![]() ![]() What exactly does all that name-dropping mean? Benjamin Moser quotes these lines in the introduction to his ambitious biography, which amounts to his own attempt at the massive project of trying to understand Lispector. If Heidegger had been able to stop being German.” If Rimbaud had been a mother, if he had reached the age of fifty. If Rilke had been a Jewish Brazilian born in the Ukraine. Hélène Cixous, one of Lispector’s most devoted readers, came up with an oft-cited yet exceedingly ambiguous paean to her genius: imagine, Cixous proclaimed, “if Kafka had been a woman. The English translator of her most celebrated novel confesses that her language defies his best attempts to render it, and wonders if the book can even be called a novel at all. Her first novel, Near to the Wild Heart, created a sensation, but she struggled to find publishers for nearly all of her subsequent work-nine novels, as well as collections of short stories, essays, and journalism. Though she considered herself fully a Brazilian, having lived in the country since infancy, both her critics and her admirers often described her accent and her diction as “foreign”-perhaps unsure how else to characterize her unconventional wrestlings with the Portuguese language. ![]() No one has ever known quite how to understand Clarice Lispector. Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector
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