Okay, I want you to picture something. Imagine
a scene. It's straight out of an old black and
white movie. We're in Washington, D .C., the
late 1950s maybe. There's a diplomatic party
going on. You know, the type of room thick with
smoke, the sound of ice clinking in crystal glasses,
all these men in tuxedos muttering about the
Cold War. Right, the whole embassy circuit, very
serious, very formal. Exactly. And right in the
middle of it all, there's this woman. And she
is just arresting. She stops traffic. She's got
these incredible high cheekbones, these heavy
lidded, intense eyes, a dress that's just perfectly
tailored. She looks, and I mean this literally,
she looks like Marlene Dietrich. The perfect
hostess. The perfect hostess. Smiling, making
the right conversation, passing the canapes.
And this is the thing. If you could somehow peel
back that mask, if you could just get a glimpse
of what was actually happening inside her head
at that moment. I don't know. It wouldn't be
about the dinner party. Not even close. You'd
find a mind that was just churning, churning
with some of the most terrifying, strange and
philosophically dense ideas of the entire 20th
century. And that's it, isn't it? That's the
whole story. That is the hook. That's the contradiction
we're diving into today. The woman is Clarice
Lispector. For a very long time, she was sort
of the secret password among writers, you know,
a kind of cult figure. But today she is seen
as an absolute titan. And not just in Brazil,
where she's from. We're talking about a giant
of world literature, the American translator
Gregory Rabassa. And this is the guy who brought
100 years of solitude to the English speaking
world. So he knows what he's talking about. He
actually met her. Oh, wow. And he said he was
just flabbergasted. That was his word. He gave
us this amazing description and the one everyone
quotes. He said she was that rare person who
looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia
Woolf. I love that quote. I mean, it just captures
the dissonance so perfectly, doesn't it? It really
does. And we have a pretty massive stack of sources
to get through to try and understand her. We're
leaning heavily on Benjamin Moser's biography.
It's called Why This World. It's just fantastic.
Really the definitive work. Absolutely essential
reading. We're also looking directly at her major
novels, things like The Passion, according to
GH, and her last book, The Hour of the Star.
And we've got a lot of the original criticism,
you know, what people were saying about her when
she was alive. And Moser, in that biography,
he makes this incredibly bold claim, and I think
it really sets the stakes for our deep dive today.
What's the claim? He says that he considers Clarice
Lispector to be the most important Jewish writer
in the world since Franz Kafka. Whoa, okay. Kafka.
Kafka. That's putting her in the absolute stratosphere.
That's the highest possible praise. It is. It's
a huge statement. But I think as we unpack her
life and her work today, you'll start to see
why he says that. Our mission really is to figure
out how this refugee, a little girl fleeing the
absolute chaos of the Russian Civil War, becomes,
well, she becomes known as the Brazilian Sphinx.
The Brazilian Sphinx. I like that. We're going
to look at how she completely revolutionized
the Portuguese language. And we're going to try
to get our heads around a life that swung so
wildly between, you know, this diplomatic luxury
and this deep, almost mystical suffering. Okay,
so let's do it. We have to start at the very,
very beginning because her origins are, I mean,
they're incredibly traumatic. She's known as
this icon of Brazilian literature. But she wasn't
born in Rio or even in Brazil. No, not at all.
And you really can't understand Clarice. The
writer, without understanding where Chaya the
Child came from. Chaya. That was her birth name.
Chaya Pinkasivna Lispector. Born on December
10th, 1920. And the setting is a small Jewish
town, a shtetl called Chechelnik, in a region
called Podolia. Which today we'd say is in Ukraine.
Correct. But in 1920, I mean, forget modern borders.
The region was a complete disaster zone. The
Russian Empire had collapsed. The Tsar was gone.
And the Russian Civil War was raging. It was
just absolute chaos. And when we say chaos, we're
not just talking about, you know, a breakdown
of government services. We're talking about brutal
violence. Oh, extreme and very targeted violence.
