lava from mount vesuvius

How can the gift be given without creating the other the prisoner of the gift? This is extremely hard to do in reality, even in the strongest and most generous relationships. It is the subject of Clarice Lispector’s writing. She does not make a theory of it, she gives concrete examples. Her narratives contain the possibility of a practice. Perhaps this possibility can only exist in texts. But at least in her writing it is there, it makes itself felt, it appears.

She was, all the time, ruefully aware of the limitations that writing imposed on her. Part of her dark vision included a sad knowledge of the frailty of the very words and phrases she used, the necessary thinness of her own observations and her games with form.

The other day, a friend of mine, a Brazilian writer, said it took Brazil half a century to absorb her [Clarice Lispector], and they’re not done yet. I think that there’s no denying that, as much as she writes about apparently accessible subjects—all her housewives with headaches—the books are extremely strange and disconcerting. In the opening of The Passion According to G.H., she warns people away from the book unless their “souls are already formed.” And it sounds a bit melodramatic. But then you read the book and you realize that she was not at all speaking flippantly. That is a book powerful enough to destroy a human being, someone who is not prepared for it. And all her writing has a quality of spiritual rigor and emotional relentlessness that makes them far more difficult to absorb. What happened in Brazil is similar to what is happening now. She was read by a small group of the intellectual elite, mainly in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. People in a few neighborhoods. And then her passionate readers recruited others, who recruited others. Journalists, singers, critics, actresses, teachers brought her to more and more people. And then it reached a critical mass, and she became the most famous of modern Brazilian writers. That was certainly not the case in her lifetime. And in English, the more she is read and absorbed, the more apparent it will become that what I’ve always said, things that everyone thought were exaggerations, are obviously true—that she is, for example, the greatest Jewish writer since Kafka.

Since I was a little girl I had seen and felt the predominance of men’s ideas over women’s. Mama, before she got married, according to Aunt Emília, was a firecracker, a tempestuous redhead, with thoughts of her own about liberty and equality for women. But then along came Papa, very serious and tall, with thoughts of his own too, about . . . liberty and equality for women. The trouble was in the coinciding subject matter.