Review by New York Times Review
THE DAWN WATCH: Joseph Conrad in a Global World, by Maya Jasanoff. (Penguin, $18.) Jasanoff, a Harvard professor, explores how Conrad's novels grappled with Western imperialism and sought to expose its many hypocrisies. "Jasanoff does not forgive Conrad his blindness," our reviewer, Ngugi wa Thiong'O, wrote, but she offers context to his perspective, "one that still has strong resonance today" THE COMPLETE STORIES, by Clarice Lispector. Translated by Katrina Dodson. Edited by Benjamin Moser. (New Directions, $21.95.) In the strange stories across this collection, Lispector establishes herself as a truly original Latin American writer. Our reviewer, Terrence Rafferty, praised the collection, warning that it "is a dangerous book to read quickly or casually because it's so consistently delirious." THE SHADOW IN THE GARDEN: A Biographer's Tale, by James Atlas. (Vintage, $19.) Atlas has written acclaimed biographies of the writers Saul Bellow and Delmore Schwartz, and discusses the process by which artists' life stories get told. Along the way, Atlas revisits his childhood in Chicago, his formative time at Oxford (where he studied with the noted Joyce scholar Richard Ellmann) and the works of classic biographers. THE HOUSE OF IMPOSSIBLE BEAUTIES, by Joseph Cassara. (Ecco, $16.99.) A debut novel follows the gay ballroom subculture of 1980s New York, including the imagined lives of figures from the documentary "Paris Is Burning." The story centers on the House of Xtravaganza, an all-Latino ballroom in the Harlem circuit. Angel founded the house with her partner, but when the partner dies of AIDS-related complications, it falls to her to shelter the house's members from rejection and abuse, and foster a community. ALONE: Britain, Churchill, and Dunkirk: Defeat Into Victory, by Michael Korda. (Liveright, $18.95.) Korda was a child during the war, and his memories of the 1940 defeat offer a satisfying complement to the historical account. Other books may provide more robust discussions of the Dunkirk evacuation's military dimension, but Korda highlights the Royal Navy's essential, if often overlooked, role in the operation. FUTURE HOME OF THE LIVING GOD, by Louise Erdrich. (Harper Perennial, $16.99.) Evolution runs backward in Erdrich's futuristic novel; Cedar, the main character, is expecting a baby as the rights of pregnant women are under threat. The book is structured as a letter to her unborn child, chronicling the world's unraveling, with urgent climate change worries and ever-tightening martial law.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [November 25, 2018]
Review by Booklist Review
Benjamin Moser set a spectacular revival of the work of Clarice Lispector (1920-77) in motion with Why This World (2009), his superb biography of the deftly imaginative, cosmopolitan, and sardonic Jewish Brazilian writer. Moser is also series editor for new translations of Lispector's novels, translating The Hour of the Star himself, and he has edited and introduced this landmark collection containing new translations of all 86 of Lispector's uncanny stories. Many are portraits spiked with unnerving details. Some are cosmic riddles (The Egg and the Chicken). Others are family farces (The Birthday Party concentrates generations of resentments into one family gathering for the silent birthday girl, an 89-year-old matriarch.) There are strange fables (an encounter between an explorer and Africa's tiniest pygmy) and wildly unpredictable and barbed tales of lust and spirituality, crime and fate. Lispector's stories are surreal, modernist, and laced with magic realism, and she has been compared to Franz Kafka and Virginia Woolf. But Lispector's tales are distinctly her own sharp, swift, and dangerous in their stinging humor and burning illuminations of the paradoxical human condition.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Reviewed by Valeria Luiselli In the only footage that exists of Clarice, as fellow Brazilians affectionately refer to her, she looks at her interviewer with a bewildering combination of innocence, rage, and nonchalance and tells him: "I insist on not being a professional. To keep my freedom." Like so many of her thoughts and statements, this one overflows beyond its apparent simplicity. It is at once a deeply personal position taking in how Clarice Lispector (1920-1977) envisages her craft and an overt social critique directed at a world that had just discovered the market value of the author. It must be remembered that Lispector's publishing life ran parallel to but was always independent of the Latin American Boom, which was, in many ways, a literary brand, as well as the first internationally visible map of professional writers in Latin America. But Lispector cannot be circled into that, or any map. Her ravishing freedom will always just spill out from the restraints of any conceptual boundaries. Lispector's work never engaged explicitly with the political debates of her time. When asked in the same interview what the duty of Brazilian authors is, she replied: "To speak as little as possible." The answer is, of course, political, directed at the perceived duty of the writer to be an enlightened public intellectual, but in many ways it is also a declaration of her ars poetica. Lispector--like Beckett, or, to a degree, Kafka's--strips language to the bone, in search of some kind of metaphysical core or nucleus. The way she composes a sentence has more to do with subtracting layers from the world she observes than with adding commentary to it. In the devastating story "Love," for example, the protagonist