“I can’t sum myself up because it’s impossible to add up a chair and two apples. I’m a chair and two apples. And I don’t add up,” states the female narrator of Clarice Lispector’s novel Agua Viva (The Stream of Life) as she pursues a narrative quest of self-discovery only to realize that her identity is compound and words cannot always convey what she actually feels. If the apple symbolizes knowledge and the chair an aspect of domesticity, this voice is affirming that she is greater than her gender. Despite an intense struggle with words, Lispector’s female protagonists nevertheless burst forth, sparked by unexpected epiphanies that lead them to probe their existential condition with a self-conscious awareness of the limitations of language and of their beleaguered situations. These narrator/protagonists also manifest experiences of displacement and otherness that, rather than inducing alienation, expand the knowledge of self, as exemplified by the words of another female narrator, GH: “He who lives totally is living for others.” Lispector’s prose also transmits the evocative and spiritual sense of the ineffable, an openness to a form of mystical and linguistic reception that transcends the concreteness of the written word to enable her characters and readers to experience a lyrical sense of the sublime, the “unsayable,” which scholar and theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel, in Man Is Not Alone (1951), recognized as “the root of man’s creative activities in art, thought and noble living.”

Clarice Lispector was born on December 10, 1920, in Tchetchelnik, Ukraine (Russia) to Jewish emigrants, Marieta (1889–1930) and Pedro (Pinkhas) Lispector (1885–1940), who were fleeing from the pogroms with their two daughters, Elisa and Tânia. Traveling by ship, they arrived in Brazil’s underdeveloped northeast in 1921, when Clarice was just two months old. Later in life, Lispector often spoke of being born in “flight” and how that affected her sense of not quite belonging, especially to herself. In 1925 the family moved to the major northeastern coastal city of Recife. Marieta, mother and homemaker, a sickly woman, died in 1930 when Clarice was nine years old. In 1933 Pedro and his three daughters moved to Rio de Janeiro, where the second daughter, Tânia Lispector Kaufmann (b. 1915), settled. The eldest, Elisa Lispector (1911–1989), became a nationally known writer of psychological fiction and a semi-autobiographical novel In Exile (1948) about a Jewish family not unlike the Lispectors. Although Yiddish was the language spoken at home, Clarice, as the youngest, supposedly spoke only Brazilian Portuguese, her first language, despite her Russian nationality that she abandoned when she became a naturalized Brazilian in 1943.

From 1930–1931 Lispector attended the Hebrew-Yiddish-Brazilian school in Recife where she performed well, as she did at all the schools she attended. Clarice’s father, an intelligent man who read the Bible regularly and loved books and music, was first a peddler (clientelchick) and then a merchant who had to support his family instead of pursuing his own love of study. According to his daughter Tânia Kaufman, Pedro Lispector was a very progressive man who possessed much biblical culture, knew Yiddish very well, and regularly read the New York Yiddish newspaper Der Tog. Consequently the Lispectors led a “Yiddishkeit” family lifestyle during Clarice’s childhood, until the death of her mother. Pedro, who died in 1940, encouraged his daughters’ motivation to succeed but did not live to see their accomplishments: all three became writers, two of fiction and one of technical books. Recalling the family’s first years of economic hardships in the northeast, Lispector frequently expressed her empathy with Brazil’s impoverished masses.

Much criticism of Lispector’s reticence about her Jewish heritage stemmed from her rapid assimilation into Brazilian culture and the absence of Jewish references in most of her work. While Brazil’s intense nationalist spirit in the 1930s and 1940s and the climate of sporadic antisemitism, fascism, and xenophobia may have contributed to her not publicly displaying her roots, recent scholarship reveals that there is indeed a strong Jewish impulse in her work, though it contrasts with the overt ethnically driven narratives written by immigrant voices. Her fiction was neither ethnic nor naturalistically bound. She resisted categorization and even rejected the feminist label, despite the predominance of female characters in her fiction. The outstanding Brazilian and Latin American female writer of her generation, Clarice Lispector wrote lyrically inspirational works, employing an original use of language and revealing an intense search for understanding the enigmas of existence, the problems of self and subjectivity as well as identity difference, and the condition of psychological and spiritual exile. She also experimented with different forms of the novel, extensive interior monologues, and narrative techniques such as stream-of-consciousness that led to comparisons with modernists Virginia Woolf and James Joyce.

Lispector began writing stories as a young teenager. She studied penal law at the National School of Law in Rio de Janeiro from 1940 to 1943, while working as a copy editor and then journalist for various Carioca newspapers as well as for the student university newspaper, in which she published some stories. Lispector graduated, but never practiced law. During a ten-month period beginning in 1942 she feverishly wrote her first novel, Near to the Wild Heart, which was published in 1943, the year she married one of her fellow law classmates, Maury Gurgel Valente, who became a Brazilian diplomat in 1944. In that year the couple left Rio for a six-month assignment in the north of Brazil, followed by a series of international posts that took them away from Brazil between 1944 and 1959, except for short annual visits.

Awarded the prestigious Graça Aranha national prize for fiction in 1944, Lispector’s first novel, seemingly autobiographical in part, was heralded by the renowned Brazilian critic Antonio Candido as “an impressive attempt at taking our awkward language style to realms barely explored, forcing it to adapt to a way of thinking filled with mystery.” That way of thinking was later labeled by the critic Olga de Sá as “ontological questioning,” already evident in the identity quest of her first female protagonist, Joana, whose character and search merge with the narrative process itself, thereby questioning the relationship between reality and fiction/language or being and consciousness, as exemplified by these words of the narrator, GH: “Living isn’t courage, knowing that you’re living, that’s courage.”