This was the era of the pogroms. For anyone who
might not know the history, a pogrom is basically
an organized massacre of an ethnic group. And
in this case, in that region, it was aimed at
the Jews. So the Lispector family, her father
Pincus, her mother Mania and her two older sisters,
they were living in the middle of a war zone.
a nightmare the sources describe a landscape
of just sheer terror armies the red army the
white army ukrainian nationalists polish forces
just freelance bandits they were all sweeping
back and forth across the territory villages
were burned there were mass executions starvation
was everywhere it was hell on earth and there's
a particularly dark shadow that hangs over this
period specifically concerning her mother mania
There is. And this is a very delicate subject,
but it's absolutely crucial to the whole story
of the mythology of Clarice Lispector. By the
time the family finally escaped and made it to
Brazil, Mania was paralyzed. Her health was just
in a steep, rapid decline. And biographers have
speculated about the cause. Yes. There's been
significant and I think credible speculation
that her health issues were trauma related, specifically
that they were the result of sexual violence
of rape during one of the pogroms in Ukraine.
The sources are clear that this is unconcerned,
but the weight of that possibility. Yeah. That
is an incredibly heavy burden for a family to
carry in silence. It's immense. And there's another
layer to it, another piece of this family tragedy
that directly involves Clarice. Clarice, or Chaya,
as she was then, was conceived and born during
this period of flight and terror. And there was
an old folk belief, a superstition in Eastern
Europe, that becoming pregnant could cure an
illness. Oh, no. So there's a theory, which Moser
discusses in his biography, that Clarice was
conceived in a... desperate last -ditch attempt
to cure her mother of this creeping paralysis.
That's just heartbreaking. So she's literally
born into the world with this impossible mission
to save her mother, a mission that, of course,
no baby could ever fulfill. Exactly. And so from
the moment of her birth, she's tied to this tragedy
and she carries the guilt of that failure for
her entire life. It's a foundational wound. So
they know they can't stay. They have to escape.
They're desperate. In the dead of winter in 1921,
they managed to cross a frozen river into Romania.
From there, eventually, somehow they get to Hamburg
in Germany and they get passage on a ship bound
for Brazil. Why Brazil specifically? It was one
of the very few countries that was still accepting
Jewish immigrants at the time. A lot of doors
in America and elsewhere were closing. So they
arrived in early 1922. Clarice is just over a
year old. And this is where the first great reinvention
happens. To survive in this new world, they had
to assimilate. They had to blend in. Right. They
couldn't be the Lispectors from a Ukrainian shtetl
anymore? No. They shed their old names like old
skins. Pinkas became Pedro. Mania, the mother,
became Marietta. And little Chaya. She was given
the name Clarice. It's like a magic trick, isn't
it? A new name for a new life. But they didn't
land in the glamorous postcard -perfect Rio de
Janeiro, did they? Not at all. They settled in
the northeast of Brazil, which is a much poorer,
much harsher region, first in a small city called
Maceio, and then a bigger one, Recife, in the
state of Pernambuco. And you just have to imagine
the sensory shock of that. Oh, completely. I
mean, think about it. You come from the freezing
gray, muddy landscape of Eastern Europe to...
the blinding oppressive tropical heat of the
equator. It's a world of intense light, of vibrant,
overwhelming colors, and also of... Really intense,
grinding poverty. The family was poor. Very poor.
Her father, Pedro, became a peddler. He sold
whatever he could. The sources say he struggled
constantly just to make ends meet. But the family's
central tragedy, her mother's declining health,
that continued to worsen. Which leads to the
first great trauma of her life in Brazil. Yes.
Her mother, Marietta, finally died on September
21, 1930. Clarice was just nine years old. To
lose your mother at nine, and a mother whose
illness was so wrapped up in the family's secret
history and your own birth. It leaves a void.
