Crooked Plow : A Novel by Itamar Vieira Junior ;2019 - translated by Johnny Lorenz from the Portuguese - 2023

 Crooked Plow : a novel by Itamar Vieira Junior ;2019 - translated by Johnny Lorenz from the Portuguese - 2023 - A 2024 International Booker Prize Finalist 

Crooked Plow kept me captivated from the start.  Crooked Plow is set in a community of ancestors of once enslaved people in the Bahia State in North Eastern Brazil.

I recently read a great book focused on Slavery in Brazil, Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery by Ana Lucia Araujo.  She pointed out that five times as many people were transported as slaves to Brazil as to North America.  In Brazil young Portuguese men came without wives which inevitably lead to the social acceptance of sexual exploitation of enslaved women.  The Crooked Plow brilliantly depicts the consequences of this on the descendants of once enslaved persons. (Slavery was outlawed in Brazil in 1888.) It produced women who were used to very hard work and men who took out their low self esteem on the women in their lives through physical abuse and neglect.  

What the International Booker Prize 2024 judges said about The Crooked Plow

‘Bibiana and Belonisía are two sisters whose inheritance arrives in the form of a grandmother’s mysterious knife, which they discover while playing, then unwrap from its rags and taste. The mouth of one sister is cut badly and the tongue of the other is severed, injuries that bind them together like scar tissue, though they bear the traces in different ways. Set in the Bahia region of Brazil, where approximately one third of all enslaved Africans were sent during the height of the slave trade, the novel invites us into the deep-rooted relationships of Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous peoples to their lands and waters – including the ways these communities demand love, gods, song, and dream – despite brutal colonial disruptions. An aching yet tender story of our origins of violence, of how we spend our lives trying to bloom love and care from them, and of the language and silence we need to fuel our tending.’  

"This powerful debut novel charts the plight of Brazil's poorest farmers scrabbling for subsistence on the land their enslaved ancestors worked. Initially centered on two sisters whose lives are changed forever by a catastrophic accident, the book explores themes of generational poverty and political strife through the lens of family bonds and the eyes of a once-revered Afro-Brazilian divinity." 

The Washington Post

Itamar Vieira Junior was born in Salvador, Bahia, in 1979. He holds a doctorate in Ethnic and African Studies. Before Crooked Plow, he published a collection of short stories entitled The Executioner's Prayer, which was nominated for Brazil's biggest literary award, the Jabuti. Crooked Plow won the prestigious 2018 LeYa Award in Portugal.

Mel Ulm 

The Reading Life 

 

Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery by Ana Lucia Araujo- forthcoming October 2024- 620 Pages

 Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery by Ana Lucia Araujo- forthcoming October 2024- 620 Pages is an extraordinarly valuable addition to the history of Trans-Atlantic Slavery.

Most works on the enslavement of people from Africa totally concentrate on Slavery in what is now the United States.  However as Professor Araujo details over ten times as many enslaved persons were transported to Brazil as to America.  

We are provided a detailed explanation as to how inter-African politics and warfare impacted the slave trade as well as how Early Europeans demand for slaves in turn caused conflicts between kingdoms.

Slave trade in sub- Sahara Africa can be traced back to at least 1000 years ago, as Araujo documents.  War captives or persons guilty of crimes were shipped via Arabic traders to the Ottoman Empire and India.  The first European slave merchants were from Portugal.  They both collaborated with African leaders who wanted European goods and captured people on their own.  Araujo detailed the horrible cruelty and extreme violence involved. Women and young girls were raped with impunity 

Araujo spends a lot of time on the lives of enslaved women in Brazil and on the sugar islands. Working on a sugar plantation was especially dangerous.  The population of Rio de Janeiro was over half black in 1850.  Araujo presented a marvelous account of the lives of enslaved women in Rio.

In South America European men arrived without families, seeking to get rich. Enslaved women could be raped, some bonds were formed but they were always unequal.  Children born to an enslaved woman were themselves slaves.

There is much more in this marvelous book.

"Humans in Shackles is a sweeping narrative history of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery in the Americas.

