her books into English, dedicated a whole chapter to her in his memoir. “The first thing I remember of her?� he said in an interview with the Forward. “Her physical beauty. When I first met her, I was entranced by her; she looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf � a good combination. She had eyes that may go back to her Ukrainian past, what Thomas Mann called krirgiesen Augen in ‘Magic Mountain.’� She may have been born in the Ukraine, but she was a Brazilian through and through.
”I follow the tortuous path of roots bursting the earth, I have a gift for passion, in the bonfire of a dry trunk I contort in the blaze.�
Don’t be afraid. Take hold of the snake’s tail and let yourself be pulled through the tall grass. What better way to meet a different version of yourself.
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January 28, 2021
Água Viva � Living Water � in the Russian fairytales living water is a magical substance that heals any wounds and resurrects killed warriors so the story is written to revive our ability to think�
Every single instant is objectless but put together instants become the imagery of life and awareness�
This dramatic representation of personal life is obviously an artistic creation so it may be named quite adequately A Portrait of the Artist as a Mental Abstraction�
Human consciousness is the quintessence of all the things and phenomena that surround us.
Every thing has an instant in which it is. I want to grab hold of the is of the thing. These instants passing through the air I breathe: in fireworks they explode silently in space. I want to possess the atoms of time. And to capture the present, forbidden by its very nature: the present slips away and the instant too, I am this very second forever in the now.
Every single instant is objectless but put together instants become the imagery of life and awareness�
And I am haunted by my ghosts, by all that is mythic, fantastic and gigantic: life is supernatural. I walk holding an open umbrella upon a tightrope. I walk to the limit of my great dream. I see the fury of the visceral impulses: tortured viscera guide me.
This dramatic representation of personal life is obviously an artistic creation so it may be named quite adequately A Portrait of the Artist as a Mental Abstraction�
What beautiful music I can hear in the depths of me. It is made of geometric lines crisscrossing in the air. It is chamber music. Chamber music has no melody. It is a way of expressing the silence. I’m sending you chamber writing.
Human consciousness is the quintessence of all the things and phenomena that surround us.
January 21, 2025
One long stream of consciousness that reads like a poem, sometimes even a prayer, a spiritual awakening and philosophical pondering. Dare I say even a witches� awakening? I don't know - there's something there. I think you can get from this book what you want to get from it. So many beautiful lines that I know I will be coming back to often in the future.
February 23, 2025
I have had my first encounter with this Brazilian author in a long time in my TBR. Clarice Lispector is one of the great Brazilian writers. Coming from a family of Ukrainian immigrants who fled the Jewish pogroms at the beginning of the last century, she made her place in South American literature.
Agua Viva is a demanding, reflective, and poetic style of writing. When she published her first books, there was talk of Proustian and Woolfian influences, even though she had not read either Proust or Virginia Woolf.
Written in the 70s, I don't know to what extent she was influenced by American authors of previous decades, but like them, and like Proust and Woolf, she strives to live and write the IT, the moment, in all its intensity. In the form of images, sensations, and emotions, she transcribes this passage of experience that is both ephemeral and timeless.
It is a book to read and reread because it is dense, complex, and beautiful.
Agua Viva is a demanding, reflective, and poetic style of writing. When she published her first books, there was talk of Proustian and Woolfian influences, even though she had not read either Proust or Virginia Woolf.
Written in the 70s, I don't know to what extent she was influenced by American authors of previous decades, but like them, and like Proust and Woolf, she strives to live and write the IT, the moment, in all its intensity. In the form of images, sensations, and emotions, she transcribes this passage of experience that is both ephemeral and timeless.
It is a book to read and reread because it is dense, complex, and beautiful.
January 22, 2025
reading clarice lispector’s works often feels transcendental, and this was no different. but this one especially felt like running through a waterfall or a cascade of words rather than physically reading pages. the cadence and rhythm of lispector’s writing in this felt oddly hypnotic, and I felt like i was watching her stretch and fold sentences, making literature malleable in her hands. kind of a spiritual experience in a way.
⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻�
pre-read
love clarice lispector so much i'm trying to pace myself with her books, like how i'm saving jane austen's sandition for my deathbed so i continue to have a will to live.
⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻�
pre-read
love clarice lispector so much i'm trying to pace myself with her books, like how i'm saving jane austen's sandition for my deathbed so i continue to have a will to live.
September 22, 2018
"A fantastical world surrounds me and is me. I hear the mad song of a little bird and crush butterflies between my fingers. I'm a fruit eaten away by a worm. And I await the orgasmic apocalypse. A dissonant throng of insects surrounds me, light of an oil lamp that I am. I then go too far in order to be. I'm in a trance. I penetrate the surrounding air. What a fever: I can't stop living. In this dense jungle of words that thickly wrap around whatever I feel and think and live and transform everything I am into something of mine that nonetheless remains entirely outside me. I'm watching myself think. What I wonder is: who is it in me who is even outside of thinking:' I'm writing you all this because it's a challenge which I have to accept with humility. I'm haunted by my ghosts, by whatever is mythic and fantastical - life is supernatural."
Água Viva is a book I simply cannot easily define, it sits way out there all on its own. A non-novel in the form of a letter?, a novel in the form of an essay on the meditation of creation, a long prose poem?, a collection of obscure thoughts? a metaphysical theory?, regardless, Lispector kept me seduced within her realm in such a fascinating manner. In memory, I can't think of anything else quite like it. And I could have picked a passage of writing from any of it's pages. She paints a dark ethereal and otherworldly canvas, hypnotic, bewildering, and translucent, with metaphors aplenty, and Agua Viva felt like a refreshing break from the doldrums of a typically standard book. She admits to fear and uncertainty, but she chooses to wrap both arms and legs around each passing moment and find joy in just existing. She writes each instant like she is trying to catch her breath, and she does it with such exuberance that the reader cannot help but feel the same strange joys. There is an angular edge to her writing, with a curious monologue of tremendous depth, and it also comes across like a piece of chamber music being zapped by the building blocks of life.
The beauty of this book is undeniable, even if Lispector’s comparisons and images can be tricky to untangle. Indeed, some are impossible to fully grasp (hence the four stars and not five), and the reader’s work involved in navigating them is sometimes frustrating, sometimes delightful, but always felt with a sense of wonder. Much of what Lispector hinges on is the fragile narrative structure thrown over the piece like a thin blanket made out of a human soul, the idea that the narrator, a painter attempting to create art for the first time with words is writing an intimate letter to a single individual, presumably a lover. And yet really, the book could also be read as a letter from the author to her audience of readers. There is a certain intimacy of that contact between writer and reader, especially in light of her raw honesty throughout, which is at times is wonderfully overwhelming.
While this work is deeply conceptual, it mediates constant reminders of the material, sensational world. She profiles flowers and colors, a cigarette burn, she ruminates time and again on her own imminent death, whilst also calling out to us to run our fingers gently over each page.
