, Paulo Gurgel Valente Remembers His Mother, Clarice Lispector. IMS Clarice Lispector, 2014. Disponível em: https://site.claricelispector.ims.com.br/en/2014/12/09/paulo-gurgel-valente-recorda-sua-mae-clarice-lispector/. Acesso em: 23 December 2024.
On December 10, the Moreira Salles Institute presents the fourth edition of Clarice’s Hour, an event that marks Clarice Lispector’s birthday (1920-1977).
As part of the commemoration, IMS has produced a video interview with Paulo Gurgel Valente, son of the writer, who spoke with Eucanaã Ferraz and Elizama Almeida and recalls, for example, the personalities who frequented his home and the first book that he read by his mother.
The Brazil LAB is an interdisciplinary initiative at Princeton University that considers Brazil to be a crucial nexus for us to understand today’s most pressing issues. Based at PIIRS (Princeton Institute of International and Regional Studies), the LAB brings together professors, researchers, and students from more than 20 different university departments (from the social to the natural sciences, from engineering to the arts and humanities) in interaction with dozens of researchers from academic institutions of excellence.
More or less fantastic in their plots, these children’s stories reveal narrators who, stripped almost completely of their fictional character, are very similar to the author: they are mothers, writers, they go by the initials “C.L.,” or even say their name is Clarice. Thus, if there is a horizontal posture in these narrators in which respect for the particularities of childhood is presupposed, this same movement also shows the desire to become a little more like a child.
In 1970, Clarice Lispector started to write a work that would come to be called Água Viva. Published at the end of August 1973 by Artenova, what follows is a manuscript.
I died. I found out when, one day, on the sidewalk of Praça Maciel Pinheiro, I lifted my head, opened my eyes, and saw myself dead, there on the plaza’s sidewalk, the two-story house on the other side of the street. My broken heart inside my chest, the two-story house on Rua do Aragão, 387, where, on the second floor, Clarice Lispector lived a happy childhood here in Recife, despite the pains of the world and experiencing and feeling, mainly, the pains of an implacable disease that would one day take Mania, her mother, away from her. I found out when, laid out on the sidewalk there under the scorching Sunday sun, I turned my head to the right and saw a man beside me, who was also looking at the house.