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
See also
What Lies Clarice Has
In the times of social networks, Clarice “cultivates” thousands and thousands of “followers”, of “apps”, and “pages”.
Clarice and Lucrécia in Bern
The following text began with research on the correspondence between Clarice Lispector and her sisters Tania Kauffman and Elisa Lispector, under the care of the IMS.
The Symbol and the Thing
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.
Paulo Gurgel Valente Remembers His Mother, Clarice Lispector
Paulo Gurgel Valente, Clarice's son, spoke with Eucanaã Ferraz and Elizama Almeida and recalls, for example, the personalities who frequented his home.
Book You Might Not Imagine Clarice Had
Clarice left various papers with drafts to calculate responses provided by the I Ching. Some of the questions are scribbled, such as “What’s my future in general?”
Between Mystery and Politics
The numerous commentators who not only in Brazil but also throughout the world investigate Clarice Lispector’s work encounter several aspects to highlight in her multifaceted writing.1 From the fruitful tension between transcendence and contingence to the profound and refined attention to the human condition, one can encounter an immense variety of dimensions in her body of writings.