I am baffled, stunned, and still trying to comprehend what I have just read. It might not have been the right introduction to Lispector's work. (One of her better known novels probably should have been a starting point), but one thing is for sure, she is a writer I will certainly not be forgetting any time soon.
Água Viva is a book I simply cannot easily define, it sits way out there all on its own. A non-novel in the form of a letter?, a novel in the form of an essay on the meditation of creation, a long prose poem?, a collection of obscure thoughts? a metaphysical theory?, regardless, Lispector kept me seduced within her realm in such a fascinating manner. In memory, I can't think of anything else quite like it. And I could have picked a passage of writing from any of it's pages. She paints a dark ethereal and otherworldly canvas, hypnotic, bewildering, and translucent, with metaphors aplenty, and Agua Viva felt like a refreshing break from the doldrums of a typically standard book. She admits to fear and uncertainty, but she chooses to wrap both arms and legs around each passing moment and find joy in just existing. She writes each instant like she is trying to catch her breath, and she does it with such exuberance that the reader cannot help but feel the same strange joys. There is an angular edge to her writing, with a curious monologue of tremendous depth, and it also comes across like a piece of chamber music being zapped by the building blocks of life.
The beauty of this book is undeniable, even if Lispector’s comparisons and images can be tricky to untangle. Indeed, some are impossible to fully grasp (hence the four stars and not five), and the reader’s work involved in navigating them is sometimes frustrating, sometimes delightful, but always felt with a sense of wonder. Much of what Lispector hinges on is the fragile narrative structure thrown over the piece like a thin blanket made out of a human soul, the idea that the narrator, a painter attempting to create art for the first time with words is writing an intimate letter to a single individual, presumably a lover. And yet really, the book could also be read as a letter from the author to her audience of readers. There is a certain intimacy of that contact between writer and reader, especially in light of her raw honesty throughout, which is at times is wonderfully overwhelming.
While this work is deeply conceptual, it mediates constant reminders of the material, sensational world. She profiles flowers and colors, a cigarette burn, she ruminates time and again on her own imminent death, whilst also calling out to us to run our fingers gently over each page.
I am baffled, stunned, and still trying to comprehend what I have just read. It might not have been the right introduction to Lispector's work. (One of her better known novels probably should have been a starting point), but one thing is for sure, she is a writer I will certainly not be forgetting any time soon.
March 19, 2016
Lispector siempre dijo que ganaba con la relectura, y no se si es eso, o simplemente que cada vez que la leo encuentro cosas distintas que me atraen y me atrapan. En esta novela, que no se si debería ser llamada novela como tal, o como prosa poética, o como qué, solo un libro de Clarice, no hay una historia. Son imágenes, muchas ya conocidas de sus otros libros, que para mi su cumbre llega en La Pasión Según GH. Está Dios, la naturaleza, el crear, las palabras, el amor, el presente, el destino.
No importa cómo se llega a el mundo de Lispector, lo importante, y bello, es que entrar en su mundo es una experiencia que no hay que perderse.
============================================================================
La magia de Clarice Lispector en este libro se siente desatada. Locura lúcida, podría llamarse. Una ausencia de anécdota real convierte esta novela en algo mágico. Porque sólo así se puede llamar a lo que hace Lispector con las palabras.
Es un desfile de sentimientos, reflexiones, donde se ven animales, flores, insectos, estaciones, el amamantar, la placenta, dios, el bien, el mal, la soledad, la libertad. Quizás si intento sacar algo de la historia podría ser esto, se trata de una mujer pintora, quien habla a un viejo amor, o quizás sólo habla a quien la lee. Habla sobre la vida, la creación, las palabras, todo contado por instantes. Es una novela de presente puro, no mira hacia atrás ni hacia adelante. Hay que leer a Lispector, porque sólo ella nos lleva hacia un lugar en donde el tiempo no existe, y todo a nuestro alrededor son palabras en movimiento, emociones latiendo.
No importa cómo se llega a el mundo de Lispector, lo importante, y bello, es que entrar en su mundo es una experiencia que no hay que perderse.
============================================================================
La magia de Clarice Lispector en este libro se siente desatada. Locura lúcida, podría llamarse. Una ausencia de anécdota real convierte esta novela en algo mágico. Porque sólo así se puede llamar a lo que hace Lispector con las palabras.
Es un desfile de sentimientos, reflexiones, donde se ven animales, flores, insectos, estaciones, el amamantar, la placenta, dios, el bien, el mal, la soledad, la libertad. Quizás si intento sacar algo de la historia podría ser esto, se trata de una mujer pintora, quien habla a un viejo amor, o quizás sólo habla a quien la lee. Habla sobre la vida, la creación, las palabras, todo contado por instantes. Es una novela de presente puro, no mira hacia atrás ni hacia adelante. Hay que leer a Lispector, porque sólo ella nos lleva hacia un lugar en donde el tiempo no existe, y todo a nuestro alrededor son palabras en movimiento, emociones latiendo.
July 26, 2024
She wrote a whole lotta words in this book and they sounded very nice and unique together. I might not have understood every part but it was poetics and whimsical and amazing nonetheless
January 18, 2025
meant to be savored and not devoured, reread, annotated and quoted !
April 10, 2015
Before you read this review: go find a version of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" and put it on. (I'm sure you have it someplace. John Cale's version is recommended, but just about anyone will do.)
Back? Good. And I guess now I'll have to explain what Cohen has to do with Lispector - I suppose it's possible that Cohen's read the book, but it's not like they're all that closely related (apart from the fact that the book opens with a cry of "hallelujah"). But what they have in common is that approach, that ecstasy that's not necessarily religious but which might be the same feeling that's behind religion - not God, but that which some people fill with God. And the self-referential attempt to capture it all in words.
The Stream of Life is a letter from a her to a him, one long monologue that begins the day she wakes up with the sun and finds that life has gone on. It's an incredible feeling, an epiphany she has to try and catch: to describe LIFE in mere words, all that's beautiful and fucked up, the concrete and the abstract, the bits you can't help but paint or sing. But just like you supposedly can't dance about architecture you can't really write about feelings; the words are just words, they don't cover it. She needs time. She has to manipulate language, duck under their superficial definitions and get at the core meaning, while at the same time trying to stop time, freeze the NOW she's trying to describe before it's passed and the feeling of having understood something is lost to the pale cast of thought and everything becomes just more words.
Where does the music go after you've played it?
Lispector goes deep-sea fishing in her language, soul, philosphy, love, art and keeps bumping into the words we once used to represent emotions rather than the emotions themselves, "the it;" she treats language the way a saxophone player in jazz might treat notes, refusing to play the basic melody but playing around it, surrounding it from all directions, alternately divebombing it and caressing it before restating the theme at the end. The novel - if you can even call it that - is subjective taken to the extreme, the sheer experience of experiencing taken to the degree where everything becomes a subject - everything is "I," I am "it." Being as a conscious act of creation: "I am myself."
