, The Clarice Factor. IMS Clarice Lispector, 2017. Disponível em: https://site.claricelispector.ims.com.br/en/2017/03/20/o-fator-clarice/. Acesso em: 05 April 2025.
The Moreira Salles Institute, in partnership with the Department of Humanities at Columbia University, presents the international seminar The Clarice Factor: Aesthetics, Gender, and Diaspora in Brazil, which will take place on the 23rd (Thursday), 24th (Friday), and 29th (Wednesday) of March, at Casa Hispánica, in New York City.
The inaugural milestone of the collaboration between IMS and Columbia University began in December 2015, at the Institute’s headquarters in Rio de Janeiro, with the colloquium Brazil: Global Crossing, which brought together Columbia University researchers, Brazilian professors and specialists, in addition to the coordinators of the IMS collection, in multidisciplinary discussions on the modernization process in Brazil.
Since then relations between the two institutions have strengthened with the announcement of the new event organized by Ana Paulina Lee and Graziela Montaldo, from the Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures at Columbia University, and by the IMS Research Directorate.
Completely dedicated to discussions on Clarice’s writing as performance, form, sound, and material, the tables will mostly occur on the 24th, with the participation of researcher-professors from several universities. IMS guests include Carlos Mendes de Sousa, Vilma Arêas (University of São Paulo-Campinas), and Yudith Rosenbaum (University of São Paulo). Also confirmed are Katrina Dodson, award-winning translator for the edition of TheComplete Stories, and Argentinian Gabriel Giorgi, Associate Professor at New York University.
The event will also feature the installation Edge of Nothing by theater director Dara Malina, who in 2015 had adapted The Hour of the Star for the theater at the same university.
Caetano Veloso says that when he showed the acoustic version of his song “Odeio” (I hate), which would be included on the Cê album, to his friend and composer Jorge Mautner, the latter cried and told him that it was the most beautiful love song that he had ever heard.
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.
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.”
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.
On December 10th, IMS Rio celebrates Clarice Lispector’s birthday. This year, we will present, in a single screening, the short film Perto de Clarice (Close to Clarice), by João Carlos Horta, from 1982, in a new digital version based on the 35mm original preserved by the Audiovisual Technical Center (CTAv). After the film screening, there will be a conversation between the writer Heloisa Buarque de Holanda, who was involved in the making of the film and is the director's widow, and Teresa Montero, author of the most recent biography of the writer, À procura da própria coisa (In Search of the Thing Itself – Rocco, 2021), mediated by the IMS literature consultant, the poet Eucanaã Ferraz.
The critic José Castello will teach new classes for Grupo Clarice, a group dedicated to the reading and study of the works of Clarice Lispector. Among the works discussed are...
, A Wild Review of Near to the Wild Heart. IMS Clarice Lispector, 2017. Disponível em: https://site.claricelispector.ims.com.br/en/2017/03/03/uma-critica-selvagem-para-perto-do-coracao/. Acesso em: 05 April 2025.
It is the end of 1943. A publishing house of little cultural relevance, A Noite, releases the exceptional original version of Near to the Wild Heart, a book by a 22-year-old author and former employee of the publisher. Two of the main critics of the time, Álvaro Lins and Otto Maria Carpeaux, had prior access to the manuscripts. Both the editor of the prestigious José Olympio and Carpeaux advised against its publication. Contrary to these opinions, the book comes out with an initial print run of a thousand copies (sold out by June of the following year). The author does not earn much beyond a hundred copies to distribute among friends and family.
Lins, as one of the most respected critics and also editor-in-chief of the newspaper Correio da Manhã, will publish in the aforementioned newspaper on February 11, 1944 the article “Lyrical Novel,” dedicated to Near to the Wild Heart and its unknown author, Clarice Lispector.
The arguments the critic uses, read from today’s perspective, guarantee a reading that on the one hand is absurd in how it uses as a criterion the female gender in opposition to the male gender to justify many aspects of the work, and on the other hand does not fail to be amusing.
