BOOKS:Why This World

Until last month I had never read anything by Clarice Lispector, also known as the “Brazilian Sphinx.” Apparently most Americans have not. Although highly regarded by Latin American scholars and considered one of Brazil’s most intriguing authors, few American scholars even know of her. This is surprising because in Brazil as well as in Latin America she lived a life of mythic proportions. She was stunningly beautiful, tragic, and a mystery, but is this is what caused this obsessive fascination with her life? Partly it was the beauty and the tragedy of her brief life, but mainly it was her talent. She was arguably Brazil’s greatest writer. It is said that, “she looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf.” All these characteristics were rolled up into one enigmatic character__hence the name, “the Sphinx.” And she was loved for it. In a new biography, “Why This World,” Harper’s columnist Benjamin Moser, tries and does make sense of Lispector’s life and writing. Lispector’s work was born from within her turbulent life. It bubbled up and came out in her writing. Her style is impressionistic. She used what critics called an “exquisite abstraction” or language in search of its own meaning. Hard to understand? Her writings are hard to explain, you must experience them. Moser”s biograpraphy is painstaking researched and he visited many of the actual spots were Lispector spent time. He traces the details of Lispector’s life from her birth in pogrom torn Ukraine, on to her immigration to Brazil in 1922 at the age of five and then through her precocious and tempestuous rise to fame. A fame she achieved at 23 with the publication of, “Near to A Wild Heart.” And a fame that was fueled mainly by her unequaled literary talent. As she aged her persona grew more mysterious. For a while she lived in a fashionable part of Rio just off Ipenema beach. Fell passionately in love with a homosexual poet, spurned, she then married a career diplomat and joined the Brazilian Foreign Service, which took her to Italy, Switzerland and the United States then back to Brazil. All the while she continued to write and the fascination for her grew. She died on her 57th birthday of ovarian cancer. However, interest in her has never ceased and Moser’s new biography is an admirable addition to the Lispector literature that already exists. Check her out.