And I use that word void very deliberately because
that absence, that silence, that thing that isn't
there, it becomes maybe the central character
in all of her fiction. She's always writing into
that void. But even with all this poverty and
tragedy, you start to see the spark of the genius
she would become. Absolutely. The sources mention
one specific book that just blew her world open
when she was about 13. Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf.
Yes. And I mean, Steppenwolf is not exactly,
you know, young adult fiction. No, it is not.
It's a dense, philosophical, very strange novel
about a man who feels he's split in two. He has
his respectable human social self, and then he
has this wild, lonely, wolf of the steps nature
inside him. So why does a 13 -year -old girl
in Recife, Brazil, connect so deeply with that?
Because she felt that split in her own life.
Think about it. She was a Jewish refugee in a
deeply Catholic country. She was poor, but she
knew she was brilliant. She was a girl who had
what was then considered a man's mind for philosophy
and big ideas. She saw herself in that book,
and after reading it, she said she consciously
claimed the desire to write. So it wasn't just
a hobby for her. No, it was an existential necessity.
It was the only way she could figure out how
to integrate the wolf and the human inside her.
So the family is in Recife, but eventually...
Like so many people, the pull of the big city
gets too strong. In 1935, her father moves the
family Clarice and her two sisters down to Rio
de Janeiro. He was hoping for better economic
opportunities and also, frankly, as was the custom,
he was hoping to find good Jewish husbands for
his daughters. But Clarice had much bigger plans
than just getting married. She enrolls in the
law school, the University of Brazil, in 1937.
Which we have to point out was an incredibly
prestigious and almost exclusively male space
at the time. This wasn't something young women,
especially poor immigrant women, were expected
to do. It puts her right at the center of the
country's intellectual elite. And she's studying
law, but she's also hustling to support herself.
She gets into journalism. Right. First at the
Agencia Nacional, which was the government press
service, and then at a major newspaper called
Anoite. She's working, she's studying, she's
absorbing everything. And this is where she starts
to find her people. She meets a writer named
Lucio Cardoso. A fascinating character. Cardoso
was a sort of cursed poet type. He was brilliant,
openly gay, which was very brave for the time,
and just a complete rebel. And Clarice fell madly
in love with him. But it was a doomed romance
from the start. Romantically, yes. A traditional
relationship was never going to happen. But intellectually,
they were absolute soulmates. He was part of
this younger generation of artists who were trying
to break away from the old, stiff, formal styles
of Brazilian literature. He saw her talent immediately,
and he encouraged her to be weird, to be different,
to be herself. While she's navigating this complex,
unrequited love with Cardoso, she also makes
a very pragmatic choice. She starts dating a
fellow law student named Mori Gergel Valente.
Mari was the opposite of Lucio. He was the safe
choice. He was solid, respectable, and he was
about to enter a temerity, the Brazilian Foreign
Service, the diplomatic corps. And there's a
crucial detail here about her legal status. Yes,
this is really important. Clarice was a naturalized
citizen, but her citizenship had certain legal
caveats. And to marry a diplomat and be able
to leave the country with him, she needed full,
unrestricted citizenship. So as soon as she turned
21, she applied. It was granted in January of
1943, and she married Maury just 11 days later.
Wow. Talk about cutting it close. It almost feels
less like a romance and more like she was securing
her passport to the world. Or at least securing
her safety. You have to remember the refugee
child still inside her. Marriage to a diplomat
meant protection. It meant status and meant she
would never, ever be stateless again. So she's
23 years old. She's a newlywed. She's a full
citizen. And then in December of that same year,
she drops an absolute nuclear bomb on the Brazilian
literary scene. That is not an exaggeration.
She publishes her debut novel. So what was the
literary world like in Brazil at that moment?
Why was this book such a profound shock? Well,
the dominant style at the time was something
called regionalism. Think of these big, serious,
social realist novels. They were about the great
drought in the Northeast or about class struggles
on plantations or the lives of rural workers.
It was all very external, very sociological,
very... masculine in a way. And Clarice's book
is not that. Not even remotely. Near to the Wild
Heart has almost no plot in the way people thought
of plot. It's the story of a young woman named
Joanna, but it's not about what Joanna does.
