La palabra según Clarice Lispector: Aproximaciones críticas / A palavra segundo Clarice Lispector: Aproximações críticas / The Word according to Clarice Lispector: Critical Approaches (review)

With this collection, editors Luciana Namorato and Cesar Ferreira have produced an impressive gathering of thought-provoking essays about the oeuvre of Clarice Lispector. The volume is divided into four sections, with essays written in Spanish, Portuguese, and English, as indicated by its trilingual title.

In the first part, “Homages,” Moacyr Scliar writes a beautiful straightforward tribute, speaking to many of Clarice’s contradictions: how she was not born in Brazil, yet is one of the most famous Brazilian writers; how her female characters are primary in many of her writings, yet she did not consider herself a staunch feminist; etc. Marjorie Agosín finds reading Lispector to be an exercise in reflection, noting that, as a reader, as she often discovers the silences, she hears the empty spaces behind the words, and participates in the journeys that Lispector designs in her writings. Agosín’s essay, thus, is a poetic rendering of the experience of reading Clarice. Inspired by Lispector’s Laços de família, Sonia Coutinho offers her thoughts about life, love, destiny, and death through her own short story, in which Clarice appears as a ghost.

The second section provides an analysis of Clarice’s novels. Affonso Romano de Sant’Anna offers a detailed reading of Clarice’s A paixão segundo G.H. (1943), replicating her style at the beginning of the article, disrupting his own critical language, so as to approximate her text. He goes on to argue that the novel is a revelation and that this element of epiphany is a ritual in her writings. He offers various critical approaches in this essay, almost to the point of excess; in doing so, he poses an important question about the distance between critical writing and the subject of criticism. Ida Vitale goes on to convincingly argue that Lispector attacks novelistic conventions in her writing. Stripping her work of traditional plot and dialogue, her characters are left bare. Vitale highlights their inability to comprehend the worlds that surround them and their incapability to understand themselves; the novels reveal their struggle to make sense of it all.

In a fascinating essay, Berta Waldman compares the novels of Clarice with those of her older sister Elisa, examining the autobiographical elements of their texts to explore their relationships with Judaism. Waldman finds that Clarice’s use of language, her circularity, and the silences in her works, for example, communicate an ethnic and religious identity that she did not discuss for a good portion of her life. María Fernández-Babineaux persuasively argues that Clarice’s writing is an androgynous one. Using Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of “body without organs” as a guide, she analyzes the language of Agua viva (1973), in which there are no identifiable cultural markers, such as a gendered narrative voice. Instead, the novel is a monologue of fragments directed at the reader. Fernández-Babineaux proposes that, in this way, Clarice creates a new subjectivity and a new language. For her part, Leila Lehnen offers a compelling reading that ably demonstrates the role of social space in A Hora da Estrela (1977). She plainly lays out her argument that the novel “can be read as a map of the multiple relations of power present within the Brazilian nation in the latter half of the twentieth-century and of the marginalized subject’s location within this grid” (110). It is a straightforward essay, one that could easily be used to supplement a university course on the subject.

The third section, focusing on Lispector’s short stories, begins with Yudith Rosenbaum’s essay, in which she reveals how Clarice traces the development of the ego in “Menino a bicode-pena,” from the collection A...