"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent," as a dull Austrian once put it. But Lispector isn't a philosopher, she's a fiction writer, and she refuses to be silent; she WILL force language to capture that second of clarity, jubilation, grief, extacy - like a Coltrane who's learned to paint, like Molly Bloom on E. This is prose that wants to top poetry. It takes her 127 pages and I'll be damned if she doesn't manage it. I can't sum it up - that would sort of defeat the purpose; maybe my attempt to use words to describe her attempt to use words to speak of that which cannot be spoken about, that secret chord that goes all the way to the divine, was doomed from the beginning. But on the other hand, if it could be easily summed up we wouldn't need literature, would we?
I don't want to feel the horrible limitations of living only by that which makes sense.
I just know that The Stream of Life lights up what, for lack of a better word, I call my soul. And that it's amazing, mankind's ability to watch everything go wrong and yet stand their with nothing on our tongues but "hallelujah."
Back? Good. And I guess now I'll have to explain what Cohen has to do with Lispector - I suppose it's possible that Cohen's read the book, but it's not like they're all that closely related (apart from the fact that the book opens with a cry of "hallelujah"). But what they have in common is that approach, that ecstasy that's not necessarily religious but which might be the same feeling that's behind religion - not God, but that which some people fill with God. And the self-referential attempt to capture it all in words.
The Stream of Life is a letter from a her to a him, one long monologue that begins the day she wakes up with the sun and finds that life has gone on. It's an incredible feeling, an epiphany she has to try and catch: to describe LIFE in mere words, all that's beautiful and fucked up, the concrete and the abstract, the bits you can't help but paint or sing. But just like you supposedly can't dance about architecture you can't really write about feelings; the words are just words, they don't cover it. She needs time. She has to manipulate language, duck under their superficial definitions and get at the core meaning, while at the same time trying to stop time, freeze the NOW she's trying to describe before it's passed and the feeling of having understood something is lost to the pale cast of thought and everything becomes just more words.
Where does the music go after you've played it?
Lispector goes deep-sea fishing in her language, soul, philosphy, love, art and keeps bumping into the words we once used to represent emotions rather than the emotions themselves, "the it;" she treats language the way a saxophone player in jazz might treat notes, refusing to play the basic melody but playing around it, surrounding it from all directions, alternately divebombing it and caressing it before restating the theme at the end. The novel - if you can even call it that - is subjective taken to the extreme, the sheer experience of experiencing taken to the degree where everything becomes a subject - everything is "I," I am "it." Being as a conscious act of creation: "I am myself."
"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent," as a dull Austrian once put it. But Lispector isn't a philosopher, she's a fiction writer, and she refuses to be silent; she WILL force language to capture that second of clarity, jubilation, grief, extacy - like a Coltrane who's learned to paint, like Molly Bloom on E. This is prose that wants to top poetry. It takes her 127 pages and I'll be damned if she doesn't manage it. I can't sum it up - that would sort of defeat the purpose; maybe my attempt to use words to describe her attempt to use words to speak of that which cannot be spoken about, that secret chord that goes all the way to the divine, was doomed from the beginning. But on the other hand, if it could be easily summed up we wouldn't need literature, would we?
I don't want to feel the horrible limitations of living only by that which makes sense.
I just know that The Stream of Life lights up what, for lack of a better word, I call my soul. And that it's amazing, mankind's ability to watch everything go wrong and yet stand their with nothing on our tongues but "hallelujah."
May 26, 2024
4.5, this reminds me a lot of a conversation i had with my dad a few years ago where he made a really “simple� observation that completely changed how i thought about something that had been a huge source of stress for me in years prior, but because of my proximity to it i just couldn’t see for myself until he noticed it. just crazy to think 80 pages can carry the amount of clarity it does, really enjoyed and definitely see myself revisiting this soon.
February 26, 2025
My, oh my, what the hell is this? Just over 80 pages, but at first I could barely make head or tail of it. Brazilian author Clarice Lispector (1920-1977) offers a chaotic collection of impressions and reflections, indeed a bit like running water or a life giving well, if you like. Intriguing and overwhelming, but also disruptive, confrontational, and sometimes even nauseating.
Only after a while do you recognize certain patterns. “I am� keeps returning: the writer who describes, explores and names herself, who tries to grasp herself in the “now�, with words, even though she knows all too well that she can hardly succeed. At times this seemed like an alternative version of Walt Whitman’s exuberant self-affirmation: “I am obscure to myself. I let myself happen. I unfold only in the now. I am rudely alive.�
And then again those animals that pass by: panthers, dinosaurs, and inevitably with Lispector also the cockroach. She clearly had a thing with animals, or rather: with the animalistic. In the same vein lies the focus on her own physicality. So it is the spark of life that intrigued Lispector so much, and therefore existence itself: “The most important word in the language has but two letters: is. Is�. Ultimately, it is this realization that makes her see what a grace ‘existence� really is.
I can’t really do this book justice in this review. Only: once again this is an overwhelming reading experience, like the one Lispector already provided in , published 9 years before this book. What a writer.
Only after a while do you recognize certain patterns. “I am� keeps returning: the writer who describes, explores and names herself, who tries to grasp herself in the “now�, with words, even though she knows all too well that she can hardly succeed. At times this seemed like an alternative version of Walt Whitman’s exuberant self-affirmation: “I am obscure to myself. I let myself happen. I unfold only in the now. I am rudely alive.�
And then again those animals that pass by: panthers, dinosaurs, and inevitably with Lispector also the cockroach. She clearly had a thing with animals, or rather: with the animalistic. In the same vein lies the focus on her own physicality. So it is the spark of life that intrigued Lispector so much, and therefore existence itself: “The most important word in the language has but two letters: is. Is�. Ultimately, it is this realization that makes her see what a grace ‘existence� really is.
I can’t really do this book justice in this review. Only: once again this is an overwhelming reading experience, like the one Lispector already provided in , published 9 years before this book. What a writer.
October 8, 2019
A água é um dos quatro elementos fundamentais que, segundo a sapiência da Grécia Antiga, constitui a base da Natureza. De facto, sabe-se que este é o constituinte principal dos seres humanos e da Terra. Não é pois de todo estapafúrdio ofertar-lhe o estatuto de pedra angular da própria vida, numa assunção que tem vindo a ser aproveitada por diferentes credos e religiões.
Este texto de Clarice, de difícil classificação � não deveria eu já estar acostumado? -, não se apropria dessas ideias, que deambulam entre o biológico e o místico; antes brinca com o nome de um animal disforme, mais comummente conhecido por medusa. Como ela, a personagem principal lança sobre o leitor os seus tentáculos pejados de ideias, numa orgia de palavras pintadas a aguarela, que deixa o último num estado electrificante. Tais pensamentos bucólicos são gerados ao sabor de um descontentamento notório perante a vida que lhe coube e não a preenche, deixando as pinturas para se imiscuir na escrita, que também garante imagens.
