I really wish I’d read some background on this book before I picked it up. It nearly thwarted me!!! I wanted to throw it out but persevered thinking it could turn out to be an elaborate and very boring literary hoax. But in the second half something clicked and some shimmering little thread of narrative appeared, all those horses began to make a little bit of sense, and I warmed to Lucrécia just a little.

After reading the brief letter where Clarice Lispector (kind of) explains herself I’m looking forward to trying this book again in future. Just maybe not right now.

*shoves back into depths of TBR pile*

For some time I’ve wanted to discover what the Ukrainian-Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector is all about. She’s a sorceress, I read. A strange, brilliant luminary!

My public library only had this, her 3rd novel. In Benjamin Moser’s foreword he quoted Lispector telling an interviewer to read it “if you can manage. Even I thought it was hard.”

It was written when she was unhappily exiled in Bern, Switzerland in 1946, feeling “rootless” in an appalling silence.

Oh boy! I said. Let’s dig in!

Her book is an inscrutable dream, taking place in 192?, in a town called Sao Geraldo where horse imagery abounds to a young woman named Lucretia. She turns into a horse, her identification with them is pervasive and mysterious. Horses are being replaced by cars and machines in this town. Progress is visible everywhere on its streets but Lucretia finds it repulsive. Objects are also constantly transforming under her gaze but she prefers the dream reality. Clarity is deemed “merciless”. Real life “reeks.”

I didn’t read it so much as drift through it. Even though I was completely lost, I loved the poetic language of her descriptions. I always appreciate a transcendent ending. Lucretia makes her escape from Sao Geraldo, which was so transformed by progress that it was soon to be re-named.

Another Clarice Lispector book that leaves me somewhat befuddled.....once again, sections where the writing was really evocative and other sections I was scratching my head!

This book possibly warrants 4-stars. One could devote several years, or perhaps a lifetime, to trying to ‘understand’ it; but that isn’t the point of the book. Insofar as I can tell, this book is concerned with concepts such as the world of forms, the hell and beauty of solipsism, and the ultimate futility of understanding, both of the world and between individuals. Now, all of that could be confirmation bias; regardless, I was and am sympathetic to the book’s aims and themes. Once coupled with Lispector’s defiantly poetic, often obtuse, occasionally impenetrable prose, the text becomes pretty damn difficult, the already heady themes buried under language. Is this intended? I think so. There are plenty of remarkable images in this book, but for each of those there are three or four confounding ones. I’d consider this text more ‘difficult’ than Joyce or Gaddis, those typical scapegoats. Whereas their difficulty lies more in erudition and showmanship, Lispector’s lies in the language and syntax itself, so rigorously ‘original’ as to often defy comprehension. This book demands the slowest of possible readings, and even with meticulous attention, by the end I felt as if any experience had eluded me. I think this is intentional, but it certainly left me feeling discouraged.

Will I be reading more Lispector in the future? Absolutely. Will I be reading The Chandelier immediately after this, like I planned? No, my mind is mush.

[24th book of 2021. Artist for this review is Venezuelan artist Carlos Cruz-Diez.]

This is a dense novel. In the beginning I could only manage working my way through a few pages at a time, and extracting any meaning was difficult; it is elusive, almost impenetrable. Throughout the novel certain images reoccur, but namely, the image of horses. They prevail throughout the entire novel, sometimes, even our protagonist is described as stamping her hooves. And though the language is beautiful at times, it felt as if it was too distant, and driving towards nothingness, that left the whole novel feeling slightly cold—as if I was witnessing something very beautiful on another shoreline, with my vision blurred and slightly distorted by ripples of heat.


“1 plate, from Chromointerférence, 1981”—1981

I wrote out some thoughts on an old receipt the other night and after some translation issues (from indecipherable to decipherable) I read it again:

At first I thought there wasn’t enough sunshine to pour into the uncooperative recesses of my brain, but then the sunshine came and instead my brain was blinded; then it was too windy and my thoughts were constantly scattering south; then there was no wind, so my thoughts settled into stillness and stagnated; then it rained and my brain was flooded. In the end I realised it was me, or the book, but not the weather.

A little abstract, but it is an abstract book. At the halfway mark I was idly flipping through the pages until I realised an appendix, which contained a review from the Brazilian critic Temístocles Linhares and then a response from Lispector herself, which she wrote twenty-two year later after happening upon the review.


“Physichromie 2232”—1988

I won’t bother delving into Linhares review, though I will record its final line: And the result is that the work circles around a life and a drama without managing to lend them more than a simulation of a novel.

Lispector’s response is worthy of some reflection. It did change an element of my reading in the second half of the novel. She begins by saying, Your review is pointed and well-done. Further down she writes, What astonishes me—and this is certainly my own fault—is that the higher purposes of my book should escape a critic. Does this mean I couldn’t bring to the fore the book’s intentions? Or were the critic’s eyes clouded for other reasons, not my own? She claims, As for the book’s “intention,” I didn’t believe it was lost, in a critic’s eyes, through the development of the narrative. I still feel that “intention” running through all the pages, in a thread perhaps fragile as I wished, but continuous and all the way to the end. Lispector’s words are more resounding here than in the novel itself, for me: The way of looking gives the appearance to reality. When I say that Lucrécia Neves [the protagonist] constructs the city of São Geraldo and gives it a tradition, this is somehow clear to me. When I say that, at that time of a city being born, each gaze was making new extensions, new realities emerge—this is so clear to me. She talks in this vein, or seeing, of creating, of reality, until the letter’s conclusion:

No, you didn’t “bury” the book, sir: you too “constructed” it. If you’ll excuse the word, like one of the horses of São Geraldo.

Clarice Lispector