Weeks 2 to 4: Clarice Lispector's "Near to the Wild Heart" (1943)

Born Chaya Lispector in what is now part of Ukraine, her family fled the Anti-Semitic pogroms that were all too common during the Russian Civil War when she was still an infant, settling half a world away in Brazil. Upon arrival, they took new names, with Chaya becoming Clarice. The young girl would be especially close to her mother — sick and paralyzed from violence she'd suffered in her homeland — and would make up stories to entertain her. This pall of tragedy amidst survival would deepen when Clarice's mother passed away when she was nine, and deepen further still when her beloved father died from surgical complications in her twentieth year.

She attended prestigious schools, learning in Portuguese along with her native Hebrew and Yiddish, and became interested in literature — as well as becoming a writer herself — after reading Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf at the age of thirteen. Lispector would eventually work as a journalist and circulate among Brazil's young literary generation, while also attending law school, and in 1943 published her first novel, Perto do Coração Selvagem (its title and epigraph come from James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: "He was alone. He was unheeded, happy and near to the wild heart of life"). 

It was an unmitigated success, a phenomenon described as "Hurricane Clarice," and would win her the Graça Aranha Prize for debut novels. Brazilian Poet Lêdo Ivo hailed it as "the greatest novel a woman had ever written in the Portuguese language," while also noting how foreign and un-Brazilian her prose sounded, and in the same fashion, critics would make connections between Lispector's voice and those of Joyce and Virginia Woolf, among others. One key reason for this is her prevalent use of both stream-of-consciousness narrative, as well as a preoccupation with interiority, which provide some semblance of order amidst a non-linear narrative.

Here's how we'll divide up our four classes on Near to the Wild Heart, which will have a long break in the middle:

• Wed. August 30: Benjamin Moser, "Hurricane Clarice" and Part 1, "The Father..." to "Joana's Pleasures"
• Fri. September 1: NO CLASS — You're Welcome
• Mon. September 4: NO CLASS — Labor Day
• Wed. September 6: Part 1, "... The Bath ..." to "Otávio"
• Fri. September 8: Part 2, "The Marriage" to "Lídia"
• Mon. September 11: Part 2, "The Man" to "The Journey"

And here are a few supplemental readings you might find interesting:

• Colm Toibin discusses Near to the Wild Heart and two other Lispector novels in The Irish Times: [link]
• JS Tennant reviews the novel in The Guardian: [link]
• Benjamin Moser reflects upon "The True Glamour of Clarice Lispector" in The New Yorker: [link]