Ao longo deste fluxo de pensamento, ela defende fundamentalmente três termos para que a sua utilização se torne rotineira - "instante-já", "é" e "it". O primeiro associa-se ao arcaico "carpe diem", que exige aproveitar o agora para ter uma total experiência de existência - bem degustada. O segundo, de índole mais complexa, luta contra as regras gramaticais ensinadas e desvincula o verbo "ser" de qualquer predicativo, colocando o ênfase no existir - "pronto e ponto" -, indepententemente dos artifícios que o compõem. Adensando campos da metafísica, o último termo alerta para algo tão patente na escrita de Clarice - a inexistência de género, em primazia da pessoa-animal, que não tem de ficar conotada a algo pura e simplesmente por questões biológicas, mal resolvidas, por vezes.
Sem surpresas para um leitor expedito, este livro não encaixa em nenhuma das normas de estrutura pré-estabelecidas, sorvendo algo de vários tipos, numa amálgama informe mas acolhedora. E, apresentando os pensamentos de um alguém - de forma lírica e desconcertante -, obriga quem o lê a reflectir sobre a sua forma de encarar a vida. Bebam esta água, da melhor nascente!
"O que estou te escrevendo não é para se ler � é para se ser."
Este texto de Clarice, de difícil classificação � não deveria eu já estar acostumado? -, não se apropria dessas ideias, que deambulam entre o biológico e o místico; antes brinca com o nome de um animal disforme, mais comummente conhecido por medusa. Como ela, a personagem principal lança sobre o leitor os seus tentáculos pejados de ideias, numa orgia de palavras pintadas a aguarela, que deixa o último num estado electrificante. Tais pensamentos bucólicos são gerados ao sabor de um descontentamento notório perante a vida que lhe coube e não a preenche, deixando as pinturas para se imiscuir na escrita, que também garante imagens.
Ao longo deste fluxo de pensamento, ela defende fundamentalmente três termos para que a sua utilização se torne rotineira - "instante-já", "é" e "it". O primeiro associa-se ao arcaico "carpe diem", que exige aproveitar o agora para ter uma total experiência de existência - bem degustada. O segundo, de índole mais complexa, luta contra as regras gramaticais ensinadas e desvincula o verbo "ser" de qualquer predicativo, colocando o ênfase no existir - "pronto e ponto" -, indepententemente dos artifícios que o compõem. Adensando campos da metafísica, o último termo alerta para algo tão patente na escrita de Clarice - a inexistência de género, em primazia da pessoa-animal, que não tem de ficar conotada a algo pura e simplesmente por questões biológicas, mal resolvidas, por vezes.
Sem surpresas para um leitor expedito, este livro não encaixa em nenhuma das normas de estrutura pré-estabelecidas, sorvendo algo de vários tipos, numa amálgama informe mas acolhedora. E, apresentando os pensamentos de um alguém - de forma lírica e desconcertante -, obriga quem o lê a reflectir sobre a sua forma de encarar a vida. Bebam esta água, da melhor nascente!
"O que estou te escrevendo não é para se ler � é para se ser."
January 6, 2018
In this short book composed of fragments, Clarice Lispector seeks to create a language to capture the instances that comprise a life. It's a book about dissolving boundaries. Lispector looks to painting and music to provide her with the tools to understand creation and expression in the context of a lived life. The work she has crafted reads almost as a dreamscape, as she moves from meditation to meditation, exploring language, identity, flowers, animals, love, sex, religion:
"I tremble with pleasure amidst the novelty of using words that form an intense thicket. I struggle to conquer more deeply my freedom of sensations and thoughts, without any utilitarian meaning: I am alone, I and my freedom. Such is my freedom that it could scandalize a primitive but I know that you are not scandalized by the fullness I achieve and that is without perceptible borders. This capacity of mine to live whatever is rounded and ample —I surround myself with carnivorous plants and legendary animals, all bathed in the coarse and twisted oblique light of a mythical sex. I proceed in an intuitive way and without seeking an idea: I am organic. And I don’t question myself about my motives. I plunge into the almost pain of an intense happiness� and to adorn me leaves and branches spring up in my hair."
In order to use words in this generative manner, Lispector has had to change how she sees the world, seeing it slant, in a move that Emily Dickinson would recognize:
"It’s that I’m perceiving a crooked reality. Seen through an oblique cut. Only now have I sensed the oblique of life. I used to only see through straight and parallel cuts. I didn’t notice the sly crooked line. Now I sense that life is other. That living is not only unwinding rough feelings� it’s something more bewitching and gracile, without losing its fine animal vigor for that."
Lispector's voyage through words and language, image and song, leads her in the end confronting death. She chooses to end, not with fear, but with hope and joy, "in an allegro con brio":
"My only salvation is joy. An atonal joy inside the essential it. Doesn’t that make sense? Well it must. Because it’s too cruel to know that life is just one time and that we have no guarantee outside our faith in shadows� because it’s too cruel, so I respond with the purity of an untamable happiness. I refuse to be sad. Let us be joyful.
"Whoever isn’t afraid to be joyful and to experience even a single time the mad and profound joy will have the best part of our truth. I am� despite everything oh despite everything� am being joyful in this instant-now that passes if I don’t capture it in words. I am being joyful in this very instant because I refuse to be defeated: so I love. As an answer. Impersonal love, it love, is joy: even the love that doesn’t work out, even the love that ends. And my own death and that of those we love must be joyful, I don’t yet know how, but they must be. That is living: the joy of the it. And to settle for that not as one defeated but in an allegro con brio."
Lispector enacts her joy in words, fixing this instant in time, and by doing so making this work a song, an allegro con brio. Joy in the face of uncertainty, creation as an act of humanity.
"I tremble with pleasure amidst the novelty of using words that form an intense thicket. I struggle to conquer more deeply my freedom of sensations and thoughts, without any utilitarian meaning: I am alone, I and my freedom. Such is my freedom that it could scandalize a primitive but I know that you are not scandalized by the fullness I achieve and that is without perceptible borders. This capacity of mine to live whatever is rounded and ample —I surround myself with carnivorous plants and legendary animals, all bathed in the coarse and twisted oblique light of a mythical sex. I proceed in an intuitive way and without seeking an idea: I am organic. And I don’t question myself about my motives. I plunge into the almost pain of an intense happiness� and to adorn me leaves and branches spring up in my hair."
In order to use words in this generative manner, Lispector has had to change how she sees the world, seeing it slant, in a move that Emily Dickinson would recognize:
"It’s that I’m perceiving a crooked reality. Seen through an oblique cut. Only now have I sensed the oblique of life. I used to only see through straight and parallel cuts. I didn’t notice the sly crooked line. Now I sense that life is other. That living is not only unwinding rough feelings� it’s something more bewitching and gracile, without losing its fine animal vigor for that."
Lispector's voyage through words and language, image and song, leads her in the end confronting death. She chooses to end, not with fear, but with hope and joy, "in an allegro con brio":
"My only salvation is joy. An atonal joy inside the essential it. Doesn’t that make sense? Well it must. Because it’s too cruel to know that life is just one time and that we have no guarantee outside our faith in shadows� because it’s too cruel, so I respond with the purity of an untamable happiness. I refuse to be sad. Let us be joyful.