It's about the vibration of her thoughts. It's
about the feeling of being alive from one moment
to the next. It's pure interior monologue. And
the critics just went absolutely ballistic. They'd
never seen anything like it. We have a quote
here from the poet Leto Ivo. He called it, and
this is for a debut novel by a 23 -year -old
woman. the greatest novel a woman has ever written
in the portuguese language that's incredible
and another major critic sergio milia said she
had penetrated the depths of the psychological
complexity of the modern soul Immediately, they
all started scrambling for comparisons. They
said, ah, this is the Brazilian Virginia Woolf.
This is the female James Joyce. Because of that
stream of consciousness style, obviously. Right.
It looked and felt like European high modernism.
And the title itself, Near to the Wild Heart,
is a direct quote from Joyce's A Portrait of
the Artist as a Young Man, so the connection
seemed obvious. But here is the part of the story
that I find just so amazing and honestly kind
of hilarious. I know what you're going to say.
She hadn't read them. It's true. True. She had
never read James Joyce. She had never read Virginia
Woolf. That title, that epigraph from Joyce,
it was suggested to her by her friend, Lucio
Cardoso, after he read her finished manuscript.
So he saw the connection. He saw the similarity
in spirit and said, here, use this. It fits perfectly.
That is just mind blowing. It's like she invented
the airplane in her garage without ever knowing
the Wright brothers existed. It proves that her
style wasn't some academic imitation of European
trends. It was organic. It came directly from
her own fractured experience, her own need to
express the world in a new way. She was just
tapping into the same modernist frequency completely
on her own. So she's 23. She's beautiful. She's
a genius. She's the toast of Rio's intellectual
scene. And then she's gone. The duty of the diplomat's
wife calls. In 1944, just a few months after
her sensational debut, she leaves Brazil to follow
her husband, Mari, on his first posting. And
this begins a long, long period of exile for
her. And her first stop is not exactly a romantic
European capital. She lands in Naples, Italy.
In the middle of World War II. I mean, what a
jarring shift. Mari is posted to the Brazilian
consulate there. Brazil had actually sent troops,
the Brazilian Expeditionary Force, to fight with
the Allies in the Italian campaign. So Clarice
literally lands in a war zone. And she doesn't
just, you know, sit in the consulate and arrange
flowers. No, she volunteers. She gets a job working
in a military hospital, caring for the wounded
Brazilian soldiers. This image just fascinates
me. The writer of the interior monologue, this
woman obsessed with the abstract soul and the
nuances of thought, is suddenly dealing with
the most brutal physical realities, blood, bandages,
amputations, death. I think it was a vital grounding
for her. It proved that her obsession with the
body, with suffering, with what she called the
thingness of life, wasn't just some abstract
philosophical game. She saw the absolute breakage
of the human body up close. But she still managed
to keep her artistic life going. She did. While
in Italy, she met the great Italian poet Giuseppe
Ungheretti, and she even had her portrait painted
by the famous surrealist artist Giorgio de Chirico.
And she was writing, she finished her second
novel, The Chandelier, during this period. Yes,
it was published in 1946. It's another very intense,
very difficult book about the interior life of
a girl named Virginia. The reception was respectful,
but it wasn't the explosion that her debut had
been. And one critic, a woman named Gilda de
Mello Isusa, wrote something about it that was
incredibly prophetic. What did she say? She said
Clarice possessed an enormous talent, but that
she would have to suffer the disadvantages of
that talent. Meaning, when you write this way,
when you're this original, it's a lonely path.
You alienate people, you're out there on your
own. After the noise and chaos of wartime Naples,
the diplomatic service sends them somewhere.
Different. Bern, Switzerland. And if Naples was
too loud, too chaotic, Bern was the polar opposite.
