Clarice lispector biography for kids
Clarice Lispector
Lispector had an ability to write as though no one had ever written before. One of the hidden geniuses of the twentieth century, in the same league as Flann O’Brien, Borges, and Pessoa—utterly original and brilliant, haunting and disturbing.
— Colm Tóibín
Clarice Lispector was born in 1920 to a Jewish family in western Ukraine. As a result of the anti-Semitic violence they endured, the family fled to Brazil in 1922, and Clarice Lispector grew up in Recife. Following the death of her mother when Clarice was nine, she moved to Rio de Janeiro with her father and two sisters, and she went on to study law. With her husband, who worked for the foreign service, she lived in Italy, Switzerland, England, and the United States, until they separated and she returned to Rio in 1959; she died there in 1977. Since her death, Clarice Lispector has earned universal recognition as Brazil’s greatest modern writer.
Covert Joy: Selected Stories
This radiant selection of Clarice Lispector’s best and best-loved stories includes such familiar favorites as “The Smallest Woman in the World,” “Love,” “Family Ties,” and “The Egg and the Chicken.” Lispector’s luminous regard for life’s small revelatory incidents is legendary, and here her genius is concentrated in a fizzing, portable volume. Covert Joy offers the particular bliss a book can bring that she expresses in the title story:
Joy would always be covert for me. . . Sometimes I’d sit in the hammock, swinging with the book open on my lap, not touching it, in the purest ecstasy. I was no longer a girl with a book: I was a woman with her lover.
The Apple in the Dark
“It’s the best one,” Clarice Lispector remarked on the occasion of the publication of The Apple in the Dark: “I can’t define it, how it is, I can only say that it’s much better constructed than the previous ones.” A book in three chapters, with three central characters, The Apple in the Dark is in fac Filmmaker Pedro Almodovar was asked to write an introduction to the translated edition of Clarice Lispector’s final novel Breath of Life. Instead of a formal introduction, his refusal letter was published and said this of Lispector’s work: “Each phrase accumulates such a quantity of meanings; it is so dense, rotund, and rich that I halt before it as before a wall. I like it very much but am not qualified to accompany a text of such magnitude.” To write about Clarice Lispector is to be crushed under the weight of her form. For me, Lispector is an author who is always unfolding. Each time I encounter her, it’s as if I am discovering her for the first time. But the piece of hers I came across most recently, The Mystery of the Thinking Rabbit, shifted my view of Lispector in a way that made me pause and retrace the last decade I have spent reading her. * While at Fordham in the Bronx, I muddled through an undergraduate Portuguese course with the goal of learning enough to survive a semester in Brazil. We had one reading assignment, in the form of a small newspaper clipping photocopied onto a large sheet of paper. I remember this detail not because I did the assignment (I didn’t), but because the name at the top sounded like a different type of foreign: Clarice Lispector. In class we had spoken of Jose Saramago, Paulo Coelho, and Jorge Amado. Lispector stuck with me, either because she was the first female author we discussed in a parade of Important Men, or because her name did not sound particularly Brazilian. Living in the Northeast of Brazil was like living in a warm rain cloud—everything always damp. The pages of the books I brought with me swelled and grew fat out of their spines from the humidity. I would splay out on the hardwood floor of my rented apartment to read because it was the coolest place to be. This chronology is based on the text “A descoberta do mundo”, written by Nádia Gotlib for the series Cadernos de Literatura Brasileira, published by the Moreira Salles Institute in 2004. “That rare person who looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf,” Clarice Lispector is one of the most popular but least understood of Latin American writers. Now, after years of research on three continents, drawing on previously unknown manuscripts and dozens of interviews, Benjamin Moser demonstrates how Lispector’s development as a writer was directly connected to the story of her turbulent life. Born in the nightmarish landscape of post-World War I Ukraine, Clarice became, virtually from adolescence, a person whose beauty, genius, and eccentricity intrigued Brazil. Why This World tells how this precocious girl, through long exile abroad and difficult personal struggles, matured into a great writer. It also asserts, for the first time, the deep roots in the Jewish mystical tradition that make her the true heir to Kafka as well as the unlikely author of “perhaps the greatest spiritual autobiography of the twentieth century.” From Chechelnik to Recife, from Naples and Berne to Washington and Rio de Janeiro, Why This World strips away the mythology surrounding this extraordinary figure and shows how Clarice Lispector transformed one woman’s struggles into a universally resonant art. Why This Worldreviewed in the New York Times Book Review Why This World chosen as one of Amazon.com’s Best Books of the Month for August Why This World selected as a New York Times Notable Book of 2009 Why This World chosen as a Los Angeles Times Favorite Nonfiction title of 2009 Why This World chosen as “Best of 2009” by Barnes and Noble Why This World elected a Booklist Editors’ Choice, 2009 Why This World chosen as a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Awards “Lively, ardent and intellectually rigorous … His ene
Clarice Lispector’s Children’s Story Taught Me to Read Her Like An Adult
Considered one of the greatest names in Brazilian literature, Clarice Lispector debuted with the award-winning novel Near to the Wild Heart (1943), deserving passionate attention from critics, given the singularity of her writing. Besides being a novelist, author of the acclaimed The Passion According to G.H. (1964) and The Hour of the Star (1977), she established herself as a short story author thanks to titles such as Family Ties (1960) and The Foreign Legion (1964). Her oeuvre also includes children’s books and a vast number of chronicles. Her work today is widely translated and disseminated, with critics placing her works among internationally recognized authors such as Virginia Woolf, Kafka and Katherine Mansfield.
Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector
A finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award
New York Times Notable Book
Reviews