The horror and wonder

If Jorge Luis Borges is the father of modern Latin American literature, it seems fair to nominate Clarice Lispector as the mother. Born in Ukraine in 1920, and raised in Brazil after her parents fled the pogroms, she created a language and sensibility uniquely her own. She draws comparisons with Franz Kafka, but hers is a tropical existentialism, heavy with the scent of mangoes and rotting vegetation. For Elizabeth Bishop, who first translated her stories, she was “better than J. L. Borges”.

Lispector was twenty-three when her first novel, Perto do coração selvagem (1943; Near to the Wild Heart, 1990), was published to immediate success. During her lifetime she became fabulously popular – revered, even – in Brazil. Elsewhere she was underrated, amid glib assertions that Latin America had never produced a major female writer. That she now has a firmer foothold in the canon owes much to a project by New Directions to issue new translations of all fifteen of her novels (published in the UK by Penguin Classics), together with her Complete Stories (TLS, September 4, 2015) and collected journalism, Too Much of Life (2022). The series has been directed by Benjamin Moser, whose acclaimed biography, Why This World (TLS, February 19, 2010), helped to fuel an interest in the Brazilian novelist and a demand for better translations of her novels. Moser has translated several of the new editions, including The Apple in the Dark (A maçã no escuro, 1961), which completes the series.

Lispector’s fictions tend to centre on a character whose life is thrown into crisis, often by a mundane event. A girl chatting to her teacher suddenly sees his eyes as “moving jelly” and is forever altered by the experience (“The Disasters of Sofia”). A woman cracks her tooth while eating an apple and kills herself (“Happy Birthday”). In her novel The Passion According to G. H. (A paixão segundo G. H., 1964), a woman kills a cockroach and is plunged into existential breakdown, through which she achieves spiritual transcendence.

In The Apple in the Dark the crisis has happened before the story begins: Martim has escaped from his life in the city, having committed a crime that we take to be the murder of his wife. After two weeks in a hotel, mostly sleeping, he is reborn into a world that is completely new to him and sets out into it as an allegorical man, perhaps the first man. So begins a novel that is about being alive, and the struggle to express aliveness through words.

Life and death tussle throughout Lispector’s writing. “I am alive”, her characters sometimes insist, as if they might as well not be. In her journalism, too, the author courted death, often to the concern of fans, who would ring up to check she was all right after a despondent column, and sometimes arrive at her home with dishes of food. Lispector had learnt early on that horror and wonder are both in life all the time, whether you are eating a mango or attending a funeral. In Ukraine her mother had been gang-raped by Russian soldiers and contracted syphilis. Folk medicine recommended pregnancy as a cure. “And so I was deliberately engendered: with love and hope”, Lispector wrote in the Jornal do Brasil. “Except that I did not cure my mother. And even today I still feel the burden of that guilt.”

Martim sets out on the first day of his new life – which must logically be a Sunday, he thinks – across a primeval desert landscape. He is aware, for the first time, of walking, his feet communicating to him “the dubiousness of the earth”. He remembers that there is a physical process called “thinking”, which must be what he is doing now. “A thinking man was one that, when he saw something yellow, would say with a dazzled effort: this thing that is not blue.”

Sitting among rocks, Martim experiences nature and is startled by a bird, which he takes in his hand and accidentally kills. He experiences a sunset. “The sun was shuddering fixedly with the discipline of stained glass.” The dim memory of a woman listening to a radio comes to mind, but “the woman had nothing to do with the meticulous rage of a man who probably already had inside himself the fact that one day he’d have to begin from the exact beginning, he who was now starting from Sunday”.

This is familiar Lispector territory; through his crime the man has lost his sense of self. Unlike with G. H., though, it seems that this was a deliberate act of self-annihilation. “He thought that with this crime he had carried out his first manly act. Yes. Courageously he had done what every man had to do once in his life: destroy it.” Now he must rebuild himself, and in describing that recreation of the self the novel becomes a Creation story: “As for Martim, he had time. Actually he seemed to have discovered time”.

Lispector’s great appeal is that, while handling themes that are almost absurdly weighty, she isn’t pompous. She can be esoteric – her guiding lights included Spinoza and Hermann Hesse – without losing levity. Nowhere is this more apparent than in her collected journalism, where she may talk as easily of the mysteries of life as the allure of a new lipstick.

After his rebirth in the desert Martim arrives at a ranch run by the cousins Vitória and Ermelinda, and learns about manly tasks such as chopping wood and animal husbandry. He rediscovers writing: the first thing he writes is “Things I need to do”; then, deciding that’s too ambitious, “Things I’ll try to find out”. Number one on the list is simply “That”.

The still-wet phrase had the grace of a truth. And he liked it with a shiver of creation. Because he recognized in it everything he’d wanted to say! Moreover he thought the phrase was perfect because of the resistance it was offering him: “beyond that, I cannot go!”, so it seemed to him that the phrase had touched the very depths, he was groping its resistance with ecstasy.

In Why This World Moser quotes Lispector saying something similar: “If I had to give a title to my life it would be: in search of the thing itself”.

If the project of every sentence is to identify “that” or “the thing”, then every sentence has infinite options. Lispector is always riffing on a theme, coming at the horror of things, or the wonder of things, from different angles, in pulsating rhythms that recall musical exercises. The pages buzz and thrum. Martim experiences nature as a kind of violence; the sun is brutal, the flowers suffer, ants writhe. A typically paradoxical sentence is: “In the joyous morning two screaming hens were grabbed and turned up dead in the kitchen”.

After writing comes love. Martim learns how love changes perception:

Around Ermelinda’s dark pupils, for example, Martim saw a lightly amber circle, which without love would have escaped him. He also saw that the birth of the hairs on her neck was softer, and those threads too short to be tied up in her braids were dangling in light in the air. On her arms the light hairs were gilding the girl as if she couldn’t be touched. Once loved, she was of rare delicacy and beauty.

Such epiphanies come thick and fast; a vortex opens on every page. Reading Lispector can make you restive. I can’t think of another writer who can be both thrilling and tedious in such short order. (Anyone new to her writing may want to limber up with some short stories.)

Ultimately Martim’s fugitive status is discovered; he is denounced to a visiting “teacher” (often a malevolent figure in Lispector), admits to his crime and submits to his punishment. The process sparks another transfiguration; Martim moves beyond his recently learnt humanity and achieves a transcendence. He speaks directly either to his own father or a heavenly Father, who warns against relying on language: “a person can run aground on a word and lose years of life”. Knowing how to grasp an apple in the dark counts for more than the kind of knowledge that can be put into words. This may be where Adam and Eve went wrong.

Moser has described the rhythm of Lispector’s phrasing as a creation “in defiance of norms”. Her fractured phrases come “closer perhaps to original thought patterns than the language had ever managed before”. He makes for a graceful partner in this linguistic dance, catching Lispector’s humour as well as her horror, and giving her phrases that sound lovable as well as evocative. The cows “moo luke-warmly”. The world is lovely and feels “futurely right”.

An earlier translation of The Apple in the Dark by Gregory Rabassa tried to make Clarice Lispector easier to broach. Moser allows her to be difficult but charming, a combination the author seemed to favour. “I am so mysterious that I cannot understand myself”, she once boasted in a column. We readers shouldn’t presume to do much better.

Miranda France is a consultant editor at the TLS

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