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 following text began with research on the correspondence between Clarice Lispector and her sisters Tania Kauffman and Elisa Lispector, under the care of the IMS.
In the interviews done by Clarice there is a sort of unsuitableness for the job with respect to journalistic technique. With Vinicius de Moraes, her first approach sounds like a provocation: “Vinicius, have you really ever loved anyone in life?”
The film portrays the famous Ulisses, Clarice Lispector’s dog and a prominent character in her life and fiction. He is present in the posthumous novel A Breath of Life, he is the narrator of the children’s book Quase de verdade (Almost True), he was mentioned in countless chronicles, and today he is immortalized, alongside his owner, in a bronze statue at Leme Beach, in Rio de Janeiro.
Mineirinho, one of the Rio de Janeiro police’s most wanted criminals during the 1960s. José Miranda Rosa earned this nickname, naturally, for being born in the state of Minas Gerais.
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.”
In addition to confirming the value of the biographical genre as a privileged means to meet the demands of a curious public about the past of famous personalities, Teresa Montero challenges the genre’s conventions by reconstructing the family life, personal experiences, friendships, and creative process of Clarice Lispector, an author who, with all her strengths, gave life to her vocation for literature as a fatality and a salvation.
