, 50 years of The Mystery of the Thinking Rabbit. IMS Clarice Lispector, 2017. Disponível em: https://site.claricelispector.ims.com.br/en/2017/06/26/50-anos-de-o-misterio-do-coelho-pensante/. Acesso em: 17 March 2026.
Written in the 1950s, during the period in which she lived in Washington, The Mystery of the Thinking Rabbit was the first children’s book written by Clarice Lispector. After a question by her son Paulo– “Why do you only write books for adults? Not for children?” – the text, initially not intended for release, was written in English and shelved until 1967, when it was published by José Álvaro.
The narrator in The Mystery of the Thinking Rabbit is named Paulo, which evokes the name of Clarice’s son and will strengthen the close ties with the reader, since the narrative is constructed like an intimate conversation, where the one who listens/reads is constantly engaged.
The plot focuses on Joãozinho the rabbit, who smelled of ideas, and invents a way to leave his cage when there is no food. The humans notice and do not forget to feed him. Nonetheless, the rabbit wants much more than what the humans offer him, and his life comes to be “eat well and escape, and always with a beating heart.” More than for the adventure, the rabbit had acquired a taste for freedom, and it is outside the cage that he really manages to be a thinking rabbit.
According to Rosa Gens, “Lispector’s poetics is evident in the fluid plot, in the doubts and inquiries, in the presence of a narrator who is always together with the reader and does not know all the answers, allowing the doubt to be prolonged. Mystery narratives commonly lead the reader to investigate clues, elaborate solutions, solve enigmas. In Clarice Lispector’s writing, the mystery is different. It does not concern an enigma related to facts, only the possibility of pretending to be a rabbit, of climbing into someone else’s skin, of thinking from different angles. In the text, which emphasizes fantasy and imagination, playing and thinking provide the tone, and the contamination between rabbit and human, emphasized at the end of the narrative, makes way for the marvelous.”
A book only for those who like rabbits, according to Clarice Lispector, who moreover asks adults for a little patience and understanding for the many questions that cannot be answered in rabbit terms.
Original cover for The Mystery of the Thinking Rabbit, 1st edition
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 work of Clarice Lispector revolves around on two notions: the symbol and the thing. The thing, physics, and the symbol, metaphysics; the thing, immanence, and the symbol, transcendence; the thing, the body, and the symbol, language; the thing, existence, and the symbol, the saying; the thing, the event, and the symbol, the way to make it possible to read the nonsymbolizable thing.
Darkness is a hollow word and one never really knows what fits inside Its dimensions are so undetermined that perhaps it could even be said that everything fits and nothing fits in it, since, being an immense storehouse of paradoxes, the ambiguous quality of immeasurable is immediately added to the primordial void that characterizes it. These attributes, thus agreed, gain particular density when prepared by the wrought of the author of The Apple in the Dark.
The numerous commentators who not only in Brazil but also throughout the world investigate Clarice Lispector’s work encounter several aspects to highlight in her multifaceted writing.1 From the fruitful tension between transcendence and contingence to the profound and refined attention to the human condition, one can encounter an immense variety of dimensions in her body of writings.
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.
The day I met Clarice was not the same day she met me. I was all adoration, observing her. She had no reason to even lay eyes on me. Leaving the Jornal do Brasil newsroom together, the journalist Yllen Kerr, a great friend of mine, said he was going to visit Clarice and asked if I wanted to go. Did I ever!
