In the 1960s, the Spaniard Jaime Vilaseca was a carpenter in Rio de Janeiro until a fateful encounter with Clarice Lispector, for whom he had gone to make a bookcase in her apartment in the Leme neighborhood. The writer had silently watched him working during those days, and when the furniture was finished, she looked at him and said: “You’re going to be a framer.” Faced with the man’s hesitation, she completed the prediction: “You won’t escape your destiny!” Since then, for over fifty years, Jaime Vilaseca has lived off this profession, for which he is renowned, besides having become a curator and owner of an art gallery. In this conversation with the poet Eucanaã Ferraz, the framer talks about his friendship with Clarice Lispector and tells his stories that served as a source of inspiration for texts by the writer, such as the famous short story “The First Kiss,” from the book Covert Joy.
A frame for Clarice Lispector
Footnotes
See also
The Rio de Janeiro of Clarice Lispector
Clarice Lispector spent her childhood in Recife, but at the age of 15 she moved with her father and two sisters to Rio de Janeiro. It was in the then capital of Brazil that the writer lived her youth and early adult life: she completed high school, graduated from law school, had her first professional experiences in the press, got married, and in 1943, released her first book Near to the Wild Heart.
Clarice is pop
According to a survey done by YouPIX in June 2012, Clarice is the most quoted writer on Twitter. Every day more than 3.5 thousand phrases by the author – or attributed to her – are posted on there.
LispectorFest at the University of Tennessee
Every year the University of Tennessee prepares AuthorFest, a series of activities to celebrate the work of a single author. In its second edition, AuthorFest paid tribute to Clarice Lispector.
Clarice Lispector: Visions of Splendor
Acclaimed by critics and a popular phenomenon on the internet, Clarice Lispector is considered, internationally, one of the great names in 20th century literature. Mysterious, obscure, revealing, experimental, strangely mystical, or philosophical – how to define the writing of the author of The Hour of the Star? This podcast, conceived and presented by Bruno Cosentino and Eucanaã Ferraz, covers Clarice’s life and work in five episodes, in which they talk to great specialists, professors, and researchers.
Clarice’s Hour 2016
Celebrated in Argentina, New York, and Paris, 2016 Clarice’s Hour was divided last year between the themes of epistolary and translation.
Idiocy and Holiness
Michel de Certeau, in his La fable mystique, addresses an important aspect in the relation between idiocy and holiness in the first centuries, particularly in Christian literature, namely: a mode of isolation in the crowd. Idiocy, in the form of madness, is attributed to the crowd, and additionally, is established as a provocation, a transgression in the field of the “right-minded.”