For the first time in English, all the stories that made Clarice Lispector a Brazilian legend are collected together in one volume: from teenagers coming into awareness of their sexual and artistic powers to humdrum housewives whose lives are shattered by unexpected epiphanies to animals too deeply loved and then eaten. From one of the greatest modern writers, these eighty-five stories, gathered from the nine collections published during her lifetime, follow Clarice Lispector throughout her life.
Reviewed by Michael Marett-Crosby in Slightly Foxed Issue 37.
Hurricane Clarice
MICHAEL MARETT-CROSBY
The sleeper lounge is old-fashioned British Rail, all tartan carpet, smeared tables and microwave cuisine. Tonight it contains a gathering of solitaries, all of us making separate journeys to London. The man beside me is still working, though it’s nearly ten o’clock.
By chance we order the same whisky. We raise our plastic glasses, embarrassed in a very British way. I want to encourage him. He is at war with a pile of papers. But he is wishing me good luck as well. He has been glancing at the author’s face on the back cover of my novel. She does rather stare.
Her name is Clarice Lispector, one of the most original and fascinating writers of the twentieth century. She is the author of nine novels and several collections of short stories, all written in Portuguese. She was born in 1920, not as Clarice but as Chaya, the daughter of Ukrainian Jewish parents. From this beginning she was to become, improbably, the doyenne of Brazilian literature . . .
Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 37, Spring 2013
‘One of the hidden geniuses of the twentieth century’ Colm Tóbín
Hurricane Clarice
The sleeper lounge is old-fashioned British Rail, all tartan carpet, smeared tables and microwave cuisine. Tonight it contains a gathering of solitaries, all of us making separate journeys to London....
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