"Whoever isn’t afraid to be joyful and to experience even a single time the mad and profound joy will have the best part of our truth. I am� despite everything oh despite everything� am being joyful in this instant-now that passes if I don’t capture it in words. I am being joyful in this very instant because I refuse to be defeated: so I love. As an answer. Impersonal love, it love, is joy: even the love that doesn’t work out, even the love that ends. And my own death and that of those we love must be joyful, I don’t yet know how, but they must be. That is living: the joy of the it. And to settle for that not as one defeated but in an allegro con brio."
Lispector enacts her joy in words, fixing this instant in time, and by doing so making this work a song, an allegro con brio. Joy in the face of uncertainty, creation as an act of humanity.
Read
May 7, 2023what the fuck�, again, less than 100 pages n she rewired my brain. full stop.
February 18, 2018
Beguiling improvised abstractions about consciousness via short paragraphs about mirrors, flowers, horses, writing, being, painting perfume in the air, beatitude, joy, grace, how cats never laugh, always being born through thought, "is-ness," "it-ness," maybe best described/reduced as Beckettian Brazilian Beat prose-poetry? Unlike anything I've ever read -- much longer than its 88 pages. At times sophomoric, juvenile, ridiculous, superficial, zone-out-able, but then suddenly so much more, with perfect phrasing like "a horse with the open wings of a great eagle." But then it goes back to proto-stoner silliness like how "now" is always passing, by the time you say "now" it's no longer now, etc. Anyway, my first Lispector in the updated translations (a few years ago, I read The Hour of the Star in an old translation and wasn't into it at all) -- won't be my last.
December 10, 2016
In the market for some rambling unmitigated narcissism? Well take a seat, sonny; have I got the book for you.
Listen. I want to like Clarice Lispector. I keep trying. But for every moment of legitimate brilliance, sparkling clarity, or that thing where an author reads your thoughts way too well...there are TEN moments like this:
"Now is the domain of now."
"Are the facts of life lemon on the oyster? Does the oyster sleep?"
"I'm a heretic. No, that's not true. Or am I? But something exists."
and, paraphrased:
"I have experienced all that is dark and true in life. I know the depths of reality and I will try to convey them to you but unless you, too, have experienced in the exact way I have, you will never understand. I am so profound. I am a painter and a writer. I know another path, I feel deeper than everyone who lives, I am pure chaos and you might think I'm admitting a flaw when I say that but actually I consider it one of the grandest virtues there is. In fact, I am all virtue; every single one of my qualities is a gift and I have no flaws. Read my ramblings and grasp only the surface of me, for I am true brilliance at my core, unfathomable."
Kindly: shut up.
I have no patience for this kind of self-indulgent writing. I can't understand how it's considered a masterpiece. And if I'm missing something, I don't care what it is -- Lispector just does not resonate with me. And I keep trying, but there's always been something in her that frustrates me profoundly ------ I just can't stand the persona she conveys in her writing. Self-absorbed, self-aggrandizing, self-...everything. And fine, that lends her a reflective nature -- even one I relate to -- that's cool.
But I can read my own damn journal entries. I don't need to read hers.
Listen. I want to like Clarice Lispector. I keep trying. But for every moment of legitimate brilliance, sparkling clarity, or that thing where an author reads your thoughts way too well...there are TEN moments like this:
"Now is the domain of now."
"Are the facts of life lemon on the oyster? Does the oyster sleep?"
"I'm a heretic. No, that's not true. Or am I? But something exists."
and, paraphrased:
"I have experienced all that is dark and true in life. I know the depths of reality and I will try to convey them to you but unless you, too, have experienced in the exact way I have, you will never understand. I am so profound. I am a painter and a writer. I know another path, I feel deeper than everyone who lives, I am pure chaos and you might think I'm admitting a flaw when I say that but actually I consider it one of the grandest virtues there is. In fact, I am all virtue; every single one of my qualities is a gift and I have no flaws. Read my ramblings and grasp only the surface of me, for I am true brilliance at my core, unfathomable."
Kindly: shut up.
I have no patience for this kind of self-indulgent writing. I can't understand how it's considered a masterpiece. And if I'm missing something, I don't care what it is -- Lispector just does not resonate with me. And I keep trying, but there's always been something in her that frustrates me profoundly ------ I just can't stand the persona she conveys in her writing. Self-absorbed, self-aggrandizing, self-...everything. And fine, that lends her a reflective nature -- even one I relate to -- that's cool.
But I can read my own damn journal entries. I don't need to read hers.
June 16, 2024
This is a poem (akin to Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, but more existential and less homoerotic). It is disorganized. She starts her novel (can you even call this a novel?) with a quote by Michel Seuphor that illustrates and paints the insides:
This is a horrible place to start with Clarice, I can see how this can seem annoying and pretentious without the broader context of her creative output. But it’s not, there’s so much sincerity and honesty in this work, but only if you’re already acquainted with her and a little mystified. Never have I ever enjoyed her books as much. In fact I enjoyed it so much, that I highlighted a lot. Enjoy!
There must be a kind of painting totally free of the dependence on the figure—or object—which, like music, illustrates nothing, tells no story, and launches no myth. Such painting would simply evoke the incommunicable kingdoms of the spirit, where dream becomes thought, where line becomes existence.
This is a horrible place to start with Clarice, I can see how this can seem annoying and pretentious without the broader context of her creative output. But it’s not, there’s so much sincerity and honesty in this work, but only if you’re already acquainted with her and a little mystified. Never have I ever enjoyed her books as much. In fact I enjoyed it so much, that I highlighted a lot. Enjoy!
I must also write to you because you harvest discursive words and not the directness of my painting. I know that my phrases are crude, I write them with too much love, and that love makes up for their faults, but too much love is bad for the work. This isn’t a book because this isn’t how anyone writes. Is what I write a single climax? My days are a single climax: I live on the edge.
I deal in raw materials. I’m after whatever is lurking beyond thought.
So writing is the method of using the word as bait: the word fishing for whatever is not word. When this non-word—between the lines� takes the bait, something has been written. Once whatever is between the lines is caught, the word can be tossed away in relief. But that’s where the analogy ends: the non-word, taking the bait, incorporates it. So what saves you is writing absentmindedly.
This is not a message of ideas that I am transmitting to you but an instinctive ecstasy of whatever is hidden in nature and that I foretell. And this is a feast of words. I write in signs that are more a gesture than voice. All this is what I got used to painting, delving into the intimate nature of things. But now the time to stop painting has come in order to remake myself, I remake myself in these lines. I have a voice. As I throw myself into the line of my drawing, this is an exercise in life without planning. The world has no visible order and all I have is the order of my breath. I let myself happen.
I knew a “she� who humanized animals talking to them and giving them her own characteristics. I don’t humanize animals because it’s an offense—you must respect their nature—I am the one who animalizes myself. It’s not hard and comes simply. It’s just a matter of not fighting it and it’s just surrendering.
What am I doing in writing to you? trying to photograph perfume.
The true thought seems to have no author.
