When we think about the books that make up a writer’s library, we first imagine works that have influenced the author, or at least dialogue with his or her literary production. When speculating about how Clarice Lispector’s bookshelf would look, a reader could assume the presence of Virginia Woolf’s novels, stories by Katherine Mansfield… and, in fact, in Clarice’s library, which is in the IMS Collection, the two modernists are present.
Unexpected books included various works with Buddhist themes, such as “Introduction to Zen-Buddhism,” “Zen and the Infinite,” and The Tibetan Book of the Dead. The author’s interest in eastern philosophy is evident when we handle her copy of the I Ching, “the book of changes,” a Chinese classic that, among other things, also serves as an oracle.
Clarice left various papers with drafts to calculate responses provided by the I Ching. Some of the questions are scribbled, such as “What’s my future in general?” Curiously enough, this question is on a page in her planner dated December 10, 1974, the author’s 54th birthday. It is also hard to imagine Lispector purchasing the nutritional guide Let’s Eat Right to Keep Fit, by Adelle Davis, or the fitness guide Exercise and Keep Fit, by Terry Hunt.
In addition to these curiosities, we have two books with styles much different from Lispector’s: Stories, by Ernest Hemingway, known for his dry style and faithful to the notion that “to write is to cut words” [as the Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond has said] and Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut, a hilarious novel, written in a simple style defined by the author himself as writing “in the voice of a child.”
Revealing some of the author’s very idiosyncratic interests, we have Fun with Mathematics, by Jerome S. Meyer, and Ten Perfect Crimes, by Hank Sterling, who presents particularly ingenious true crime cases. This latter book is perhaps not so strange considering that it keeps company with many works of detective fiction in Clarice Lispector’s extremely diverse and unusual library.
That was the first sensation which I had when I saw Clarice’s paintings: my whole body shivered in a flush that was shared with these two women who worked every day at the archive. A kind of slip, a discomposure, a “human dismantling.” As Clarice wrote, “She needs to move her whole boneless head to look at an object.”
I believe that Clarice and I shared a common feeling: objects are not inanimate, on the contrary, they have a secret life. I do not know if the reader has already tried turning off the lights at night in your room and, little by little, noticed that your eyes adapt to the dark and finally you can perceive the living presence of things.
Clarice Lispector spent her childhood in Recife, but at the age of 15 she moved with her father and two sisters to Rio de Janeiro. It was in the then capital of Brazil that the writer lived her youth and early adult life: she completed high school, graduated from law school, had her first professional experiences in the press, got married, and in 1943, released her first book Near to the Wild Heart.
[...] throughout all of Clarice’s work there is a dazzling – almost primordial, inaugural, Edenic – vision of gender, of the man-woman division. One notes a frightened fascination that there is a male-animal-man in the world, as we read, for example, in the short story “The Buffalo,” and also in another story about phantasmic and monstrous masculinity titled “The Dinner”.
On December 10th, IMS Rio celebrates Clarice Lispector’s birthday. This year, we will present, in a single screening, the short film Perto de Clarice (Close to Clarice), by João Carlos Horta, from 1982, in a new digital version based on the 35mm original preserved by the Audiovisual Technical Center (CTAv). After the film screening, there will be a conversation between the writer Heloisa Buarque de Holanda, who was involved in the making of the film and is the director's widow, and Teresa Montero, author of the most recent biography of the writer, À procura da própria coisa (In Search of the Thing Itself – Rocco, 2021), mediated by the IMS literature consultant, the poet Eucanaã Ferraz.