It was too quiet. She had a killer phrase for
it. The cemetery of sensations. Ouch. That's
how she described Switzerland in a letter to
her sisters. She fell into a deep, profound depression
there. Bern was clean, it was orderly, it was
prosperous, and for her, it was utterly, soul
-crushingly boring. There was no grit, no life.
None of the intensity she craved. She wrote that
she lived on a street called Gerechtigkeitsgasse,
which means Justice Street, and she would just
stare out her window at this old medieval statue
of justice and feel like she's suffocating in
a museum. She said it felt like living in the
Middle Ages. The opposite of the chaos of Rio
or Naples that she seemed to thrive on. Exactly.
Switzerland was too sanitized for her. soul,
but as always, she wrote to survive. She wrote
an entire novel there called The Besieged City.
A very fitting title for someone who felt besieged
by silence. Completely. She later said it was
her least liked book, but she was also grateful
to it. She said the sheer effort of writing it,
of creating a world on the page, was what saved
her from the appalling silence of Bern. It was
her lifeline. How did the critics in Brazil receive
it? The reception was a bit tepid. They found
it hermetic, you know, closed off, difficult
to access. One critic described it as having
the hermeticism of dreams, which is a beautiful
phrase, but probably not a compliment in terms
of sales. And her personal life was also developing
during these years of exile. Yes, she was starting
her family. Her first son, Pedro, was born in
Bern. Then after Switzerland, they had a brief
unhappy stint in Torquay in England, where she
tragically suffered a miscarriage. And then in
1952, they make the big move to the United States.
Washington, D .C. The heart of the Cold War empire.
They move into a house in the suburbs in Chevy
Chase, Maryland. And this is the height of the
1950s, the era of the perfect American housewife.
And Clarice Lispector, the Ukrainian refugee,
the Brazilian literary genius, is now expected
to play that role. She's wearing the mask again.
And this time, it's the mask of the diplomat's
perfect wife. She wrote about it later with such
bitterness. She said, I gave dinner parties.
I did everything you're supposed to do, but with
a disgust. You could just feel the suffocation.
It was a total trap. She was raising her sons.
Her second son, Paul Lowe, was born in Washington.
But intellectually, spiritually, she was starving.
She felt like her wild, wolf -like soul was being
ironed flat by the suburban routine of cocktails
and small talk. It's a classic pressure cooker
situation. You have this wild, existential, philosophical
intellect trapped inside a world of canapes and
embassy gossip. And in 1959, that pressure cooker
finally exploded. She just couldn't take it anymore.
She did some Something incredibly brave and scandalous
for a woman of her class at that time. She left
her husband. And she went home. She took her
two young sons and she returned to Rio de Janeiro.
So the prodigal daughter returns. But she's coming
back to a very difficult situation, right? She's
a single mother now. She doesn't have the protection
or the salary of the diplomatic service. She
has to earn a living on her own. It was a huge
risk, personally and financially. But creatively,
it was the best thing that ever happened to her.
It unleashed her. The 1960s, her first decade
back in Brazil, became her great renaissance.
She was back in the heat, back in the noise,
back in the daily rhythms of the Portuguese language.
She was home. Let's talk about the incredible
work that came out of this return. First up is
a collection of short stories, family ties in
1960. And honestly, if any of our listeners are
looking for a place to start with Clarice, this
is it. These stories are masterpieces of quiet
dread. How so? Well. They're often set in very
normal domestic spaces, a family having a birthday
dinner, a woman riding a bus through the city.
But in every single story, there's a moment,
a tiny crack in reality where everything just
snaps. It's like she puts a mundane moment under
a microscope until it becomes alien and terrifying.
That's a perfect way to put it. There's a famous
story called The Imitation of the Rose about
a woman trying to be the perfect housewife after
a stay in a mental institution. Or another, love,
where a woman on a bus sees a blind man chewing
gum. And this tiny, insignificant sight triggers
a complete collapse of her entire worldview,
her sense of compassion, her stable life. And
the critics at the time, they recognized this
as a major leap forward. They went wild for it.
