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  • Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector
  • Naomi Lindstrom
Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, by Benjamin Moser. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. 479 pp. $29.95.

Benjamin Moser's new biography of the novelist, journalist, and short-story writer Clarice Lispector (b. Ukraine, 1920, d. Brazil, 1977; often referred to by her first name) is expertly tailored to convey its subject's specialness to English-language readers, including those who have little or no previous acquaintance with this greatly admired writer, her work, or Brazil. Titles and quotations appear in English translation, and Brazilian historical and cultural allusions are explained. The main strength of Why This World is its ability to impart an understanding of the significance of Clarice's literary innovation and the enigma of her personality. Moser, enchanted by the beautiful, secretive novelist and her mysterious writing, infuses his biography with a spell-binding quality, skillfully convincing readers of his subject's appeal.

While the main focus is Clarice's life, Moser also includes general characterizations of her most noted works of fiction. Rather than carry out textual analyses in a scholarly mode, he conveys to readers his own personal sense of what about the novels and short stories is most meaningful and most revealing of their author. Moser also cites lengthy and well-chosen passages from his subject's fiction.

Clarice's turbulent personal relations are another main theme, and Moser is not shy about drawing upon the wealth of rumors swirling through the Brazilian literary milieu. He has also researched in detail Clarice's dealings with editors, publishers, and the reading public, and seems somewhat chagrined that such a great literary original, even after winning acclaim with her first novel, the 1943 Near to the Savage Heart, at times had to struggle to place her manuscripts adequately. Clarice's oeuvre has some less illustrious sectors, including [End Page 191] outright hackwork. Moser reveals, for example, that her beauty-advice column was underwritten by Pond's.

Why This World is also suited to readers who are especially intrigued by this celebrated writer's Jewish background, which she acknowledged but persistently sought to downplay. The quest to understand Clarice's relation to Jewish thought and tradition is made arduous, yet more fascinating, by the absence of overt Jewish thematic markers in her writing. Whether or not the plan behind the book was to highlight the subject's Jewishness, the sections of Why This World on this topic are especially well realized and greatly enrich the biography.

Moser begins his story by describing the wretched existence of Eastern European Jews in the early twentieth century and, specifically, the wave of pogroms that swept through the Ukraine in the years following World War I. In his account, Clarice's mother, Mania, was raped during one such raid, contracted syphilis as a result, and then conceived Clarice out of the folk belief that childbearing would cure her. While reported statements certainly suggest that Mania Lispector was a rape survivor, Moser's categorical assertion that her eventual cause of death was syphilis rests on some rather tenuous hearsay. We may never establish the exact details, but Moser is correct in his overall message that the family arrived in Brazil traumatized by the violence that they had experienced in the Ukraine.

The next sections offer an account of the family's 1925 immigration and Clarice's childhood and adolescence in Brazil, in Maceió, then Recife, then Rio. On the one hand, Moser emphasizes the Lispectors' poverty and the misery occasioned by the mother's declining health. On the other, he notes the creative and imaginative qualities that Clarice displayed early on. Moser points out that, even in a city as small as Recife, Clarice had available to her all the resources needed to sustain Jewish life, and her father took pains to pass on the Jewish intellectual tradition to his Brazilian daughters. This background information is especially worth establishing, since in adult life Clarice often gave the impression that a perfunctory Jewish upbringing had made little impression on her. Moser is certainly not the only reader to detect a Kabbalistic legacy in Clarice's unknowable literary...

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