Near to the Wild Heart (New Directions Paperbook) Paperback – June 13, 2012

Lispector is a boss. This book is challenging, but not near as challenging as some of her other work (The Passion According To G.H. is perhaps the most obfuscated book I have ever read). This is the story of Joana, who we see, in childhood and adulthood, reject the sentimentalities of adult life as vapid disingenuousness. She just doesn't see the point, you know? She gets called a viper for it, but that doesn't seem to bother her. So I'm a viper, so what? Kind of reads like a pissed off Virginia Woolf. I loved it. In fact, I enjoy a lot of Lispector's work, but I would say try this before you go anywhere near her other books. She can be a bit abstract, you know.

I'd never heard of Clarice Lispector a year ago, then starting seeing her name rather frequently. Its similarity to "Inspector" made me think perhaps this was some newly discovered detective series. Forgive my ignorance. A strongly-engaged review of her oeuvre prompted me to finally purchase this, her first, novel. (It was also mentioned as being short; what was there to lose?) The idea that this is the work of a twenty-three-year-old writing in 1943 is stunning. The writing is dense, fluid, and at times nearly inscrutable. It took forty or fifty pages of this 194 page book for me to get my footing. Lispector writes in a chanting, throbbing, stream-of-consciousness style that is almost breathtaking, relating bits of the female protagonist's childhood, abandonment, and eventual marriage to a man who comes to fear her fearlessness and her moral objectivity, driving her to the bed of another, a nearly unknown neighbor who provides her with both the depth and superficiality of her ideal relationship. While Near to the Wild Heart borders on philosophy, it also reminded me of the current trend of literary/souls-bared fiction by certain younger writers. And it clearly revealed how much deeper, more mature, and more fully realized Lispector's work is. There is little white space on her pages. She is no fan of short words, of short sentences or short paragraphs. She writes, one gets the sense, from the fuguelike state between sleep and wakefulness, a precise, accurate observer of her own thoughts. Though I am not one to reread books as a matter of course, I realize that this embroidery of thoughts and observations will take more than a single pass to fully unravel. And the benefit will be mine for doing so.

I don't know how to review something that has racked my entire being inside and out, except to say that my next tattoo is going to be a Clarice Lispector! Without question. I'm hoping to get her eyes and a quote beneath them! The only question is which quote. So, I will leave this review with Lispector quotes:"I try to isolate myself in order to find life in itself.""The dense, dark night was cut down the middle, split into two black blocks of sleep....isolated in the timeless and the spaceless, in an empty gap. This stretch would be subtracted from her years of life.""...may they make a harp out of my nerves when I die.""As if she had tossed a hot coal at her husband, the phrase flipped about, wriggling through his hands until he rid himself of it with another phrase, cold like gray, gray to cover the interval: it's raining, I'm hungry, it's a beautiful day. Perhaps because she didn't know how to play. But she loved him, that way of picking up twigs of his."THE LOVE COULD NOT BE DEEPER!!! If you just read one more book in your life, make it one of Lispector's! This was her first novel written in 1943 and she was 23 yrs. old. She is a philosopher. Her work never ceases to take in the big picture of existence and everything is animate! xoxoxo

Writing is of uneven quality. Remarkable in some parts, pretentious in many parts. The collected short storiesare a much better read.

And that's my blindness, from which most of the English-reading world has suffered. This translation of her first novel, Perto do coração selvagem, was just published this year though the book was written in 1943. Astonishingly, there are seven titles by Lispector listed by New Directions publishers. Where have I been? And have YOU perhaps been there too?Lispector was 23 when she wrote "Near to the Wild Heart"!!! That's scary! Nobody should be this good, or this confident, at age twenty-three. Her later life was almost Garbo-esque; she was a celebrity nobody saw, who shunned literary circles yet lived large in the diplomatic milieux of Europe and The USA. Like Frida Kahlo, she suffered an accident and lived in constant pain for the last decade of her life, dying in 1977.And what can I say about this stunningly original novel of introspection or introjection? I don't want to spoil any of its freshness. Imagine a writer with the sensibilities of Jean Rhys or a female Vladimir Nabokov, plus the musical artistry with words of James Joyce. Yes, I mean to say she's that good! And that's my impression from this translation by Alison Entrekin, since I haven't tried to read her in her original Portuguese. Another comparison might be to Brazil's greatest novelist, Machado de Assis; they have nothing in common except their utterly fearless bemusement with the rest of us human specimens.

Another reviewer had described this novel as Joyce, but a woman, and from Brazil. Maybe there’s something to that. The narrative is deeply introspective and the protagonist (Joanna) is aware of the power of words to create, to lie, to invent. Her story of childhood, boarding school, marriage, and separation flows like her thoughts and touches on subjects like mortality, the nature of god, love, and the philosophy of Spinoza.I’ll probably be chewing on this one for a while...