, 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: 06 May 2026.
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.
Clarice’s connection with politics does not take place on the surface of public life, or in the texts that directly address the issue. This is due to the writer’s understanding of the rift between art and politics, which is addressed in two related texts, “Literature and Justice” and “What I Would Like to Have Been,” in which she observes with disconcerting lucidity the uselessness of her literature as a political instrument.
[...] 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”.
It has become commonplace to say that Clarice Lispector’s writing seeks to overcome the limits of language which the author names “it,” “nucleus,” “thing,” “unsayable,” “silence.”
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.
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.