I’m not going to die, you hear, God? I don’t have the courage, you hear? Don’t kill me, you hear? Because it’s a disgrace to be born in order to die without knowing when or where. I’m going to stay very happy, you hear? As a reply, as an insult. I guarantee one thing: we are not guilty. And I have to understand while I’m alive, you hear? because afterwards it will be too late.
What I’m writing you is a “this.� It won’t stop: it goes on. Look at me and love me. No: you look at yourself and love yourself. That’s right. What I’m writing to you goes on and I am bewitched.
July 7, 2024
What I write to you has no beginning: it's a continuation.
If I'm being transparent about how I view things today, I don't care about frequenting authors on social media to view real-time daily activities typed with accompanying hashtags, or face cards filtered and uploaded as reels or stories. Give me your thoughts in book form, give me your thoughts about books, disappear in real life so that I envision you creating the outer worldly, and when you do emerge, do so as an apparition that makes me hurry to your reading, panel or virtual talk; exist as a voice on the page, a mysterious being who I learn about through your art; lay your feelings bare, render your language lucid and luscious, let me peek through your writing to see you:
Don't be tempted to read this 88-page book quickly, for you will never grasp its beautiful oddity. In fact, this is probably not a read for all. Read it when it calls for you. I read a decade ago and two years ago, yet even after being familiar with Lispector's style, nothing prepared me for this book. It is now my favorite work of hers that I've read. It is sweetly strange and poignant.
There is no story to be found here, as Lispector reminds her reader. It is fragmented, composed of instants, existing as a quest. I see it as a journey in poems, a series of prose poems, a meditative and lyrical journal, a trek to ascertain life, to cope with pain, to understand living, to prepare for death. It is a mixture of all things. It is an instant, and then it is gone:
Back to what I said earlier...can a writer whose thoughts are accessible via daily updates accomplish this sort of existential writing today? This is debatable. Even Lispector had a weekly newspaper column and most of those words appear in . Is it possible for one to disconnect from life, find solitude, and write about it like Mary Oliver successfully did and like Lispector does so well here? Most importantly, would anyone publish such a thing today without the forced social media presence that encourages some authors to become the worst versions of their writing selves? I couldn't help it, these were the thoughts I had as I considered this very strange, captivating, flummoxing, bewitching mixture of prose and poetry, which in some odd way, reminded me of reading not only Oliver, but also Petrushevskaya.
This "thing that bubbles" is a sort of "unconscious realm" that a reader must be prepared to enter. In other words, it is best if your reading habitat is akin. Like Lispector's paintings, it is art that is appealing in texture but is also partly at the mercy of the beholder (a Brazilian musician read it "one hundred and eleven times"). She was a writer, lawyer, painter, wife of a diplomat, Ukrainian and Brazilian, poor and privileged, a woman who lived with pain on a mental and physical level, a writer who was deceased way too early. I'm now invested in learning more about her multifaceted life and plan on reading her biography soon.
If I'm being transparent about how I view things today, I don't care about frequenting authors on social media to view real-time daily activities typed with accompanying hashtags, or face cards filtered and uploaded as reels or stories. Give me your thoughts in book form, give me your thoughts about books, disappear in real life so that I envision you creating the outer worldly, and when you do emerge, do so as an apparition that makes me hurry to your reading, panel or virtual talk; exist as a voice on the page, a mysterious being who I learn about through your art; lay your feelings bare, render your language lucid and luscious, let me peek through your writing to see you:
I want to write to you like someone learning. I photograph each instant. I deepen the words as if I were painting more than an object, its shadow. I don't want to ask why, you can always ask why and always get no answer—could I manage to surrender to the expectant silence that follows a question without an answer? Though I sense that some place or time the great answer for me does exist.
Don't be tempted to read this 88-page book quickly, for you will never grasp its beautiful oddity. In fact, this is probably not a read for all. Read it when it calls for you. I read a decade ago and two years ago, yet even after being familiar with Lispector's style, nothing prepared me for this book. It is now my favorite work of hers that I've read. It is sweetly strange and poignant.
This is not a book because this is not how one writes.
There is no story to be found here, as Lispector reminds her reader. It is fragmented, composed of instants, existing as a quest. I see it as a journey in poems, a series of prose poems, a meditative and lyrical journal, a trek to ascertain life, to cope with pain, to understand living, to prepare for death. It is a mixture of all things. It is an instant, and then it is gone:
Nothing is more difficult than surrendering to the instant. That difficulty is human pain. It is ours. I surrender in words and surrender when I paint.
Back to what I said earlier...can a writer whose thoughts are accessible via daily updates accomplish this sort of existential writing today? This is debatable. Even Lispector had a weekly newspaper column and most of those words appear in . Is it possible for one to disconnect from life, find solitude, and write about it like Mary Oliver successfully did and like Lispector does so well here? Most importantly, would anyone publish such a thing today without the forced social media presence that encourages some authors to become the worst versions of their writing selves? I couldn't help it, these were the thoughts I had as I considered this very strange, captivating, flummoxing, bewitching mixture of prose and poetry, which in some odd way, reminded me of reading not only Oliver, but also Petrushevskaya.
What beautiful music I can hear in the depths of me. It is made of geometric lines criscrossing in the air. It is chamber music. Chamber music has no melody. It is a way of expressing the silence. I'm sending you chamber writing.
This "thing that bubbles" is a sort of "unconscious realm" that a reader must be prepared to enter. In other words, it is best if your reading habitat is akin. Like Lispector's paintings, it is art that is appealing in texture but is also partly at the mercy of the beholder (a Brazilian musician read it "one hundred and eleven times"). She was a writer, lawyer, painter, wife of a diplomat, Ukrainian and Brazilian, poor and privileged, a woman who lived with pain on a mental and physical level, a writer who was deceased way too early. I'm now invested in learning more about her multifaceted life and plan on reading her biography soon.
February 17, 2023
i cut out the pain of which i write to you and give you my restless joy!!!!
October 31, 2012
Sorry Clarice, no dice. I wanted to like it, and I'm not opposed to structureless rhapsody per se, but Leaves of Grass (or even its introverted modernist reflection) this ain't. At first, it's true, the fact that it didn't actually annoy me - when it so easily could have - was a selling point. And I appreciated the suggestion that it should be read quickly, from afar, without too intense a focus. For a while, it kind of worked. Maybe a rereading will help. Maybe its having inspired zero excitement, interest or emotion in me is part of its magic; maybe it must sneak in unannounced to do its work. But I tend to doubt it. Apparently the one book that she herself seriously doubted, this is Clarice Lispector overcooked, undernourished and far less radical/experimental than its proponents would have as believe. Or so it seems to me on first viewing.
