Listening to music is not only a pleasurable activity but also an almost necessary task for those whose vocation it is to incorporate words – a mixture of sound and silence – as a way of illuminating existence. In the archives of Clarice Lispector, Otto Lara Resende, and Decio de Almeida Prado, there are several LPs that help us get to know a little about the musical taste of these three writers.
Clarice Lispector, for example, was explicit in relation to what music meant to her. In Água Viva, she confesses: “I see that I’ve never told you how I listen to music – I gently rest my hand on the record player and my hand vibrates, sending waves through my whole body: and so I listen to the electricity of the vibrations, the last substratum of reality’s realm, and the world trembles inside my hands.”
Covers from Clarice Lispector’s LPs: on the left, St. Matthew Passion, by J.S. Bach, performed by the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam; on the right, The Complete String Quartets of Ludwig von Beethoven, performed by the Budapest String Quartet. Clarice Lispector Archive / IMS Collection
On the left, Jeanne D’Arc au bucher, by Arthur Honegger, performed by The Philadelphia Orchestra; on the right, Othello, by William Shakespeare, with Paul Robeson, José Ferrer, Uta Hagen, and Edith King. Clarice Lispector Archive / IMS Collection.
See also
by Yudith Rosenbaum
The word “unfamiliar” is used by Clarice Lispector in several of her works. To be precise, in the original Portuguese, Clarice employed the neologism infamiliar, which is not in the dictionary, though it cannot be affirmed that the author is the source of this term in Brazilian literature. Nonetheless, by mentioning the word “unfamiliar” at least sixteen times, whether in novels, short stories, or chronicles, the author makes this unique signifier an object of greater attention.
by Equipe IMS
Acclaimed by critics and a popular phenomenon on the internet, Clarice Lispector is considered, internationally, one of the great names in 20th century literature. Mysterious, obscure, revealing, experimental, strangely mystical, or philosophical – how to define the writing of the author of The Hour of the Star? This podcast, conceived and presented by Bruno Cosentino and Eucanaã Ferraz, covers Clarice’s life and work in five episodes, in which they talk to great specialists, professors, and researchers.
by Elizama Almeida
Written in the 1950s, during the period in which she lived in Washington, The Mystery of the Thinking Rabbit was the first children’s book written by Clarice Lispector.
by Bruno Cosentino
This August, Todas as crônicas will be released, a volume that brings together for the first time all the chronicles written by Clarice Lispector for newspapers and magazines.
by Victor Heringer
Clarice Lispector’s birthday was last Sunday, December 10, but the “Clarice’s Hour” celebrations continue in Brazil and abroad.
by Betty Bernardo Fuks
Benjamin Moser, one of the most significant biographers of Clarice Lispector, said in an interview that one of his goals in writing Why This World, published in the United States and translated into Portuguese as Clarice, uma biografia, was to make space for a theme rarely explored by literary critics, commentators, and biographers: the writer’s “Judeity.” Most tend to limit themselves to reflecting on her “Brazilianness,” “as if one had to choose between being Jewish and being Brazilian.”
