Lispector, Clarice
[key], 1920–77, Brazilian author, b. in what is now Chechelnyk,
Ukraine, as Chaya Pinkhasovna Lispector. She immigrated to Brazil as an
infant when her Jewish family fled the Russian pogroms. An editor,
translator, newspaper columnist, and law student as well as a fiction
writer, Lispector was married to a diplomat and traveled widely; she was
renowned for her exotic beauty as well as for her literary talents. In 1959
she divorced and returned to Brazil. Lispector burst on the Brazilian
literary scene in 1943 with the publication of her first novel, the
semiautobiographical Near to the Wild Heart (tr. 1990). Her
avant-garde modernist fiction—elusive, mysterious, and relatively
plotless with a collagelike and elliptical stream-of-consciousness
style—has been extremely influential in Brazil, where she is both
popular and highly regarded critically, and in Europe. In North America,
however, she was little known until the early 21st cent. Many of her nine
novels, e.g., The Apple in the Dark (1961, tr. 1967),
The Passion According to G. H. (1964, tr. 1988;
considered by many her finest novel), The Hour of the Star
(1977, tr. 1986), and nine short-story collections, e.g., Family
Ties (1960, tr. 1972) and Soulstorm (tr.
1989), focus on human isolation, alienation, and moral uncertainty, and
particularly on the unhappiness of women. The Chandelier
(1946, tr. 2018), her second novel and one of her most difficult, consists
mainly of interior monologues. She also wrote a number of children's
books.
See her complete stories (tr. 2015) and newspaper columns in Selected Crónicas (tr. 1996); biography by B. Moser (2009); D. E. Marting, ed., Clarice Lispector: A Bio-Bibliography (1993); studies by E. E. Fitz (1985 and 2001), H. Cixous (tr. 1990), M. Peixoto (1994), M. J. S. Barbosa (1997), and C. P. Alonso and C. Williams, ed. (2002).
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