Clarice Lispector’s birthday was last Sunday, December 10th, but the Clarice’s Hour celebrations continue in Brazil and abroad. In Mexico, the Fondo de Cultura Económica celebrated the date with a presentation of En estado de viaje (published by the FCE in 2017), an assemblage of texts from the period when the author was abroad (between 1944 and 1959). Check out excerpts from the reading in the video, with the participation of Tálata Rodriguez.
Clarice in Mexico
Footnotes
See also
Before the Hour, a preface by Paloma Vidal
A chronicle of the encounter with the manuscripts of The Hour of the Star by Paloma Vidal for the new edition of the novella.
Fact, Hoax, Fiction
At the center of the short story “The Smallest Woman in the World,” there is a reference to a photograph that was allegedly published in a report about an explorer’s expedition to Equatorial Africa in the “Sunday papers.” This information could be taken as a fictional invention, but the existence of a supposed report is reinforced by “The Useless Explanation,” a text published in the “Back of the Drawer” of The Foreign Legion (1964) about the genesis of the stories that make up Family Ties (1960), the author’s previous volume.
Clarice, Mistress
The frequent allusion to domestic servants in the urban environment of her chronicles demonstrates what is a reality for many middle-class families in the country: incorporated into the intimate environment of the home in the condition of a “domesticated outsider”, the domestic servant constitutes the most lasting and personal relationship that a member of the middle class allows themselves to establish with poverty.
Clarice Lispector by Jorge Carrión
The Spanish writer and critic Jorge Carrión recently published, in The New York Times, an essay about the life and work of Clarice Lispector.
Child and Origin
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.
“In the Name of My Father”
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.