During her period abroad in Italy, Switzerland, and England, with trips to France and Spain, Lispector fulfilled the duties of a diplomat’s wife but was unhappy in this role; as one of her friends stated at the time of her death: “She was anti-diplomatic. This was funny because she married a diplomat…No false refinement. She didn’t put on airs. She was incapable of being conventional.” Her first son, Pedro, was born in Berne in 1948 and her second son, Paulo, in 1953 in Washington, D.C., where the family resided from 1952 to 1959. As a result of her burgeoning career, problems in the marriage led Lispector to return to Rio with her two sons in 1959 and this move resulted in the couple’s legal separation in 1968. While in Europe Lispector wrote and published two novels, The Candelabrum (1946) and The Besieged City (1949), which deal respectively with a young woman’s “self-enlightenment” and a woman’s consciousness and drive. These novels display neither overt Jewish references nor her reaction to the Holocaust. While one wonders what it must have been like to be a Jewish woman living in Europe at the end of World War II, only The Besieged City contains an allegorically disguised narrative about a strongly chauvinistic climate that could evoke the Nazi terror.

Later, during her stay in Washington, Lispector worked on her famous short story collection Family Ties, which portrayed the social and familial ties that often bind and stifle women, especially middle-class wives and mothers. She also completed many drafts of her long existential novel, The Apple in the Dark. Both of these works, published respectively in 1960 and 1961, won prestigious literary awards. The 1960s and 1970s were productive periods for Lispector—six novels, seven collections of stories, and four children’s books. Obliged by economic need to work regularly as a journalist, she wrote a weekly column for the national daily newspaper, O Jornal do Brasil, between August 1967 and December 1973. Known as crônicas (chronicles), these anecdotal pieces sometimes included bits and pieces of her novels and stories. These “Saturday conversations,” as she called them, were later compiled into a 781-page volume, Discovering the World, published in 1984 and, in an abridged version, Selected Crônicas, in 1996. Except for a number of short tourist trips and a return visit to her childhood city in the Northeast a year before she died, Lispector made Rio de Janeiro her home until her death of cancer on December 9, 1977.

Lispector’s discursive universe stems in part from her Jewish sensibility, which subtly interweaves metaphors and motifs reflective of Jewish biblical and diasporic experiences. In The Passion According to GH, Lispector has her narrator suffer cultural and ontological otherness by drawing upon the desert as a figurative space of displacement to evoke the non-religious struggle for redemption or spiritual passion. The following passage from this novel demonstrates the struggle of metaphorically marching through the desert and ironically without a star to guide her until she finds the strongbox: “And in the strongbox, the sparkle of glory, the hidden secret. (…) I hadn’t found a human answer to the enigma. But much more, oh much more: I had found the enigma itself.” GH thus embarks on a “voyage within” that will dismantle her single/same constructed, ego-centered identity of limited subjectivity and lead her to the deep structural and expansive levels of life. Moreover, GH’s eating of an “impure” cockroach suggests that Lispector is challenging Talmudic taboos and in part is also adapting Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, since the protagonist undergoes a significant “change” of awareness, albeit momentary. Here Lispector is “literally eating” Kafka to dramatize the metamorphosis of perspective on human existence via writing.

Her less lyrical but incisive story collection, The Stations of the Body, shocked critics and many readers due to its overtly sexual and erotic references to the body, which directly question the duties of motherhood and the sexual repression of all women, both young and old. Lispector’s last book, The Hour of the Star, a novella published one month before her death, introduced the public to a “new” side, dealing with sociological themes of economic and social oppression via a poor, ill-educated and unheroic female character, Macabéa, named after the heroic Maccabees. By inversion, Lispector creates a complex narrative voice that is ironically male but sympathetically female to dramatize not only patriarchal and socio-economic oppression, but also how the unheroic resistance of Macabéa against all odds, even death, represents the “spark” of life that is so frequently ignored and violated by the privileged of the world. It is this spark that characterizes Clarice Lispector as an author and woman of spirit.

In Portuguese

Near to the Wild Heart (1943).

The Candelabrum (1946).

The Besieged City (1949).

Some Stories (1952).

Family Ties (1960).

The Apple in the Dark (1961).

The Passion According to GH (1964).

The Foreign Legion (1964).

An Apprenticeship, or the Book of Delights (1969).

The Stream of Life (1973).

The Stations of the Body (1974).

Where You Were at Night (1974).

The Hour of the Star (1977).

A Breath of Life (1978).

Discovering the World (1984).

Selected Crônicas (1992).

Translations

Family Ties, translated by Giovanni Pontiero. Austin: 1972.

The Passion According to GH, translated by Ronald W. Sousa. Minneapolis: 1988.

The Stream of Life, translated by Elizabeth Lowe and Earl Fitz. Minneapolis: 1989.

Near to the Wild Heart, translated by Giovanni Pontiero. New York: 1990.

The Hour of the Star, translated by Giovanni Pontiero. New York: 1992.

The Apple in the Dark, translated by Gregory Rabassa. New York: 1995.

The Complete Stories, translated by Katrina Dodson, edited by Benjamin Moser. New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2015.