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Ran into our Jedi Master yesterday, and after he recounted the most recent threats and insults he had issued to his 300,000 Twitter followers, he gave us the book he was carrying. The Complete Stories of Clarice Lispector contains 86 of her short stories, translated from the Portuguese by Katrina Dodson. This is our first encounter with the work of Lispector (1920-1977), who has been hailed as the greatest Brazilian writer of the 20th century and the premier Latin American woman prose writer. We opened the hardback at random and the first story we read, The Body, was astounding. It’s about a man who lives with two women who grow to despise him because he cheats on them with prostitutes.

The stories are short, elegant, wicked, disturbing. We’ve only read three and the collection is already one of our favourite books of the year. (Chus, you’re going to love it.)

We are still reading Proust, and are halfway through Swann’s Way. It’s a slog, but we think we’re finally getting into it. To keep us from attacking random strangers with the seven volumes of In Search of Lost Time, we stop every 20 pages to read some Clarice Lispector. This book is our sanity insurance.

Here’s a sample.

Clandestine Happiness
by Clarice Lispector

She was fat, short, freckled and with sort of reddish excessively frizzy hair. She had an enormous bust, while all of us were still flat chested. As if that weren’t enough, she filled the two pockets of her blouse, above her bust, with caramels. But she possessed what any child who devoured books dreamed of: a father who owned a bookstore.

She didn’t take much advantage of it. And the rest of us even less: on our birthdays, instead of at least a cheap little book, she hand delivered to each of us a picture postcard from her father’s store. To top it off, it was a scene of Recife, where we lived, with more bridges than you could ever see. On the back, she would write in the most highly embroidered script words like “birth date” and “fond memories.”

But what a talent she had for cruelty. She was pure vengeance, noisily chewing her caramels. How this girl must have hated us, we who were unforgivably pretty, thin, tall, with smooth hair. On me she practiced her sadism with a calm ferocity. In my longing to read, I didn’t even notice the humiliations to which she subjected me: I continued to beg her to lend me the books she didn’t read.

Until the great day came when she started to practice her Chinese torture on me. As if by chance, she told me that she had The Adventures of Little Nose, by Monteiro Lobato.

It was a thick book, my God, it was a book to live with, eating it, sleeping it. And it was completely beyond my reach. She told me to come to her house the next day and she would lend it to me.

Until the next day I became the very anticipation of joy: I wasn’t living, I was swimming slowly in a gentle sea, the waves carrying me to and fro.

The next day I went to her house, I literally ran there. She didn’t live in an apartment like me, but in a house. She didn’t ask me in. Looking straight into my eyes, she told me that she had lent the book to another girl, and that I should come back the next day to get it. Open mouthed, I left slowly, but soon hope took hold of me again completely and I started leaping along the street, which was my strange way of going through the streets of Recife. This time I didn’t fall: the promise of the book led me on, the next day would come, the days that followed would be my whole life, love of the world was waiting for me, and I went leaping through the streets as always and I didn’t fall even once.

But things weren’t that simple. The secret plan of the bookstore owner’s daughter was quiet and diabolic. The next day I was at the door of her house with a smile and a beating heart. Only to hear her calm reply: the book still wasn’t there, I should return the next day. I could scarcely have imagined how later on, in the course of my life, the drama of “the next day” was going to repeat itself accompanied by my beating heart.

And so it continued. For how long? I don’t know. She knew that it was an indefinite time, so long as the bile hadn’t drained completely from her thick body. And I had begun to guess, which is something I do, that she had chosen me to suffer. But, actually guessing it, I sometimes accept it: as if the person who wants to make me suffer wickedly needs me to suffer.

Continue reading.

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From 1977: One of Clarice Lispector’s last interviews. Thanks to Richard for the link. Richard is the president of the Philippine chapter of the Clarice Lispector Obsessives (unless there is a challenger). He reminded us that Lispector has been described as having the looks of Marlene Dietrich and the mind of Virginia Woolf. She’s like your cool, twice-divorced aunt who had a very long cigarette holder and taught you about birth control. Or Rita Gomez.