Clarice Lispector was a Brazilian writer acclaimed nationally for her innovative novels and short stories. She was born to a Jewish family in Western Ukraine and brought to Brazil as an infant, sitting amidst the disasters following the first World War.
She has been the subject of numerous books, and references to her and her work are common in Brazilian literature and music. Several of her works have been turned into films.
Near to the Wild Heart
In December 1943, Clarice Lispector published her first novel, Perto do coração selvagem (Near to the Wild Heart).
The novel, which tells of the inner life of a young woman named Joana, caused quite the sensation. In October 1944, the book won the prestigious Graça Aranha Prize for the best debut novel of 1943.
One critic, the poet Lêdo Ivo, called it “the greatest novel a woman has ever written in the Portuguese language.” Another wrote that Clarice had “shifted the center of gravity around which the Brazilian novel had been revolving for about twenty years.”
This novel, like all of her works, was marked by an intense focus on interior emotional states of not only the characters but the readers as well.
Near to the Wild Heart does not have a conventional narrative plot. It instead recounts flashes from the life of Joana, between her present, as a young woman, and her early childhood. These focus on interior and the emotional states.
The book opens with a scene of the child, Joana playing in the garden, making up poems for her father. Joana’s wildness and barely suppressed violence, along with her linguistic creativity, are her most notable features. She is frequently compared to animals: over the course of the book Lispector compares her to a bird, a snake, a wildcat, a horse, and a dog. She commits transgressive acts—as a child she throws a book at an old man’s head, for example, and as a married woman she leaves her husband, Otávio, and greets the news of his adultery—he has made another woman, his old friend Lídia, pregnant—with utter indifference.
If you are looking for a book to captivate your mind and thoughts this book is the one for you.