The Shocks of Clarice Lispector

by Baret Magarian

Clarice Lispector. The two names in asymmetric union are slightly startling, jarring. Was she British? American? The surname is a little bit sinister, with its evocation of inspectors, of Spectre . . . She was in fact born in 1920 to Jewish Ukrainian parents who eventually settled in Brazil, fleeing the pogroms of the Russian Civil War of 1917. Her grandfather was murdered; her mother was raped. Then, when Clarice was almost nine, her mother died of her wartime injuries. It is about as traumatic and tragic a childhood as you can imagine. But from these ruins she forged, through sheer will and talent, a brilliant life as a writer. The Portuguese that she unleashed on the world in a series of fictions of rich interiority reflects her hybrid, seismic origins. She dispensed with grammar when it suited her, invented her own brand of it.

Portuguese is a language of anomalies. I studied, and grappled with, the European version of it when I lived in Lisbon for a time in 2011. It sounds harsh and Slavic, obeying the ostensible rules of Romance languages and yet having only second-cousin ties to Italian and French. The Portuguese of Brazil is sweeter and more mellifluous. In Lisbon I fell in love with the plaintive fado music, seeped in longing for vanished sailors lost to the horizons of the distant, icy Atlantic. I became acquainted with the pedantic eloquence of Fernando Pessoa, who visualises death as a sublimation of human identity, a sub-atomic conjoining with the universe’s metaphysical mists; and with José Saramago’s mind-bending fictional portrait of Ricardo Reis, one of Pessoa’s sixty-plus heteronyms: fictitious literary figures Pessoa had dreamed up, like Borges, like Bolaño, but going further and furnishing them with their own biographies, styles, œuvres, lives . . . But discovering Clarice was altogether new, like finding a precious metal that does not exist on this earth. Lispector writes like no one else before or after. To imitate her style is close to impossible; such an attempt would instantly collapse into parody. She is lunar, not solar; analogue, not digital; seductively, defiantly intelligent. She is a bit like 90 per cent dark chocolate: she takes getting used to. Reading her work is akin to stumbling on the transcripts of an extraterrestrial residing among people.

It is somewhat incredible, and comforting, that such an uncompromising writer was even published, let alone successful. Reading her forces you to re-read her, to pause, to wonder if you might have stumbled on the secret places of a person who has encountered the incoherence and danger of life – not cloak-and-dagger danger, but existential, buried danger; the sense that life at any moment can slip its moorings, and that subterranean shifts can pull the ground from under your feet, as if reality’s blood sugar levels are simultaneously crashing and spiking. Clarice exists – that is enough to create a moment of affirmation, some underground affirmation that literature did (does?) still have a purpose, a loftiness, a mission, an ethical function. And that people were willing to disseminate that function by publishing Clarice Lispector, against the odds.

In these culturally degraded times, when the ubiquitous death phone is killing off people’s grey cells, when humanity seems to be happily running towards its own intellectual funeral as it deliriously embraces large language models and artificial intelligence, it is inspiring to study a writer who refused to pander, doctor or prettify her work; refused to flag up a cult of personality; refused even to be a personality; refused to perform or pirouette. I watched all the interviews with her that I could find on the internet, and what impressed me were her silences, her intellect, her refusal to sugarcoat, understate or introduce levity as a backdrop to serious themes and truths. She seemed incapable of telling a lie, of engaging in spin, of any of the contortions and posturing that our times seem to demand.

I am very much afraid that the world today is grinding underfoot those artists who have no propensity for commerce, for lubricating and activating the cogs of today’s gargantuan publicity machine. A writer today simply cannot afford to be shy, withdrawn or modest. They are expected not only to write well but to be expert self-promoters, raconteurs, socialites, even pop psychologists; writers should combine the visibility of Truman Capote with the notoriety of Charles Bukowski. The writing itself is simply one element in a composite mixture of others; it might not even be the most important element. This is a problematic state of affairs for those who do not excel at public speaking, who are not naturally eloquent or gregarious, or who do not have an endless supply of bons mots and witty ripostes up their sleeve. Lispector, in both her person and her art, represents an oxygenated escape from these values and obsessions, a kind of antidote.

I want to end by talking about one specific story, one of her finest: ‘Love’, from her second collection Family Ties (1960). The story centres on Ana, a well-to-do, middle-class housewife. At the level of plot the story is negligible, for its real energy lies in the voice and interiority, which achieves a startling vividness and immerses the reader in snatched, hallucinatory details. Ana is riding the tram on her way home, clutching her shopping, when she happens to see a blind man on the street chewing gum. The sight disturbs her, though she cannot really say why. All at once her life and mind are upended. She experiences a kind of turbo-charged mental collapse; time lapses into the moments that make up her journey. She eventually gets off the tram and stumbles into a botanical garden. Unreality’s texture tightens a notch or two and she succumbs to something like depersonalisation disorder. Reality becomes contaminated with a mysterious fatality, born from the inconsequential but eventually touching madness. (The following is taken from Katrina Dodson’s translation for New Directions.)

‘The trees were laden, the world was so rich it was rotting . . . now that the blind man had led her to it, she trembled upon the first steps of a sparkling, shadowy world, where giant water lilies floated monstrous. The little flowers scattered through the grass didn’t look yellow or rosy to her, but the colour of bad gold and scarlet. The decomposition was deep, perfumed. But all the heavy things, she saw with her head encircled by a swarm of insects, sent by the most exquisite life in the world.’

The grammatical error of ‘monstrous’ is intentional, part of Lispector’s attempt to capture the on–off texture of consciousness, an aftertaste of incoherence. And that final sentence is downright awkward and leads you into a chasm, lacking as it does a clarifying clause that either completes the original one with an auxiliary verb or caps what precedes it with another movement, a final clause. It is a sentence that is suspended, but as you re-read it, it begins to deepen . . .

Somehow Ana is led to the edge of her own self, confronts a vision of the Void, of a horror that lies at the borders of life and is, for the most part, safely sequestered by the mind into a subterranean chamber of forbidden impressions – impressions that lie at the opposite pole of the middle-class world that Ana represents and inhabits. You leave the story a little troubled, shaken, but excited by the way Lispector manages to build something so compelling and immersive from practically nothing: a tram journey, a shopping bag, a walk, a garden . . .

Isn’t that what literature is meant to do? Break through the veil of the habitual and strip away the film that surrounds us and deadens experience, reality and empathy? I know I sound absurdly old-fashioned, but indulge me, please. I fear that the ethical and moral function once embodied by serious books has been corroded by the big publishing houses, the mainstream industry, which has grown, like everything else, too obsessed with the imperative of profit and the values of merely crass entertainment. I do not know what Lispector would have made of all this. But I am pretty sure she would have been pleased to know her writing creates coils of unease and shocks of recognition. The coils and shocks remind us of the wonder and abrasiveness of being alive.

Baret Magarian has written for The Times, The Guardian, The Observer, World Literature Today, Lettre International and BBC Radio 4. His major publications are: Mirror and Silhouette (2016); The Fabrications (2017); Chattering with all my Favourite Beasts (2018); and Melting Point. (2019). His acclaimed monologue The Fever (Le Manuscrit) was performed in Florence, Turin, and Paris and will be staged in Rome in April 2026. He just received an honourable mention for the Camel-Gilmer Fiction Prize in Canada for Zero Night. His story ‘The Portal in Lisbon’ was selected for inclusion in Best British Short Stories 2025 (Salt).