The great novelist Eric Overisimo said it was
the most important story collection since Machado
de Assis. And Machado de Assis is basically the
Shakespeare of Brazilian literature. That's not
a comparison you make lightly. Fernando Sabino,
just told her flat out it was the best book of
stories ever published in Brazil. So she's back.
She's reestablished herself at the top of the
literary world. Absolutely. And then in 1961,
she publishes the novel The Apple in the Dark,
which is this dense allegorical book she'd actually
been working on for years in England and D .C.
It's about a man who thinks he's killed his wife
and flees into the wilderness. It's really a
book about language and creation. It won a major
prize. But we have to get to the big one. The
one that really cements her reputation as this
terrifyingly brilliant mystic. The book that
shocks people the most, The Passion, according
to GH, published in 1964. Okay, let's set the
scene for this because the plot on the surface
is incredibly, almost absurdly simple. Deceptively
simple. There's a woman. We only know her by
her initials, GH. She lives in a beautiful penthouse
apartment in a wealthy part of Rio. She's a sculptor.
She's cultured. She's idle. She's comfortable.
Her maid has just quit. And GH decides to go
into the now empty maid's room to clean it up.
Right. And she's expecting it to be dirty, maybe
a little squalid. But instead, she finds the
room is starkly, strangely clean. It's like a
desert. And in this clean, empty room, she opens
the wardrobe. And she sees a cockroach. An ancient,
slow -moving... Prehistoric looking cockroach.
Now for 99 .9 % of humanity, the reaction is
to scream, step on it, flush it, and run away.
GH's reaction is different. She instinctively
slams the wardrobe door on it and she crushes
it. But she doesn't run away. She becomes mesmerized.
She watches the thick, white paste, the matter
of the cockroach, leaking out from its broken
shell. And this sight triggers a complete philosophical
and existential spiral. And this leads to the
moment, the one moment from her work that everyone
talks about. Yes, the climax of the book. In
a gesture that she describes with the intensity
and reverence of a religious sacrament like a
priest taking the Eucharist, G .H., looks at
the dying mass of the cockroach and she puts
it in her mouth. She eats it. Every time I hear
that, I have such a physical reaction. It's just
viscerally shocking. What on earth does it mean?
It is the ultimate act of dismantling the civilized
self. In that moment, GH realizes that her entire
identity, her social class, her art, her beauty,
her very humanity, is just a construct, a flimsy
shell. By eating the most repulsive, unclean
thing she can imagine, she's trying to break
down the barrier between herself and the raw,
pre -human, living thingness of the world. She
calls it the living neutral. So she's trying
to get back to some kind of primordial state.
Yeah. To become one with the raw matter of the
universe. Exactly. It's a mystical experience,
but it's a profane one. She isn't looking up
to God in heaven. She's looking down into the
guts of an insect to find the divine. She strips
herself down to absolute zero. It is terrifying.
But for Clarice, that's where truth lived. Not
in the polite dinner parties in Washington, D
.C., but in the raw, abject, sacred matter of
a cockroach in a maid's room. It's just so ironic
then that while she was writing about this total
dismantling of the self, her own physical self
suffered this catastrophic injury around the
same time. This was in 1966. The fire. Yes, this
is a tragedy that haunted her for the rest of
her life. Clarice had terrible insomnia and often
took sleeping pills. And one night, she took
a pill and fell asleep in her bed while smoking
a cigarette. It's the absolute nightmare scenario.
Her mattress caught on fire while she slept.
She was severely burned, especially on her legs
and her right hand, her writing hand. It was
so badly damaged that doctors considered amputating
it. She spent months in the hospital in agony
and was left with these deep, angry scars for
the rest of her life. How does she describe it?
She said the initial recovery period was like
spending three days in hell while still being
alive. And her hand. Did she ever fully recover
the use of it? Only partially. It was always
stiff and painful for her to write after that.