 

During the era of the Atlantic slave trade, more than twelve million enslaved Africans were forcibly transported to the Americas in cramped, inhuman conditions. Many of them died on the way, and those who survived had to endure further suffering in the violent conditions that met them on shore. Covering more than three hundred years, Humans in Shackles grapples with this history by emphasizing the lived experience of enslaved people in tracing the long, complex history of slavery in the Americas.

 

Based on twenty years of research, this book not only serves as a comprehensive history; it also expands that history by providing a truly transnational account that emphasizes the central role of Brazil in the Atlantic slave trade. It is also deeply informed by African history, and it shows how African practices and traditions survived and persisted in the Americas among communities of enslaved people. Drawing on primary sources including travel accounts, pamphlets, newspaper articles, slave narratives, and visual sources including both artworks and artefacts, Araujo illuminates the social, cultural, and religious lives of enslaved people working in plantations and urban areas; building families and cultivating affective ties; congregating and recreating their cultures; and organizing rebellions.

 

Humans in Shackles puts the lived experiences of enslaved peoples at the center of the story and investigates the heavy impact these atrocities had on the current wealth disparity of the Americas and rampant anti-Black racism." From the Publisher- The University of Chicago Press

From https://analuciaaraujo.org/

 

"I am a social and cultural historian writing transnational and comparative history. Currently, I am a Full Professor of History at the historically black Howard University in Washington DC, United States. I was trained in Brazil, Canada, and France with a PhD in History and Social and Historical Anthropology (2007), a PhD in Art History (2004), an MA in History (1998), and a BA in Visual Arts (1995).

My work explores the history of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade and their present-day legacies, including the long history of calls for reparations for slavery and colonialism. My books and articles explore the memory, heritage, and visual culture of slavery. I write, speak, and publish in English, Portuguese, French, and Spanish and my work has been translated into German and Dutch. My scholarship has been internationally recognized through fellowships, awards, and professional offices.

In 2023, Carnegie Corporation New York named me “Great Immigrant, Great American,” an annual list honoring the contribution of US naturalized citizens to democracy and America. I also received a Getty Residential Senior Scholar Grant, and therefore spent the first semester of 2023 at the Getty Research Institute, in Los Angeles, CA.

In 2024, I was one of the eight scholars in the United States to receive the inaugural ACLS HBCU fellowship. In Spring 2022, I was a member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute of Advanced Study (funding provided by the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation), Princeton, NJ. I was also awarded the Franklin Research Grant of the American Philosophical Society (2021/22).

I just published the book The Gift: How Objects of Prestige Shaped the Atlantic Slave Trade and Colonialism  with Cambridge University Press. The book explores how European-made luxurious artifacts, including objects that incorporate formal and symbolic elements found in West African and West Central African artifacts, shaped the interactions between Africans and Europeans during the era of the Atlantic slave trade and colonialism. The book follows the trajectory of a ceremonial sword given by a French ship captain to a local agent of the Kingdom of Ngoyo on the Loango coast, which later was found in Dahomey, from where it was looted by the French troops at the end of the nineteenth century. Research for this book was supported by the grants of Getty Research Institute and the American Philosophical Society, and the fellowship of the Institute for Advanced Study.

My book Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery in the Americas (University of Chicago Press) will be published in October 2024. The book is a hemispheric and narrative history of slavery in the Americas. A trade academic book intended for general readers, Humans in Shackles places Brazil (the country that imported the largest number of enslaved Africans in the Americas), the African continent, slave resistance, and enslaved women at the center of this painful history.

Also, a new revised and expanded edition of my book Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade: A Transnational and Comparative History was published with Bloomsbury in November 2023.

Since 2017,  I have been a member of the International Scientific Committee of the UNESCO “Routes of Enslaved Peoples” Project (former Slave Route Project). I am also a member of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History Scholarly Advisory Board and an elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, London, UK.  In 2019, I was a Visiting Professor at the University of Paris VIII, France, and was a visiting fellow at the Museum of World Cultures (former Tropenmuseum) in Amsterdam in 2023. I am also a member of the Editorial Board of the British journal Slavery and Abolition and of the advisory board of the Memory Studies Association. Previously, I served on the Board of Editors of the American Historical Review, the flagship journal of the American Historical Association(2019-2023), on the Executive Committee of the Brazilian Studies Association (2016-2020), and on the Executive Board of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (2019-2022).