A characteristic of women’s literature is the very visible and ostensive, foregrounded presence of the author’s personality. Certainly, in a general sense every literary work must be the expression, the revelation of a personality. Yet in male temperaments there is a greater tendency to make the author a figure hidden behind his creations (…) next one sees that women are particularly inclined towards these literary forms that permit more direct and sensitive projections of their personalities.
Álvaro Lins will place the novel within the lyrical, “the discovery of a new psychological world, (…) this kind of adventure, of exploration through terrains of human passions that until then have been unexplored,” choosing as exemplary the literature produced by Proust, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf.
And the work of poetic and psychological adventure, more than any other, is the modern English novel, in which a few women writers are the most representative figures. And the union of lyricism with realism, of the poetic sentiment with the capacity for observation, is what removes from the modern poetic novel its tendency toward gluttony and a rosy view of life. (…) There is no contradiction between lyricism and an acute vision of the world, a vision that is sometimes poignant and cruel. An example in fiction of this surprising effect that emerged from the intertwining of lyricism and realism is in the work of Virginia Woolf.
And within this tradition, “I am not afraid to affirm, however,” says the critic, “that the book of Mrs. Clarisse Lispector (sic) is the first definite experiment of the modern lyrical novel made in Brazil,” combining the technique of the author of Ulysses with the “female temperament.”
Although he recognizes that Near to the Wild Heart “provokes right away a disturbing surprise. The surprise of things that are truly new and original,” Lins concludes the article by presenting the novel as incomplete, “full of images, but without intimate unity. Here are pieces of a great novel, but not the great novel that the author will, undoubtedly, be able to write later.”
Clarice, recently married and living in Belém, writes to her sister Tânia Kaufmann, on February 16 – that is, five days after publication of this article: “The reviews are not good for me. The one by Álvaro Lins (…) depressed me and that was good in a way. I wrote to him saying I was unfamiliar with Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Proust when I wrote the book, because the devil of a man all but called me a ‘commercial representative’ for these writers.” But the somewhat annoyed letter was not sent, in the end.
In a less exalted spirit, Clarice herself considers the review and says in a new missive from February 23: “I didn’t write to Álvaro Lins saying that about the novel not being ‘my novel’ because I didn’t interpret his review like that.”
At this point, however, neither Álvaro Lins nor Clarice were aware that in October of the same year Near to the Wild Heart would receive the Graça Aranha award, whose main selection criteria was for debut books “with a marked character of originality.”
A Manhã, October 13, 1943/Hemeroteca Digital
The Foundation had already honored the premières of Rachel de Queiroz, Erico Verissimo, Jorge de Lima, and Murilo Mendes, among others. Later, in the column “Livros do dia – dois minutos no país das letras” (Books of the day – two minutes in literature country), among several small literary news items there was an almost prophetic note written by an unknown J.B.: “(…) The Graça Aranha Foundation concedes the highly coveted prize award for the greatest female debut of all time in Brazilian literature. Clarice Lispector, author of Near to the Wild Heart, is honored with her beautiful book. Never has there been so much justice in the granting of a literary award.”
Michel de Certeau, in his La fable mystique, addresses an important aspect in the relation between idiocy and holiness in the first centuries, particularly in Christian literature, namely: a mode of isolation in the crowd. Idiocy, in the form of madness, is attributed to the crowd, and additionally, is established as a provocation, a transgression in the field of the “right-minded.”
Paulo Gurgel Valente, Clarice's son, spoke with Eucanaã Ferraz and Elizama Almeida and recalls, for example, the personalities who frequented his home.
According to a survey done by YouPIX in June 2012, Clarice is the most quoted writer on Twitter. Every day more than 3.5 thousand phrases by the author – or attributed to her – are posted on there.
In the 1960s, the Spaniard Jaime Vilaseca was a carpenter in Rio de Janeiro until a fateful encounter with Clarice Lispector, for whom he had gone to make a bookcase in her apartment in the Leme neighborhood.
In partnership with the Department of Humanities at Columbia University, the IMS presents the international seminar The Clarice Factor: Aesthetics, Gender, and Diaspora in Brazil.
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.