She said it changed her writing, made her mood
darker, heavier. But she didn't stop. In fact,
in the late 60s, she made this pivot in her career
that, in a way, made her more famous than ever
before. She started writing chronicus. Exactly.
These are short weekly columns for a newspaper.
She started writing them for the journal do Brazil
in 1967. Now, just trying to imagine this, the
woman who wrote about eating a cockroach to find
God is now writing a weekly column for a mass
market newspaper right next to sports section
and the society pages. So what was she writing
about in these columns? Was it more philosophy?
It was about everything. And that was the magic
of it. She'd write about conversations she had
with taxi drivers. She'd give parenting advice.
She'd tell stories about her childhood. She would
complain about her servants. It was this incredible
mix of the profound and the completely mundane.
This is how she became a household name. This
is how she became a celebrity. Because this wasn't
a major daily paper. Suddenly, Clarice Lispector
wasn't just for the university professors and
the intellectuals anymore. Housewives, students,
taxi drivers, everyone was reading Clarice on
the weekend. It made her a real public figure.
Exactly. This mysterious, glamorous, Sphinx -like
woman was now speaking directly to the people
every Saturday. And she even started writing
children's books around this time. Wait, really?
The author of The Passion According to G .H.
wrote children's books. She did. She wrote one
called The Mystery of the Thinking Rabbit, which
she'd actually first written in English for her
son, Paolo, back when they lived in D .C. And
my personal favorite title of all time, The Woman
Who Killed the Fish. The woman who killed the
fish. That sounds like a dark confession. It
is. But it's this incredibly charming, apologetic
book where the narrator confesses to the children
of the world that she is a bad person because
she forgot to feed her son's little fish and
they died. It's so funny and strange and it just
shows this whole other side of her. It completely
humanized her for the public. But she hadn't
given up on the difficult, high -concept literature.
In 1973, she releases what many consider her
other late masterpiece, Agua Viva. The Stream
of Life. And this was a book she really struggled
with. Her friend and assistant, Olga Borelli,
said it was the only time she ever saw Clarice
truly insecure, truly hesitate before handing
a manuscript to her publisher. Why was she so
insecure about it? Because it was so radical,
it has no plot at all. There's no named narrator.
It's written as a long, flowing interior monologue
addressed to a mysterious you. It's pure sensation,
pure flow. It's structured more like a piece
of music than a novel. She was convinced it was
too weird, that people would hate it and think
she'd lost her mind. And was she right? Not even
a little bit. It was instantly hailed as a masterpiece.
The critics said it was the book that woke Brazilian
literature from a long lethargy. It's a book
you don't read for a story. You read it to feel
the pulse of life itself, what she called the
it. I have to ask about one of the absolute weirdest
anecdotes in the source material, the Witchcraft
Congress. Oh, yes. You absolutely cannot make
this stuff up. In 1975, because of her reputation
as this mystic, she gets an official invitation
to attend the First World Congress of Sorcery
in Mogota, Colombia. The First World Congress
of Sorcery. That sounds like something out of
Harry Potter. It got huge press coverage and
they invited her as a special guest. They even
read her famously strange short story, The Egg
and the Hen, aloud at the Congress. It all just
added to this public image of her as this kind
of beautiful, glamorous witch. What did she think
about all that? She was actually very grounded
about it. She went, she was polite, but she publicly
denied having any supernatural inspiration. She
attributed all her work to unconscious elaboration,
not to spirits or magic. She famously said, I
don't write in order to gratify anybody else.
She was writing for herself. We're getting close
to the end of her life now, the mid -1970s. She
produces two final major works that are almost
like bookends to her career. One is published
posthumously. A Breath of Life. Right, which
is this fascinating dialogue between an author
and his female creation, Angela Perlini. And
as a recent essay by Grinter Silva -Pasuni points
out, it's really a book about writing as a way
of continuing to breathe, of staying alive even
when you're facing death. But the other one,
the last book published while she was alive,
is The Hour of the Star. And this book is a monumental
achievement. By this point, her hand was so damaged
from the fire that she couldn't write easily.
