The Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector (review)

Katrina Dodson has done a pristine job in translating Clarice Lispector, one of the most recognized Brazilian writers, who has been adored in many parts of the world, albeit not that well-known or studied in the English-speaking world. The Portuguese language is less specific than the English language and given that Lispector can be difficult to understand, reading her in English may ease access to her epiphanic literary ethic and aesthetic. The ambivalent, complex, and astounding quality of Lispector’s language remains present in this English translation. This fidelity—the paramount goal of translation—is brilliantly achieved by Dodson.

To read Lispector is to experience a distinct world of intense or soft emotions, thoughts, and states of being: envy, humor, serene joy, meditative transcendentalism, fear, angst, the viscerality of suffering denunciated by the raw and disgusting social inequalities, and any other unnamable state that is part of being a person in the world. Much remains unnamable because, for Lispector, language falls short of saying our totality and can in fact adulterate it—therefore the importance of writing “absent-mindedly” with an illogic logic governing the pen. In Água Viva (1973; The Stream of Life, 1989), Lispector advocates this type of writing:

Writing, then, is the way followed by someone who uses words like bait: a word fishing for what is not a word. When that non-word—the whatever’s between the lines—bites the bait, something’s been written. Once the between the lines has been hooked, you can throw the word away with relief. But there ends the analogy: the non-word, in biting the bait, incorporates it. What saves you, then, is to write absent-mindedly.¹

Lispector’s unique writing, which Hélène Cixous has described as écriture féminine, is a constant pull toward the unconscious or those cognitive mechanisms that fall outside rational intelligence. Cixous has noted that Lispector allows for rational intelligence to be replaced by nonintelligent intelligences: “The sensation that precedes thought is nonintelligence. To understand it, an intelligence must be invented that is água viva, or living water itself.”²

In The Complete Stories, we find the astonishing power of Lispector’s breadth of voices that murmur in a multitude of tones calling us to a deeper understanding of life. Lispector’s writing is viscerally powerful and touching—guiding us to a state of being that connects us with all that came before us and all that will come after us. Her language strives to symbolically and momentarily suspend the lack that afflicts us all and connect us with one another, with all and everything. Lispector wants readers to understand life as uncontaminated by the body-politic that constantly tries to suppress connectedness. Her stories incite us to confront structures that society has erected to blind us, make us smaller than we are, and confine our ontology, which always demands discovery, reinvention, freedom, and a link with the sublime transcendental. Truth must be rescued with a living language free from suppositional meaning, cleansed and not restrained by the social contract, the body-politic. As Lispector writes in the story “Soul Storm,” “I am forced to tell so many lies. But I’d like not to have to lie to myself. Otherwise what do I have left? Truth is the final residue of all things, and in my unconscious is the truth that is the same as the world’s” (p. 499). She strives for a new truth that names in a different way and can thus create a different (better) world.

Constantly alternating between the world of the spirit and the world of the flesh and raw passion, the narrator prefers, it seems, to find solace, balance, and fulfillment (she names it “covert joy,” a title of one of the stories) in the nonphysical, or better yet, she advocates a state between physicality and transcendentalism, where one is aware of the shortcomings and destructive capacities of the passions and can...