/lit/ - Literature

ITT: What's you favorite female author and why? For me, it's Clarice Lispector.

>In A Breath of Life, the great work left unfinished at her death, Clarice Lispector returned one last time to this book. The writings she produced in the three decades since she began The Besieged City unfolded numinous meanings that are only latent—subjacent—here. They provide the key that was missing at the time of publication. A retrospective knowledge of Clarice Lispector’s work shows that Lucrécia’s thing-ness is not merely sexual, or sociological: it represents the mystery of the creation, by God, of the being—and the creation, by the being, of the thing.

“The object—the thing—always fascinated me and in a certain sense destroyed me. In my book The Besieged City I speak indirectly about the mystery of the thing. The thing is a specialized and immobilized animal,” she wrote in A Breath of Life. The word “thing” acquires layer upon layer of resonance in Clarice’s work, and comes, finally, to represent an aspiration, both linguistic and spiritual. “People speak, or rather, used to speak so much about my ‘words,’ about my ‘phrases,’ ” she wrote of this book. “As if they were verbal. Yet not one, not a single one, of the words in the book was—a game. Each of them essentially meant some thing.”