"I write to you because I don't understand myself."

Clarice Lispector dazzles me. The beauty of her writing is overwhelming. In the introduction Benjamin Moser is fangirling over Lispector and he made me realize why i like her books and stories so much: "Clarice Lispector's weird word choices, strange syntax, and lack of interest in conventional grammar produces sentences - often fragments of sentences - that veer towards abstration without ever quite reaching it. Her goal, mystical as well as artistic, was to rearrange conventional language to find meaning - never to discard it completly." 

Aqua Viva is unique: enigmatic, formally innovative, and philosophically profound. This short book is a long letter from a painter and is composed in fragments. The artist seeks to create a language to capture the instances that comprise a lived life.  

"The secret harmony of disharmony: I don't want something already made but something still being tortuously made. My unbalanced words are the wealth of my silence. I write in acrobatics and pirouettes in the air - I write because I so deeply want to speak. Though writing only give me the full measure of silence."

I'm so pleased that I saved this book for my vacation so that I could read it greedily, put it down to think and then grab it again.