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 Mell Brites
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.
by Yudith Rosenbaum
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.
by Elizama Almeida
In launching in 2015, in the United States, the unprecedented collection in one book of all the short stories by Clarice Lispector, the researcher Benjamin Moser...
by Rafael Juliao
“I wanted to announce the following: the person I love most in life is named Clarice Lispector.” This affirmation was made by Cazuza.
by Elizama Almeida
Working on a manual printer, João Cabral invites Clarice to debut “The Seamless Book,” his small publisher.
by Mateus Toledo Gonçalves
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.