I have lectured about the history of Atlantic slavery and the slave trade in the United States, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, France, England, Portugal, Germany, the Netherlands, and South Africa. I authored or edited over fifteen books.  My other recent books include Slavery in the Age of Memory: Engaging the Past (Bloomsbury, 2020), named one of the “Best Black History Books” of 2020 by Black Perspectives, the award-winning blog of the African American Intellectual History Society and Museums and Atlantic Slavery (part of the Museums in Focus series) published by Routledge in April 2021. My book Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade: A Transnational and Comparative History (2017) examines from a transnational perspective the long history of the demands of reparations for slavery and the slave trade in the Americas, Europe, and Africa. 

Currently, I have three book projects in progress: The Power of Art: The World Black Artists Made in the Americas (under contract with Cambridge University Press), Global Slavery: A Visual History (under contract with Bloomsbury), and Oceans of Tears: The French Trade in Enslaved Africans (under contract with Cambridge University Press).

Engaging with the public is an important dimension of my work. My opinion articles and reviews in English and Portuguese appeared in Slate, the Washington Post, Newsweek, History News Network, African Arguments, Intercept Brasil, Setenta e Quatro, and the Brazilian magazine Ciência Hoje. My work has been featured in several media outlets in the United States, Britain, Portugal, Canada, Brazil, Spain, France, and the Netherlands. 

In 2023, I created and launched the #Slaveryarchive Digital Initiative. Based on its own social media accounts on Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube, the initiative now gives a permanent space to the #slaveryarchive posts. The #Slaveryarchive Digital Initiative is intended to educate the public about the history of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade and will also promote scholarship in this field via book talks on video, a podcast, book reviews, syllabi, and the #Slaveryarchive Book "

I give my greatest thanks to Professor Araujo for this profound  book.

Mel Ulm

The Reading Life 

“Miss Dollar” - A Short Story by Machado de Assis - 1870

A post occasioned by The burning of Brazil’s National Museum,
Founded 200 years ago, now a total loss
500,000 Literary Treasures were lost including
Original manuscripts of Machado de Assis,
Brazil’s Greatest Writer.  I think he mourns with us
The Reading Life Universe

The Collected Stories of Machado de Assis, translated by 

Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson with a forward by Michael Wood

This collection will be a  major event in short stories in translation for 2018

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis often known as Machado de Assis

Born -June 21, 1839 - Rio de Janeiro - his father’s parents were freed  slaves

1888 - Slavery Ends in Brazil

Dies -September 29, 1908 Rio de Janeiro

I was terribly saddened to learn that The Brazilian National Museum in Rio de Janeiro was this week totally destroyed in a fire.  Over 20,000,000 irreplaceable items were lost , including over Among the lost items were original manuscripts of works by Machado de Assis, considered by all Brazil’s greatest writer.  I have been to this wonderful museum.  I know that Brazilians who cherish their history and culture are in shock over this.  Imagine if the British Museum, the Louvre, or the Smithsonian were destroyed.  

I was very glad to find just recently published a full newly translated collection of the Short Stories of Machado de Assis, combining seven collections he published into one nine hundred page plus volume with seventy five stories. A preface by Michael Wood and informative introduction by the translators place him in cultural context.  His stories focus on life in Rio de Janeiro.  I have spent time there and even in stories written well over 100 years ago I am brought to mind the sensuality of the city, the beauty and the savage ugliness, the favelas, the beach at Copa Cabana and I know Machado de Assis would add the amazing women.  In the opening story I greatly enjoyed the extended description he gives of a Carioca woman with whom the narrator is infatuated.

My purpose today is to let my readers know of the new collection.  In a Kindle sample you can read the preface, the introduction and the opening story, “Miss Dollar”.   