August 12, 2020
“Hayatımın bir konusu yok mu? Çünkü şaşırtıcı şekilde parça parça yazdım. Parçalara ayrılmış bir haldeyim. Hikayem yaşamak. Başarısızlık korkum da yok. Bırakın başarısızlık yok etsin beni, başarısızlığın görkemini istiyorum. Benim eğilip bükülen malul meleğim hep kaçıp gidiyor elimden, cennetten cehenneme düşen ve orada şeytanın tadını çıkaran meleğim.�
Tanımlanması çok zor bir metin. Sanki başı ve sonu yazılmamış bir kitabın ortasına düşmüş, kurgu karşıtı, muazzam bir monolog. Her ne kadar “it� arayışının arkasında hiçliğine karışıyor gibi olsa da arkasında terapötik bir dertleşme yatıyor gibi hissettiriyor. 102 sayfalık olmasına rağmen, kopmadan-dikkatinizi sabit tutarak okumak biraz zor. Ama ilk 20-30 sayfayı aştıktan sonra kitabın akışına uyum sağlıyorsunuz. Dili direkt kullanımı çok güzel.
“Ölmeyeceğim, duyuyor musun, Tanrı? Cesaretin yok, duyuyor musun? Öldürme beni, duyuyor musun? Çünkü nerede, ne zaman, olacağını bilmeden ölmek için doğmuş olmak bir utanç. �
Tanımlanması çok zor bir metin. Sanki başı ve sonu yazılmamış bir kitabın ortasına düşmüş, kurgu karşıtı, muazzam bir monolog. Her ne kadar “it� arayışının arkasında hiçliğine karışıyor gibi olsa da arkasında terapötik bir dertleşme yatıyor gibi hissettiriyor. 102 sayfalık olmasına rağmen, kopmadan-dikkatinizi sabit tutarak okumak biraz zor. Ama ilk 20-30 sayfayı aştıktan sonra kitabın akışına uyum sağlıyorsunuz. Dili direkt kullanımı çok güzel.
“Ölmeyeceğim, duyuyor musun, Tanrı? Cesaretin yok, duyuyor musun? Öldürme beni, duyuyor musun? Çünkü nerede, ne zaman, olacağını bilmeden ölmek için doğmuş olmak bir utanç. �
July 7, 2021
Água Viva was an exhilarating and unique experience. The metaphysical ruminations are replete with exquisite synaesthetic, lyrical imagery. Lispector delves into the layers of subjectivity and unveils the fragmented and fabricated nature of reality. She explores a gamut of existential themes, but the central motif running through the book is the perpetual attempt to capture the elusive "instant-now" - the ephemeral moments that mould the malleable memories and lie at the roots of the artistic unconscious.
The next instant, do I make it, or does it make itself? We make it together with our breath... Everything has an instant in which it is. I want to grab hold of the 'is' of the thing.
***
Can what I painted on this canvas be put into words? Just as the silent word can be suggested by a musical sound...I don't paint ideas, I paint the unattainable "forever".
***
...the invention of today is the only way to usher in the future.
***
Listen to me, listen to the silence. What I say to you is never what I say to you but something else instead. It captures the thing that escapes me and yet I live from it...One instant leads me numbly to the next and the athematic theme unfurls without a plan but geometric like the successive shapes in a kaleidoscope.
***
It's just that whatever I capture in me has, when it's now being transposed into writing, the despair that words take up more instants than the flash of a glance.
***
Beyond thoughts there are no words: it is itself...In this land of the is-itself I am pure crystalline ecstasy. It is itself. I am myself. You are yourself.
***
The instant is. You who read me are.
***
What am I doing in writing to you? Trying to photograph perfume.
***
Waiting is feeling voracious about the future.
***
To live this life is more an indirect remembering than a direct living.
***
...it is the story of instants that flee like fugitive tracks seen from the window of a train.
***
...reality has no synonyms.
***
The true thought seems to have no author.
The next instant, do I make it, or does it make itself? We make it together with our breath... Everything has an instant in which it is. I want to grab hold of the 'is' of the thing.
***
Can what I painted on this canvas be put into words? Just as the silent word can be suggested by a musical sound...I don't paint ideas, I paint the unattainable "forever".
***
...the invention of today is the only way to usher in the future.
***
Listen to me, listen to the silence. What I say to you is never what I say to you but something else instead. It captures the thing that escapes me and yet I live from it...One instant leads me numbly to the next and the athematic theme unfurls without a plan but geometric like the successive shapes in a kaleidoscope.
***
It's just that whatever I capture in me has, when it's now being transposed into writing, the despair that words take up more instants than the flash of a glance.
***
Beyond thoughts there are no words: it is itself...In this land of the is-itself I am pure crystalline ecstasy. It is itself. I am myself. You are yourself.
***
The instant is. You who read me are.
***
What am I doing in writing to you? Trying to photograph perfume.
***
Waiting is feeling voracious about the future.
***
To live this life is more an indirect remembering than a direct living.
***
...it is the story of instants that flee like fugitive tracks seen from the window of a train.
***
...reality has no synonyms.
***
The true thought seems to have no author.
September 4, 2016
I think I am just not the right reader for Clarice Lispector. It's my second go at her, and while I can see, intellectually, the point of writing like this, I just fundamentally do not enjoy reading her; fundamentally, it comes down to a virtue slog.
I think part of the problem for me is that hyper-seriousness of the tone. While we can debate along with Pierre Desproges whether you really can laugh at anything -- I lean towards his view, but am still undecided -- the issues that come up in Lispector books are not in the beyond the pale genocide cannibalism dead baby tragedy category, but rather in the serious philosophical issue pile. And I get the point of taking these questions seriously and discussing them seriously, but you get the impression that this is a person, this narrator author person, who simply does not possess the capacity to see the difference between these issues and the life and death and that this is why there is a fundamental lack, not just of humor, but of the possibility of humor, anywhere, on anyone's part, as you read the book. (Come to think of it, this is one of the things I don't care for in quite a bit of actual philosophy, as well. I mean if you want to spend your life pondering the fact that signifiers are fundamentally arbitrary, be my guest, you're not wrong, but you have to, somewhere in deep down in your heart of hearts admit that this is not really a job for an adult in the same way that say, service or teaching or building and fixing stuff is, and admit that there is a funny side to your life's efforts. Taking literature seriously is all well and good, so long as we don't always take taking literature seriously so seriously, if you see what I mean.)
I think what I'm saying is that the writing has an over-dramatic and over-wrought quality that, while I can respect the achievement, I just fundamentally cannot ever love. And Lispector then puts a womany womby spin on it, which... let's just say if I had to hear again that she had eaten her placenta like cats do, I was pretty much ready to hurl the book across the room.
So the stars are the average of what I feel I should feel and what I actually do feel reading the book. I think also that I'm maybe done with her. I'll never hate her the way I hated say, after he got his second try, but it's enough, Clarice, it's enough.
