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 thirst for the other
Every year, in the liturgical calendar of the Catholic Church, Carnival is followed by Lent, a period in which the faithful withdraw from mundane life to dedicate themselves to sacrifices, charity, and prayer.
Clarice in Princeton’s Network
The Brazil LAB is an interdisciplinary initiative at Princeton University that considers Brazil to be a crucial nexus for us to understand today’s most pressing issues. Based at PIIRS (Princeton Institute of International and Regional Studies), the LAB brings together professors, researchers, and students from more than 20 different university departments (from the social to the natural sciences, from engineering to the arts and humanities) in interaction with dozens of researchers from academic institutions of excellence.
Clarice Lispector and the Invention of Judeity
Benjamin Moser, one of the most significant biographers of Clarice Lispector, said in an interview that one of his goals in writing Why This World, published in the United States and translated into Portuguese as Clarice, uma biografia, was to make space for a theme rarely explored by literary critics, commentators, and biographers: the writer’s “Judeity.” Most tend to limit themselves to reflecting on her “Brazilianness,” “as if one had to choose between being Jewish and being Brazilian.”
The Unfamiliar
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.
A Chronicle of a Patrimony that Needs To Be Preserved
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.