He's sophisticated, suave, and super worked up about how in the world he's going to tell this story. She's a poor, underfed, unattractive, sickly, and inexperienced nineteen-year-old girl who works and lives in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.Īnd now meet your narrator, Rodrigo S.M. You're probably not going to want to be her friend. To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Macabéa. Too Much of Life: Complete Chronicles by Clarice Lispector (translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson) is published by Penguin Classics (£20). The result is, like Lispector herself, witty, mystical, surreal and profound: a treasure to return to again and again.
Stretching over a decade – and across nearly 800 pages – the pieces, some amounting to a few sentences, some many pages long, make up a self-portrait in bits and pieces. She answers her public’s questions, responds to their concerns, appeals for help when their problems outstretch her resources.įor those unfamiliar with her, this book opens a door into her uniquely challenging and rewarding body of work. Too Much of Life reveals Lispector’s continual engagement with politics and literature – reading Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa for the first time in one column, supporting embattled student protesters in the next. Those familiar with her writing will find old obsessions here: tragedy, religion, death, the cunning and cruelty of men and women, the pleasure of living and, after a 1967 fire leaves her scarred for life, the pain of defeat.
Over the course of a taxi ride, relations between the two turn sour and Lispector divests herself of angelic characteristics: “swishing my invisible tail”, she makes her exit, “careful to leave my folded wings behind on the seat”. When the grateful traveller calls her an angel, she takes the compliment as fact. Like her posthumous masterpiece, The Hour of the Star, her columns straddle realism, memoir, philosophy and politics, each dependent upon – and obscuring – the other.Īn account of helping an older woman to safety during torrential rain spins from reportage to fantasy. Too Much of Life works in almost uninterrupted continuity with the writer’s fiction – stylistically and otherwise. Lispector was a successful journalist, but not a conventional one.
0 kommentar(er)
