, “Clarice’s Hour” at the IMS Paulista. IMS Clarice Lispector, 2017. Disponível em: https://site.claricelispector.ims.com.br/en/2017/12/15/hora-de-clarice-no-ims-paulista/. Acesso em: 13 December 2025.
In this edition of “Clarice’s Hour,” the IMS Paulista hosted a conversation with Idra Novey, mediated by the poet and editor Alberto Martins. Novey spoke about the experience of translating The Passion According to G.H. to English and about her new novel published in Brazil, Ways to Disappear (2017), which is marked by the mysterious disappearance of a writer who may or may not be Clarice Lispector.
Above is a passage in Portuguese and in English from The Passion According to G.H. that moved the public. Below is the video of the meeting.
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.
In a small, vast, and brilliant book called Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, by Hélène Cixous (1993), the author is taken to three schools by writers that she loves: the School of the Dead, the School of Dreams, and the School of Roots. One of the books that transport Cixous to the School of Dreams is Clarice Lispector’s second published novel, The Chandelier.
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.
The film portrays the famous Ulisses, Clarice Lispector’s dog and a prominent character in her life and fiction. He is present in the posthumous novel A Breath of Life, he is the narrator of the children’s book Quase de verdade (Almost True), he was mentioned in countless chronicles, and today he is immortalized, alongside his owner, in a bronze statue at Leme Beach, in Rio de Janeiro.
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.