I think part of the problem for me is that hyper-seriousness of the tone. While we can debate along with Pierre Desproges whether you really can laugh at anything -- I lean towards his view, but am still undecided -- the issues that come up in Lispector books are not in the beyond the pale genocide cannibalism dead baby tragedy category, but rather in the serious philosophical issue pile. And I get the point of taking these questions seriously and discussing them seriously, but you get the impression that this is a person, this narrator author person, who simply does not possess the capacity to see the difference between these issues and the life and death and that this is why there is a fundamental lack, not just of humor, but of the possibility of humor, anywhere, on anyone's part, as you read the book. (Come to think of it, this is one of the things I don't care for in quite a bit of actual philosophy, as well. I mean if you want to spend your life pondering the fact that signifiers are fundamentally arbitrary, be my guest, you're not wrong, but you have to, somewhere in deep down in your heart of hearts admit that this is not really a job for an adult in the same way that say, service or teaching or building and fixing stuff is, and admit that there is a funny side to your life's efforts. Taking literature seriously is all well and good, so long as we don't always take taking literature seriously so seriously, if you see what I mean.)
I think what I'm saying is that the writing has an over-dramatic and over-wrought quality that, while I can respect the achievement, I just fundamentally cannot ever love. And Lispector then puts a womany womby spin on it, which... let's just say if I had to hear again that she had eaten her placenta like cats do, I was pretty much ready to hurl the book across the room.
So the stars are the average of what I feel I should feel and what I actually do feel reading the book. I think also that I'm maybe done with her. I'll never hate her the way I hated say, after he got his second try, but it's enough, Clarice, it's enough.
November 25, 2017
başı sonu olmayan bir monolog, bir doğaçlama yaşam suyu. ilk bakışta, bildik roman okuma deneyimiyle, anlaşılmaz ve hatta anlamsız görünüyor. ancak yazar/kahramanın da bizzat muhatabından istediği şekilde okunursa kendini açıyor. metni derinliğine rağmen yüzeysel okumak, anlamı satırlarda değil satır aralarında bulmak gerekiyor basit bir ifadeyle. durmadan, takılmadan okudukça, akışa bir süre müdahale etmedikçe anlatı kendi yolunu buluyor.
yazarın amacının biçim gösterisi olmadığını da belirtmek gerek elbette. metin bir kez açıldıktan sonra bir tür yol arkadaşlığı kuruyor okurla. doğaçlamanın, çağrışımların böyle bir gücü var. düşünce ya da hisler kelimelerin katı kalıplarından kurtuluyor, cümleler çizilmiş sınırlar olmadığında daha çok anlatıyor, yazı özgürleştikçe renkleniyor, zenginleşiyor. bu, çok şeydir. bundan sonra isterseniz tekrar tekrar kitaba döner, isterseniz monologu, doğaçlamayı kendi kelimelerinizle sürdürürsünüz.
yazarın amacının biçim gösterisi olmadığını da belirtmek gerek elbette. metin bir kez açıldıktan sonra bir tür yol arkadaşlığı kuruyor okurla. doğaçlamanın, çağrışımların böyle bir gücü var. düşünce ya da hisler kelimelerin katı kalıplarından kurtuluyor, cümleler çizilmiş sınırlar olmadığında daha çok anlatıyor, yazı özgürleştikçe renkleniyor, zenginleşiyor. bu, çok şeydir. bundan sonra isterseniz tekrar tekrar kitaba döner, isterseniz monologu, doğaçlamayı kendi kelimelerinizle sürdürürsünüz.
October 2, 2012
Totally thin and plotless and long and tedious and it is the hardest Clarice Lispector book I've read so far but I still l-o-v-e it, especially when she gives me such warm closure at the end. How does she do it—take me to places where I don't want to go, opening me up, leaving me with so much for wonder. "Something like the memory of a tall monument that seems taller because it is a memory." Yes. I wouldn't carelessly share this book with friends or anything. I'm going to read all her work available in English as part of a slow self-help series. Água viva.
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I know that after you read me it's hard to reproduce my song by ear, it's not possible to sing it without having learned it by heart. And how can you learn something by heart if it has no story?
But you will recall something that also happened in the shadow. You will have shared this first mute existence, you will have, as in the calm dream of a calm night, have run with the resin down the tree trunk. Afterwards you will say: I dreamt nothing. Will that be enough? It will. And especially in that primary existence there is a lack of error, and a tone of emotion of someone who could lie but doesn't. Is that enough? It is. (74)
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I know that after you read me it's hard to reproduce my song by ear, it's not possible to sing it without having learned it by heart. And how can you learn something by heart if it has no story?
But you will recall something that also happened in the shadow. You will have shared this first mute existence, you will have, as in the calm dream of a calm night, have run with the resin down the tree trunk. Afterwards you will say: I dreamt nothing. Will that be enough? It will. And especially in that primary existence there is a lack of error, and a tone of emotion of someone who could lie but doesn't. Is that enough? It is. (74)
Read
October 17, 2024confused at first, then bewitched.
its hypnotic & otherworldly prose felt all over the place, but somehow it didn’t feel entirely foreign? I felt as if i’d experienced this before � the kind of thoughts and language that only exist in the back of our minds but we do not utter out loud.
questions of the universe, fragments of instant-nows; the notion of living in the moment and grasping onto this very moment that is already in the past as we speak.
it was as if interpreting a work of art out loud. Lispector transcended the conventional way of writing and created a book that resembled a work of art with open-ended interpretations. her poetic prose was undeniably thought-provoking as you would feel when interpreting an art piece. I don’t know how i feel about this book, i neither loved it nor disliked it. what i know is that I’ve never read anything like it and i’m still processing what i just read.
its hypnotic & otherworldly prose felt all over the place, but somehow it didn’t feel entirely foreign? I felt as if i’d experienced this before � the kind of thoughts and language that only exist in the back of our minds but we do not utter out loud.
questions of the universe, fragments of instant-nows; the notion of living in the moment and grasping onto this very moment that is already in the past as we speak.
it was as if interpreting a work of art out loud. Lispector transcended the conventional way of writing and created a book that resembled a work of art with open-ended interpretations. her poetic prose was undeniably thought-provoking as you would feel when interpreting an art piece. I don’t know how i feel about this book, i neither loved it nor disliked it. what i know is that I’ve never read anything like it and i’m still processing what i just read.
July 25, 2024
It begins.
“Because no one can hold me back now. I can still reason—I studied mathematics, which is the madness of reason—but now I want the plasma—I want to eat straight from the placenta.�
And continues.
“Let me tell you: I'm trying to seize the fourth dimension of this instant-now so fleeting that it's already gone because it's already become a new instant-now that's also already gone. Every thing has an instant in which it is. I want to grab hold of the is of the thing. These instants passing through the air I breathe: in fireworks they explode silently in space. I want to possess the atoms of time. And to capture the present�.�
A examination of time, art, her death and the nature of God.
“Because no one can hold me back now. I can still reason—I studied mathematics, which is the madness of reason—but now I want the plasma—I want to eat straight from the placenta.�
And continues.
“Let me tell you: I'm trying to seize the fourth dimension of this instant-now so fleeting that it's already gone because it's already become a new instant-now that's also already gone. Every thing has an instant in which it is. I want to grab hold of the is of the thing. These instants passing through the air I breathe: in fireworks they explode silently in space. I want to possess the atoms of time. And to capture the present�.�
A examination of time, art, her death and the nature of God.
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