Below are some excerpts from The Nation's review (via the Powell's blog) of Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, who was a Brazilian writer who died in 1977. They make her work sound difficult, but after reading some of this, I'm eager to try her.
Lispector was fascinated by the possibility of extinguishing self-consciousness; she idealized animals and idiots because they were free of the desire to translate their experiences into words.
Lispector is most "mystical" when she describes her longing for silence and her belief that she could never express in words what she called her "truest life." She was obsessed by the inaccuracy and dullness of language: it dooms us to become common, to repeat what others have already said.
She said the word "literature" made her "bristle like a cat," and she wasn't concerned about whether she was following or abandoning a literary tradition. Still, she shared with contemporaries like Woolf a suspicion of language, a sense of deep alienation and a fear of madness that led to heightened self-consciousness.
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