“Miss Dollar”is told in the first person by a doctor that no

longer practices as he Invented a cure for a once dangerous disease.  His life now is devoted to his collection of dogs.  On a stroll in Rio he happens on a greyhound.  She is obviously a lost pet.  He takes her home hoping the owner will advertise.  He calls her Miss Dollar.  He does see a newspaper advertisement for the dog giving an address and offering a reward.  Caring nothing for the reward, he takes Miss Dollar to her home.  There he finds an affluent family, it is kind of jarring (slavery was legal when the story was first published) to reds that the maid is a slave.  At first he is greeted by an older lady then he meets her twenty three year old niece and is smitten.  

We meet also the narrator’s playboy friend who gives him his suggestions for courting the niece, a widow.  The story is fun to read.  The characters are very well realised 

The Passion According to G. H. by Clarice Lispector - translated by Idra Novey

"What matters is the magnetic love she inspires in those susceptible to her. For them, Clarice is one of the great emotional experiences of their lives. But her glamour is dangerous. “Be careful with Clarice,” a friend told a reader decades ago. “It’s not literature. It’s witchcraft.” Benjamin Moser, in his introduction to The Collected Short Stories of Clarice Lispector 

My Prior Posts on Clarice Lispector

I first entered the world of Clarice Lispector when I was kindly given a digital review copy of The Complete Short Stories of Ćlarice Lispector.  With a marvelous introduction by Benjamin Moser, I think many will find the reading of these stories the start of a deep fascination with Lispector's work and life.  I think the publication of this collection of short stories will be at least the most important translated work of short stories in 2015.  It is said among short story people that Kathernine Mansfield is the only writer that ever frightened Virginia Woolf, I would just say she never met Clarice Lispector.  

After I finished my first read through of the short story collection, I have posted on about ten of the stories and will be rereading and posting more as time goes on, I read Why This World:  A Biography of Clarice Lispector by Benjamin Moser.  This is a truly excellent biography which goes deeply into her cultural roots.  By coincidence shortly before I encountered Lispector I read the complete Yale Yiddish Library and Moser helped me understand the ways in which Lispector is part of the tradition of Jewish Kabbalstic thinkers and how her early life in the Jewish shetls in the very anti-Jewish Ukraine shape her fiction.    Also in the very long ago I studied Spinoza and this helped me.  Moser lets us see the impact of Spinoza in the work of Lispector, especially in her perhaps most overtly philosophical work The Passion According to G. R.  

G.R is the female narrator of the novel.  She is an affluent well regarded  sculpturor living in Rio de Janeiro.  The novel is all about a long very widely ranging interior monologue initiated in the mind of G.R. when she enters the room of her live in maid who recently quit.  She was shocked to see a drawing of herself on the wall.  There are strong post colonial and racial matters in The Passion of G.R, the maid was black.  She then sees a roach on the floor of the maid's room.  She has a horror of roaches and she slams the door on the roach.  He is partially crushed but not killed.  

She begins to reflect on the very ancient, long before man, history of the roach.  Soon all human history unfolds before her.  She begins to reflect on the nature of divinity and of God.

This book way transcends my ability to describe it.  I knew pretty much what exoect in The Passion of G.R. as Moser talks about it a lot in his biography but it still shocked me.  

Mel u

"Brasília" by Clarice Lispector (1974)

"—The construction of Brasília: that of a totalitarian State. —This great visual silence that I love. My insomnia too would have created this peace of the never. I too, like those two who are monks, would meditate in this desert. Where there’s no place for temptation. But I see in the distance vultures hovering. What could be dying, my God? —I didn’t cry once in Brasília. There was no place for it. —It is a beach without the sea. —In Brasília there is no way in, and no way out. —Mama, it’s lovely to see you standing there in that fluttering white cape. (It’s because I died, my son). —An open-air prison."

Included in The Complete Short Stories of Clarice Lispector, translated by Katrina Dodson, introduced by Benjamin Moser 2015

My Prior Posts on Clarice Lispector 

"Brasília is the opposite of Bahia. Bahia is buttocks."

