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‘The Chandelier’ Offers an Early Glimpse of Clarice Lispector’s Power

Sphinx, sorceress, sacred monster. The revival of the hypnotic Clarice Lispector has been one of the true literary events of the 21st century. A national obsession in her native Brazil — her novels are sold in subway vending machines there — she was neglected in the English-speaking world until a splendid 2009 biography, “Why This World,” by Benjamin Moser, charted the clashing currents in her life of fame, glamour, unspeakable suffering and, above all — despite it all — untrammeled productivity.

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By
PARUL SEHGAL
, New York Times

Sphinx, sorceress, sacred monster. The revival of the hypnotic Clarice Lispector has been one of the true literary events of the 21st century. A national obsession in her native Brazil — her novels are sold in subway vending machines there — she was neglected in the English-speaking world until a splendid 2009 biography, “Why This World,” by Benjamin Moser, charted the clashing currents in her life of fame, glamour, unspeakable suffering and, above all — despite it all — untrammeled productivity.

Her novels and stories represent “a record of a woman’s entire life,” perhaps “the first such total record written in any country,” Moser wrote in his introduction to her collected stories. “A woman who was not interrupted: a woman who did not start writing late, or stop for marriage or children, or succumb to drugs or suicide."

In recent years, there have been fresh translations of the major work: the mystical novels and the real landmark, to my mind, her glittering and savage “Complete Stories,” translated by Katrina Dodson.

No one sounds like Lispector — in English or Portuguese. No one thinks like her. Not only does she seem endowed with more senses than the allotted five, she bends syntax and punctuation to her will. She turns the dictionary upside down, shaking all the words loose from their definitions, sprinkling them back in as she desires (along with a few eyelashes, toast crumbs and dead flies) — and doesn’t the language look better for it?

Her second novel, “The Chandelier,” originally published in 1946, has just been translated into English for the first time, by Moser and Magdalena Edwards. The book, ignored in Lispector’s time, stands out, Moser says, “in a strange and difficult body of work, as perhaps her strangest and most difficult book.”

Lispector was always puzzled by this reputation for difficulty. “When I write for children, I am understood, but when I write for adults I become difficult?” she once protested. It’s true that her books can be best understood as a kind of cracked “Alice in Wonderland” — with their gnomic wordplay, obsession with naming and inexplicable punishments. (Of course, the white rabbit in Lispector is “a wounded hare losing blood and running until weakly reaching the end of blood.”)

But “The Chandelier” is uniquely demanding — it’s baggy, claggy and contentedly glacial. We get interior monologues and barometric readings of the drifting mood of a young, unhappy woman named Virginia. Paragraph breaks are few; chapter breaks are nonexistent. Plot? On Page 4, a man’s hat floating down a river snags on a rock. On Page 34, a leaf comes loose from a tall tree, hovers in the air “for enormous minutes” and falls to the ground.

Lispector might be describing the desultory structure of the book itself when she writes of a character: “The drinks were preventing her from letting the events connect to one another by visible paths but made them follow one another in soft, oblivious, tepidly doomed jumps.”

Did I mention that this novel is charming? Punishing, yes, and maniacally overwritten, but a vulnerable and moving performance — with a heart-stopping payoff. I recall British critic Christopher Ricks once saying that in every long book lies a short one evading its responsibilities. It’s a literary prejudice I share, but in “The Chandelier” I sense something else: not a shorter, better book lurking, but Lispector’s entire body of work, in miniature, biding its time. So many of the themes, philosophical inquiries and character types that appear here will return, honed as Lispector refines her style and hardens them into the diamond-like perfection of her final books, which are narrated in jagged aphorisms — “anti-literature” she called them.

If the pages of “The Chandelier” are so thickly lacquered with description, streams of adjectives and looping repetition, it’s because Lispector is flexing, coming into her power. She’s playing, she’s practicing. These pages are full of finger exercises, arpeggios of thought and perception.

We see the stirring of her lifelong interest in piercing the veil of language to access existence itself. She tries to evoke this by slowing down the prose in “The Chandelier,” by making the reader feel its weight. In later books, she was unafraid of posing the point directly: “What am I doing in writing you? Trying to photograph perfume,” she wrote in “Água Viva.”

Her books stay peaceably indifferent to any imperatives of story — “The Passion According to G.H.,” regarded by some as her masterpiece, features a housewife staring into a closet for 200 pages. But with her later restraint, it was her sentences that began to have plots. With their topsy-turvy structure, they contain the drama and the surprise. A few famous examples. From “The Passion According to G.H.”: “I finally got up from the breakfast table, that woman." From the opening of her short story “Temptation”: “She was sobbing. And as if the two o’clock glare weren’t enough, she had red hair.” From the story “Love”: “Next to her was a lady in blue, with a face.”

In each, the strangeness comes from a splitting — of women experiencing themselves as subject and object. This fracturing is everywhere in Lispector, and explored intensely in “The Chandelier.” Virginia, in fact, is practicing looking at everything in this particular way: “She’d see things separated from the places where they lay, loose in space as in an apparition.”

“The Chandelier” might best be understood as a bridge in Lispector’s work. But even so, it conveys a special charge, an undeniable quantity of genius — similar to what Virginia felt as she filled her hands with water, that she was “carrying in the palm of her hand a little bit of river.”

PUBLICATION NOTES:

“The Chandelier”

By Clarice Lispector

Translated from Portuguese by Benjamin Moser and Magdalena Edwards

Edited by Benjamin Moser

313 pages. New Directions. $25.95.

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