Clarice Lispector, all cards

In addition to his novels and story books, correspondence was one of the author’s passions, and we have the opportunity to follow his forty-year life journey with his letters. The anxieties accompanying his developmental years, the obstacles he has overcome to bring it to life; the challenges of a woman who wants to be herself in a very limited feminine universe.

The whole literary, personal, family and all kinds of universe can be continued by reading this correspondence, which is a total of 284 letters, which Lispector sent to relatives, friends and editors and is currently published in Spanish by Siruela publishing house, as a whole. title Todas las cartas. They contain a large amount of unpublished material, thanks to a long research conducted by journalist Larissa Vaz under the guidance of biographers and relatives to provide a holistic vision of the person and author.

Reading this correspondence, we find a Clarice who has demystified all the labels attached to her as a sophisticated and worldly woman: “I never wanted to take on a super-intellectual stance. I never thought of taking any stand. I lead a very ordinary life. I am raising my children. I take care of the house. I love to see my friends, the rest is a legend. Criticism almost always messes things up,” she pointed out in a letter to one of her sisters. On the contrary, we will find a woman who is conscious of her obligations and at the same time strives to fulfill her desires. We will see that Clarice is extremely insecure: “I am too little and my balance is so fragile that I need extreme security to feel more or less secure”, she writes to her sister Tania; Suspicious and dissatisfied with his literary work: “How I was skeptical, how terrible my writing is to me, sometimes wonderful to me, and two days later this is worthless, how I learned to be patient,” he admits to his friend, writer Lucio Cardoso, “the most important person in my life during my adolescence. ” We will also discover that needy woman who anxiously asks her sisters to write to her; and at the same time protecting your privacy and moments of solitude; It’s also time to get to know her as the older sister-almost-mother to her two sisters, Tania and Elisa, who are both older, and an extremely caring mother to her children. It’s almost as if we were allowed to enter his daily life of forty years: before his marriage to his residence in the United States and his return to Brazil.

The reader can follow Clarice Lispector’s trajectory as a woman who dared to become a writer in the last century, when the Brazilian Academy of Letters did not consider changing the statute to allow women entry. She struggled hard on this issue: months before she died, she wrote to her friend, writer Lygia Fagundes Telles, that “the Brazilian Academy of Letters owes a great deal to women”; Even so, it was clear to him that he “would never agree to enter”, she.

In the letters, as Brazilian professor Pedro Karp points out in the epilogue to this volume of this review, Clarice did not waste much time keeping secrets and wrote about her own feelings and the writings she was working on, so the letters are eloquent testimony. the writing process and its relation to the ongoing literary production.

As such, his letters provide more than one key to understanding his writing, essential to understanding Lispector’s literary career. It is a very rich correspondence regarding the writing process and the real motivations that guided the production of his literary work. A class for those who want to write professionally.

The collection is about who Clarice is, a writer who never likes to justify her work and is characterized by being extremely timid; exceptionally, it shows how Clarice Lispector has transformed her personal struggle as a woman into a series of literary works that have universal resonance, thanks to the magnetic power of her writing and the enduring charisma of all her written work.