notices people in the street: "Next to her was a lady in blue, with a face." Lispector's laconic, almost aphoristic syntax is, at times, full of a brutal sense of humor and at times disquieting. In the classic "A Chicken," a family chases a hen that, standing on a roof far from their reach, looks like "an out-of-place ornament, hesitating on one foot, then the other." In "Report of a Thing," about an alarm clock, the narrator notices "its infernal tranquil soul." In "Love," dried pits scattered on the ground, with their "circumvolutions," look like "little rotting brains." Lispector is the master of magnifying small, everyday details into epiphanies. The Complete Stories - more than 80 short stories, covering her entire writing life chronologically - seems to both restitute the form's most essential characteristics and open it up to boundless possibilities. Lispector writes, in the most simple and straightforward sense of the term, stories to be told. They are not concepts disguised as narratives, as are those of J.L. Borges. They are not investigations into form and structure, as are Julio Cortazar's. They are not developments of situations, as are many of Raymond Carver's. Lispector is one of those rare writers who can simply tell a story. She observes the lives of passing strangers - a girl who boards a train, a woman who attends a lecture on a hot day, a man who drowns, an old lady who visits the gynecologist - and, in doing so, confronts us with our own loneliness, our fragility, our humanity. Published by New Directions and translated beautifully and with a vigorous pulse by Katrina Dodson, The Complete Stories is bound to become a kind of bedside Bible or I Ching for readers of Lispector, both old and new. Wherever one opens the book, there is a slice of life to confront. In one of her later stories Lispector recalls the writer Sergio Porto, her friend, who was once asked by a stewardess on a plane if he wanted coffee. To which he replied: "I'll take everything I have a right to." We can approach this volume in a similar spirit: take everything. (Aug.) Valeria Luiselli is the award-winning author of Faces in the Crowdand Sidewalks. Her novel The Story of My Teeth is forthcoming from Coffee House Press in September 2015. © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Because as a writer she was indifferent to plot and because she happened to be very beautiful, Lispector (1920-77) in her lifetime was more talked about than read. Since her death, however, she has been rediscovered and hailed as a female Franz Kafka. As a child, Lispector told stories to her dying mother in hopes of keeping her alive. She felt a kinship with the muteness of animals, but as she watches through the railings at the zoo in "The Buffalo," it is their being "trapped in this mutual murder" that is her epiphany. In another story a woman with a broken tooth opts for suicide over a visit to the dentist. "The Fifth Story" exists in five phases or versions, the first being the most literal (the task of killing a cockroach) and the final one, "Leibnitz and the Transcendence of Love in Polynesia," dissociating itself from the cockroach theme entirely. VERDICT Lispector has a mystic's regard for transcendent perception. Her fiction, while difficult, can illuminate on many levels, and certain intrepid readers will delight in the labyrinths she constructs for them.-Jack Shreve, Chicago © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
"Freedom is only what can be conquered": a welcome, long overdue omnibus collection of the short stories of the great Brazilian literata. Chaya Pinkhasovna Lispector, later Clarice Lispector (Soulstorm, 1989, etc.), has been called the most important Jewish writer since Franz Kafka and certainly one of the most important shapers of late-20th-century Brazilian literature. Those familiar with novels such as The Stream of Life will not need convincing, but those new to Lispector's work would fruitfully begin with this collection, which shows both the evolution of her style and her early mastery of the story form. Often in her stories there is a vaguely discontented woman who has settled into her fate early on but nurses misgivings. In a story that begins, arrestingly, "Now that the affair is behind me, I can recollect it more serenely," the narrator remarks on the damnable complacency of those around her, who can barely be budged into action except by such climactic events as birth and death "and their attendant conditions." "I can recollect it more serenely," of course, isn't quite idiomatic, and the collection is marked by a highly literal rendering that at times verges into translatorese: no speaker of American English, in the heat of anger or some other passion, would yell, "I feel tied down. Tied down by your fussing, your caresses, your excessive zeal, by you yourself!" Excessive zeal? There are plenty of perfect moments, though, as when Lispector describes a young lady to whom things are about to happen: "She sat combing her hair languorously before the three-way vanity, her white, strong arms bristling in the slight afternoon chill." For much of the collection, Lispector favors a kind of elegant realism, though with odd turns: contemplating chicken and egg, literally, she waxes post-Wittgensteinian: "Seeing an egg never remains in the present: as soon as I see an egg it already becomes having seen an egg three millennia ago." Essential and sure to turn up soon on reading lists in courses in women's studies and Jewish diaspora literature as well as Latin American writing. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