Understand this and you will, perhaps, have grasped the essence of this story reflecting Lispector's complex relationship with her adopted homeland and much of the legacy of colonialism, of Brazil trying to present a European face to the world

I have been reading Clarice Lispector for a year.  I started last April,when I received a review copy of The Complete Short Stories of Clarice Lispector, translated by Katrina Dodson.   Her work has received a lot of attention in the literary press and book blog world since then. I highly recommend the reading of Benjamin Moser's biography of Lispector.  

"Brasilia" is one of her very last works.  ( My date of publication is a guess, please let me know exact date and first place of publication data.)   "Brasilia" needs to be read several times if one has any hope of understanding it.  Structurally it is the reflections of a writer who came to Brazil's capital city, Brasillia, to give a lecture.   Brasillia did not originate in the distant past of Brazil, it was a city created out of jungle to be the political capital.  "Brasillia", to me, is Lispector's rejection of the organized regulated modern city, a long for the chaos and savage beauty of Rio de Jeniro and Salvador. 

The story has so much depth one could drown.

"—Brasília has a splendored past that now no longer exists. This type of civilization disappeared millennia ago. In the 4th century BC it was inhabited by extremely tall blond men and women who were neither Americans nor Swedes and who sparkled in the sun."

Lispector loves and hates Brasilia.  

This is such a wonderful work, so full of passion, of the contradictions in the soul of Brazil.  

Mel u

"Via Crucis" by Clarice Lispector 1974 (The Complete Short Stories of Clarice Lispector August, 2015, translated by Katrina Dodson, edited and introduced by Benjamin Moser)

I

My Prior Posts on Clarice Lispector 

Clarice wrote all of the thirteen short stories in the 1974 collection, The Via Crucis of the Body over the course of a single weekend. (My source for this and most all I know of the life and literary career of Clarice comes from the essential biography by Bernard Moser, Why this World:  A Biography of Clarice Lispector).  By this time she was more than thirty years into her literary career and did not care what the critics said of her work.   Some contemporary Brazilian critics called these stories "near pornogrsphy".  In one of them two women freely share the bed of one man then murder him and cut up his body to use to mulch their roses.  In a terrifying story I have posted upon, "Pig Latin" a woman avoids being raped on a Rio commuter train by acting as if she were a mentally deranged prostitute.  She knew the men wanted a virgin,  which she in fact was, thinking rightfully that would make them look for another woman The train conductor turned her into the police who kept her in jail for several days.  She learns a woman was raped and murdered on the train.

In "Via Crucis" a woman is told by her doctor she is three months pregnant. The married woman says her husband has never touched her.  The doctor suggests perhaps in her sleep he has. She says no he is impotent.  When she tells her husband this he says then he must be Sainf Joseph, husband of the Virgin Mary.  She begins to somehow be.ieve she will give birth to a son of God.  Her husband begins to grow his hair and beard very long just as Sainf Joseph did.  As she becomes huge with child, she seeks out and finds a manger in which to give birth. She wonders what three wise men will come bringing gifts, what star from the east will guide them.  She wonders if her son, she sine how knows the baby is a boy, will walk the way of the cross.  The story title refers to a section of the road to Golgatha. 

The profound beauty of this story for me is in the complete acceptance of the virgin birth.  The love of the husband, his acceptance.  If they are mad, then are all Christians.  Maybe she is deluded or deceiving her husband and herself but if so it is not hinted at. In an interesting segment we learn why she decides not to name her son "Jesus".  In a way Clarice is turning Rio into a kind of strange holy land.

Mel u

"The Burned Sinners and the Harmonius Angels" by Clarice Lispector 1964

My Posts on Clarice Lispector 

The Complete Short Stories of Clarice Lipsector, to be published August, 2015, translated by Katrina Dodson, edited and introduced by Benjamin Moser

"Burned Sinners and the Harmonius"is strikingly different from any of the other stories by Clarice Lispector I have so far read.  In Why This World:  A Biography of Clarice Lispector by Benjamin Moser I learned that this story is her only one written in the form of a play.  Moser says it was written in Switzerland in 1949 but not published until 1964.  Evidently it took her a long time to feel ready to publish it and many journal editors found it strange.  

