Clarice Lispector (1920-1977) was an eccentric, glamorous novelist and short-story writer who left her mark on Brazil’s literary history through bold stories about women on the brink of self-enlightenment and existential discovery.
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Hello! From Wonder Media Network I’m Jenny Kaplan and this is Encyclopedia Womannica.
Today’s storyteller was an eccentric, glamorous novelist and short-story writer of the 20th century. She left her mark on Brazil’s literary history through bold stories about women on the brink of self-enlightenment and existential discovery told through intricate prose.
Let’s talk about Clarice Lispector.
Clarice was born on December 10, 1920, to a Jewish family amidst racial and religious strife in post World War I Ukraine. In an effort to escape persecution and chaos, the family fled to northeastern Brazil when Clarice was just an infant. This early relocation is considered to be one of the reasons she never experienced a strong sense of belonging, as evidenced in her work.
Despite being raised in a Yiddish-speaking, traditional Jewish household, Clarice’s distance from her Jewish identity can also be attributed to the move, as well as to her natural assimilation into Brazilian culture at a young age.
When Clarice was nine, her mother died, leaving her father, a peddler and a merchant, to raise three daughters by himself. Clarice’s childhood was ridden with poverty and grief. Fueled by the desire for better economic security for his family, her father moved the girls to Rio de Janeiro in 1935.
Clarice excelled in grade school and high school, eventually landing a spot at the University of Brazil’s law school. While law school did not bear any professional fruits, it was where she met her husband, Maury Gurgel Valente, a Brazilian diplomat. They got married in January of 1943, 11 days after Clarice became a Brazilian citizen.
Clarice started writing as a teenager, but her love of storytelling blossomed in law school in her position as a journalist for several local Brazilian newspapers and magazines. She published her first story two months before her father passed away in 1940. Her talent began to gain extensive recognition in 1944 when her first novel “Near to the Wild Heart” won the Graça Aranha national prize for fiction. The story follows the deeply introspective evolution of a young adolescent girl named Joana. Her unconventional, stream-of-consciousness style of writing shocked the Brazilian literary community as nothing like it had been done before, especially not by a woman.
Unfortunately, Clarice’s creativity was stifled when she began to fulfill the duties of a diplomat’s wife. The couple had two sons, Pedro and Paolo, in 1948 and 1953 respectively. Clarice’s husband’s work relocated the family all over Europe and eventually to Washington, DC. Consequently, Clarice’s work suffered and her next two novels, “The Chandelier” and “The Besieged City”, did not receive nearly as much praise and attention as her first.
As much as she tried, Clarice did not fit the mold of a diplomat’s wife. Her friends described her as “incapable of being conventional”. Almost two decades spent abroad inevitably took their toll on Clarice and she returned her family, without her husband, to Brazil in 1959.
Although born in Ukraine, Brazil was Clarice’s home and her literary efforts flourished during the 1960s and 70s after she returned to Rio de Janeiro. Published in 1964, Clarice’s masterpiece “The Passion According to G.H.”, tells the story of an unidentified upper-class woman who finds herself in an off putting situation in the bare bedroom of her former maid. It is the most shocking of her work as the story culminates in the protagonist eating a half-dead cockroach. The entirety of the book is spent examining the nameless protagonist’s interior life, internal dilemmas, and self-reflection leading up to this decision.
Clarice distinguished herself among a sea of men with her evocative and mystical prose. Identity and self-awareness are recurring themes throughout her stories. Most importantly, her work is a reflection of her own life. Her characters grew as she grew. From her young teenage years to well into adulthood, Clarice published work that serves as a record of her own experience.
In total, Clarice published nine novels, 10 short story collections, five children’s books, and numerous newspaper columns.
Clarice died from a hemorrhage one day before her 57th birthday on December 9, 1977.
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