She pieced this book together from notes scrawled
on loose scraps of paper with Olga Borrelli's
help, and it marks this massive final shift in
her work. How so? Well, throughout her career,
the main criticism leveled against her is that
she was too abstract, too philosophical, too
removed from the social reality of Brazil. But
The Hour of the Star is explicitly heartbreakingly
about poverty and marginalization. It tells the
story of Maccabea. Yes, Maccabea. She is a poor,
uneducated... ugly typist from the northeastern
state of Alagoas, which is right next to where
Clarice's own family first arrived in Brazil.
Maccabea is completely lost and invisible in
the huge, cruel metropolis of Rio. She barely
has an interior life to speak of because she's
just consumed by hunger and survival. She eats
hot dogs, she dreams of drinking Coca -Cola,
she's a nobody. It feels like Clarice is looking
at the ghost of a life she could have had. There
but for the grace of God go I. That is precisely
it. If her father hadn't been ambitious, if he
hadn't moved them to Rio, if she hadn't fought
her way into law school, she could have been
Maccabea. And there's a Jewish element here,
too, a final nod to her origins. The name Maccabea
is a reference to the Maccabees, the ancient
Jewish warriors. It's one of the very few times
Clarice ever overtly referenced her Jewish heritage
in her fiction. It's a devastating book. It's
the author. a stand -in for Clarice, looking
at this insignificant person and trying, through
the act of writing, to give her existence meaning
and weight. It's her final act of radical empathy.
And very shortly after The Hour of the Star was
published in 1977, Clarice was hospitalized.
She had inoperable ovarian cancer. It was very
advanced. The doctors didn't tell her the diagnosis,
which was a common and cruel practice at the
time, but she was in constant severe pain. She
died on December 9th, 1977. It was the eve of
her 57th birthday. 56 years old. It just seems
so young for someone who lived so many different
lives. The refugee, the law student, the diplomat's
wife, the literary revolutionary, the public
celebrity. She was buried at the Jewish cemetery
of Caju in Rio de Janeiro, leaving behind this
body of work that has only grown in stature and
influence ever since. She's now a part of the
Penguin Modern Classics series, the first Brazilian
writer to be included. So let's try to bring
this all together. Let's synthesize this incredible
life. We started with that paradox, the Marlene
Dietrich, who wrote like Virginia Woolf. And
I think the power of Clarice Lispector, the reason
she continues to fascinate us, is that she refused
to choose between those two things. She insisted
on being both. She lived the life of a woman
of her time, the makeup, the fashion, the children,
the dinner parties. But she used her writing
to insist that the interior life of that woman
was as vast, as dangerous, and as philosophically
profound as any epic battlefield or grand adventure.
She proved that the space inside a real apartment
or even just inside a maid's room staring at
a cockroach, is infinite. Exactly. She peeled
back the mundane surface of reality to show the
vibrating, terrifying, beautiful thingness of
life underneath it all. She validated the chaos
of the human soul. Okay, so here's a final provocative
thought for you to chew on. Clarice herself said
her writing wasn't magic, it was unconscious
elaboration. That it came out of her almost like
a scream from the soul. So if her most famous,
most quintessential scene involves the intimate,
mystical, and horrifying act of eating a cockroach,
what does that scream say about the human condition?
Maybe she's telling us that to truly find ourselves,
to become whole, we can't just look at the beautiful,
acceptable parts of life. We have to be willing
to consume, to integrate, to become one with
the very things we fear and despise the most
in the world and in ourselves. That is a disturbing
but also a strangely liberating thought. It suggests
that nothing is truly outside of us. We contain
it all. We are everything. We'd love to hear
what stands out to you about Clarice's life.
Is it the escape from Ukraine, the stifling mask
of the diplomat's wife, or is it that unforgettable
moment with the cockroach? It's a lot to process,
but that's Clarice for you. It certainly is.
Thanks for diving deep with us on this one. Until
next time.