, Clarice Lispector by Jorge Carrión. IMS Clarice Lispector, 2018. Disponível em: https://site.claricelispector.ims.com.br/en/2018/01/19/clarice-lispector/. Acesso em: 01 June 2026.
The Spanish writer and critic Jorge Carrión recently published in The New York Times an essay about the life and work of Clarice Lispector (“La pasión según Clarice Lispector”). Starting from a reading of Por qué este mundo, the biography of Clarice written by Benjamin Moser and recently released in Spanish translation by the Siruela publishing house, the author addresses broader issues related to Clarice’s work:
“She did not like interviews and fiction – in her case – is much more important, incisive, and eloquent than nonfiction. By reading her novels and short stories, one might conclude that she is a hermetic author, close to mysticism. However, I believe, on the contrary, that she is an absolutely contemporary artist, who resolved in her work one of the great literary problems of our time: how to write, with abstract ambition, mental landscapes with figurative language.”
That is, for Carrión, Clarice’s work is “corporeal, totally vital, and bloody,” although it is curdled with metaphors and mysteries. This characteristic brings her prose closer to poetry, according to the critic. That is why, perhaps, she wrote as if it were to save someone’s life, perhaps her own, as she said in A Breath of Life.Read Carrión’s essay, in Spanish, by clicking here.
See also
by Bruno Cosentino
Clarice’s connection with politics does not take place on the surface of public life, or in the texts that directly address the issue. This is due to the writer’s understanding of the rift between art and politics, which is addressed in two related texts, “Literature and Justice” and “What I Would Like to Have Been,” in which she observes with disconcerting lucidity the uselessness of her literature as a political instrument.
by Elizama Almeida
Written in the 1950s, during the period in which she lived in Washington, The Mystery of the Thinking Rabbit was the first children’s book written by Clarice Lispector.
by Alexandre Nodari
It has become commonplace to say that Clarice Lispector’s writing seeks to overcome the limits of language which the author names “it,” “nucleus,” “thing,” “unsayable,” “silence.”
by Patrick Gert Bange
In a small, vast, and brilliant book called Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, by Hélène Cixous (1993), the author is taken to three schools by writers that she loves: the School of the Dead, the School of Dreams, and the School of Roots. One of the books that transport Cixous to the School of Dreams is Clarice Lispector’s second published novel, The Chandelier.
by Elizama Almeida
Paulo Gurgel Valente, Clarice's son, spoke with Eucanaã Ferraz and Elizama Almeida and recalls, for example, the personalities who frequented his home.
by Elizama Almeida
The LPs that belonged to Clarice help us get to know a little about her musical taste.
