, “The Chandelier” is published in English. IMS Clarice Lispector, 2018. Disponível em: https://site.claricelispector.ims.com.br/en/2018/04/05/o-lustre-e-publicado-em-ingles/. Acesso em: 27 May 2026.
The Chandelier, Clarice Lispector’s second novel, published in 1946, was just translated into English by Benjamin Moser and Magdalena Edwards. The book is another of a series of translations of the author’s works that have been published in the past few years. In a statement to The New York Times, Moser observes that this may be the strangest and hardest book by the Brazilian writer (who was born in Ukraine in 1920). The British critic Christopher Ricks, for his part, sees it as a miniature of Clarice’s universe:
So many of the themes, philosophical inquiries and character types that appear [in The Chandelier] will return, honed as Lispector refines her style and hardens them into the diamond like perfection of her final books, which are narrated in jagged aphorisms – ‘anti literature’ she called them.
The American newspaper furthermore celebrates the rediscovery of Clarice in the United States as one of the true literary events of the 21st century, highlighting the singularity of her writing, which is marked by a unique punctuation and syntax, in addition to a capacity to resignify words according to her own wishes – “No one sounds like Lispector (…). No one thinks like her,” the journalist Parul Sehgal concludes.
A few days after the American newspaper featured The Chandelier, the editor Gregory Cowles included the book on the list of ten reading suggestions that he made for the prestigious Book Review column.
Read The New York Times article here.
*Photo: Unidentified photographer/ Clarice Lispector Collection/ IMS
See also
by Elizama Almeida
The LPs that belonged to Clarice help us get to know a little about her musical taste.
by Victor Heringer
Clarice Lispector’s birthday was last Sunday, December 10, but the “Clarice’s Hour” celebrations continue in Brazil and abroad.
by Bruno Cosentino
For the journalist Laura Freitas, Clarice’s female characters hide the germ of nonconformity – “the women are wild,” she affirms.
by Šárka Grauová
by Sônia Roncador
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.
by Augusto Ferraz
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.
