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 launching in 2015, in the United States, the unprecedented collection in one book of all the short stories by Clarice Lispector, the researcher Benjamin Moser...
Among the items that make up the Clarice Lispector Collection, which has been at the IMS since 2004, are two paintings by the author.
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.
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.
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.
