Too Much of Life

*Clarice Lispector*
*courtesy Paulo Gurgel Valente*

The Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, Ukrainian-born and Jewish, has become internationally fashionable and admired; her novels are strange, ordinary, intense, detached, and carefully crafted. Although they were popular in her home country, the income from her books was modest, so in the late 1960s she began to contribute to the Jornal do Brasil, a respected local newspaper (which my parents read when we lived in Rio de Janeiro), writing about topics that would have been familiar to the middle classes of the time and others that weren’t. Clarice, as she was known to those who followed her work, often considered cultural and psychological matters in her weekly column, but she was also fond of the routine and quotidian, pondering such subjects as television talent shows, football, domestic maids, and taxi drivers. Some of her pieces, usually brief, are full of melancholic sensitivity and understanding; others are sharp, exuberant, or gnomic. A few are casually dull. Called ‘crônicas’, they are a very Brazilian form of writing.

Shorter and more oblique than essays, ‘crônicas’ allow writers to reflect on anything they choose; typically, they use simple prose, personal anecdotes, unpredictable remarks, and incisive perceptions to transform the mundane into something interesting, poignant, or humorous. They are always broad-ranging; Lispector’s Saturday column included interviews, politics, book reviews, fragments of fiction, personal advice, replies to letters, apologies, and various other subjects; what they had in common was engagement with life as she encountered it. Lispector’s ‘crônicas’ are the random but sincere thoughts of someone who is trying to comprehend the world and her place within it; her perspectives fluctuated because her experiences and responses to them changed, and she was willing to show contradictory sides of herself. She never pretended to be consistent. Albeit to a lesser extent than in her novels, Lispector used language unconventionally in her journalism; she wanted to write without a style, expressing as faithfully as possible her perception of things. All this could be overwhelming; as she once wrote, ‘Everything affects me — I see too much, hear too much, and everything demands too much of me’.

Lispector was also afraid of excessive knowledge; ‘I feel that I am much more complete when I don’t understand’, she said. She worried, too, about the ‘crônicas’ being overly personal, believing that they were needlessly revealing; in her novels she was able to disappear, but through the direct voice of the ‘crônicas’, aimed at a wide audience, she felt herself becoming uncomfortably familiar and accessible. ‘In this column, I am, in a way, letting myself be known’, she said, going on to wonder if she was losing her ‘secret, private self’. She found some solace in the example of the Portuguese author Fernando Pessoa, who had the same dread of a clearly comprehensible identity and responded to this quandary by fracturing his literary identity into what he called ‘heteronyms’, which he used as subterfuges. Lispector adopted no such psychological strategy, becoming increasingly vulnerable as her life unfolded.

There is resonance between Clarice Lispector and Machado de Assis, the 19th century novelist, poet, playwright, and author of many distinguished short stories and ‘crônicas’. Famous in Brazil, where he is still often considered to be his country’s finest writer, Machado was not widely recognised abroad during his lifetime, although that is no longer so. While his early style and themes were conventional, they later became odd, opaque, and often open-ended; in 1879, a prolonged illness seems to have led him to a different view of the world, his work turning more cerebral and surreal. It gave rise to peculiar stories with ironic authorial interventions and roguish experiments, such as The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas and his novella The Alienist, the latter dealing darkly and amusingly with the issue of sanity. It concerns Dr. Bacamarte, a prominent physician whose obsession for discovering a universal method to cure pathological mental disorders leads to chaos in a small Brazilian village; his newly opened asylum, intended to provide shelter for the mad, comes to house all the many people whom the doctor considers to be at risk of mental illness. ‘Although madness has been thought a small island in an ocean of sanity’, he says, ‘I am beginning to suspect that it is not an island at all but a continent’. In The Alienist and many of his other stories, Machado enjoyed pointing out the tenuous balance of human reason, even in apparently respectable people.

For further exploration:

A review of ‘Too Much of Life’, a collection of Lispector’s ‘crônicas’: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/sep/04/too-much-of-life-by-clarice-lispector-review-chronicles-to-treasure

Clarice Lispector’s Rio: https://site.claricelispector.ims.com.br/en/2019/01/18/rio-de-clarice/

The excellent Clarice Lispector website: https://site.claricelispector.ims.com.br/en/postagens/

A moving and celebrated Clarice Lispector interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1zwGLBpULs

An unusually perceptive article on Clarice Lispector: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/12/10/clarice-lispector-madame-of-the-void/

A succinct article about Fernando Pessoa: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/07/27/a-little-fellow-with-a-big-head/

A brief review of Machado de Assis’ best-known novel: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/aug/29/the-posthumous-memoirs-of-bras-cubas-by-joaquim-maria-machado-de-assis-review

Image on index page: Leme Rock, with Post 6, Two Brothers Hill and Gávea Rock in the background. Photo: Daniel Ramalho

And some unrelated current listening: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ca-cyvU8P04

Shadow

‘Unrest’ and Pyotr Kropotkin