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... and I am not understanding whatever it is I'm saying, never! never again shall I understand anything I say. Since how could I speak without the word lying for me? how could I speak except timidly like this: life just is for me. Life just is for me, and I don't understand what I'm saying. And so I adore it.

A plotless, spiritual, mystical and richly dense interior exploration from Lispector that can be difficult, even mystifying at times, but which can also feel exciting, thrilling even, for the way it rehearses the collapse not just of individual, self and all the usual epistemological categories but also language itself - quite an achievement for a piece of text.

Utilising paradox and dialectics, the narrator's voice is lyrical and hypnotic as we experience her existential crisis and the emergence of some kind of post- post-humanism - quite extraordinary for a book written and published in the 1960s: 'We shall be inhuman - as the loftiest conquest of man. Being is being beyond human.'

The imagery throughout speaks more than the textual surface: from the conjuration of a biblical 'gospel' to the evocation of the Catholic mass and the idea of being 'baptized by the world' - but Lispector moves beyond these instances of religious culture to a kind of pure state, 'the nucleus of life' where even language has been extinguished. Is this madness? I've seen some reviews claim so but I'm not so sure.

I have no claims to fully understanding this book and, in any case, thinks it's one which operates beyond an intellectual level where the powerful placement of words is as urgent as whatever meaning we take from them - even while the text itself moves towards a state of what is unsayable.

Lispector continues to astonish me. This is absolutely not the place to start with her work and is one which I will want to come back to after reading further in and about her visions for literature. And what a tremendous job from her translator, Idra Novey, who adds a brief note at the end wishing Lispector was still alive to help guide and validate her word choices.