It reads almost like an ancient liturgical drama or a Greek play  centering on the execution of a woman taken in adultery. I do not know how versed Lispector was in Kabbalistic thought but some of the dialogues of the Angels sounds sourced from there.   It is a deeply felt story about birth, death, guilt, social mores and much more.   It could be set 2000 years ago as their are refrences to what seem the miracles of Jesus and might be reflective of a culture in moral decline, focusing on a woman who committed adultery and not deeper issues.

Thus is a very interesting story and I think it would be very good for class room discussions.

Mel u

"Monkeys" and "Journey to Petróplois" by Clarice Lispector (1964, two stories from Foreign Legion)

The Complete Short Stories of Clarice Lipsector, to be published August, 2015, translated by Katrina Dodson, edited and introduced by Benjamin Moser

In 1944 Clarice Lispector left Brazil with her husband, a Brazlian diplomat.  She lived with him for the next fourteen years in Europe and The United States.  She returned to Braźil in 1959 when her marriage effectively ended.  Her best work is considered to have begun upon her return.

When I began to read the short stories of Lispector, eighty five in the forthcoming collection, it was my intention to read and post on all of them.  I will still read all of them but will only post on a portion of them.  It is just to time consuming to post on them all.  This is not a value judgement but  a question of blog management.  

Some of her stories are very set in Brazil, others could occur anywhere.  Rio de Janeiro, a city I know, plays an important part in the two short stories I will post on today, "Monkey's" and "A Trip to Petróplois".  

"Monkeys" can be read in a delightful three or so minutes.  Set in a Favella, hills side communities some would call slums in which the poor of Rio de Janeiro lived, it is the significance a pet monkey.  This is an interesting story in which monkeys can be seen as playing numerous symbolic roles.  It is about the fragile  nature of life, about how the poor try to find joy and a meditation on the nature of love.

"Journey to Petróplois" begins with an account of a very old woman with no home of her own whose family has all passed away.  She is taken care of by a family in Rio.  One day a son  in the family, in the company of his girl friend and two of sisters, are off to visit the home of his older brother in Petróplois.  He decides to take the old woman along and leave her there.  We see inside the mind of the very old woman as she passes in her mind from her past life when her husband lived to the trip she is on.  The ending is kind of sad made sadder by not somehow being as sad as it should be.

We are very much convinced of the depth of these stories.  Each one is worthy of extended discussion.  There are common elements in the story and later on we will go into them.

Mel u

Ambrosia Boussweau 

"Family Ties" by Clarice Lispector (1960, title story in her collection, Family Ties)

My Posts on Clarice Lispector 

The Complete Short Stories of Clarice Lipsector, to be published August, 2015, translated by Katrina Dodson, edited and introduced by Benjamin Moser

"Family Ties" is the title story in Clarice Lispector's collection Family Ties.  The collection was first published in 1960, the individual stories in the collection were first published from 1952 to 1955. 

As "Family Ties" opens an adult daughter is taking her mother to the train station.  The mother stayed with her son-in-law, daughter and grandson for two weeks, long enough.  The relationships are uneasy, not simple and comfortable.  The power and interest in this story is in the very subtle ways the relationships of those in the family are conveyed.  The son is developmently delayed but it is not clear, the story is from a time in which such things were seen as just a little bit shameful, precisely what is wrong.   

I also read "The Dinner", a very strange story about watching a man eat.  Additionally I read "Preciousness", a very typical Lispector story.

16, 17, and 18

Clarice Lispector (1920–1977) was Brazilian journalist, translator and author of fiction. Born in Western Ukraine into a Jewish family who suffered greatly during the pogroms of the Russian Civil War, she was still an infant when her family fled the disastrous post-World War I situation for Rio de Janiero. At twenty-three, she became famous for her novel, Near to the Wild Heart, and married a Brazilian diplomat. She spent much of the forties and fifties in Europe and the United States, helping soldiers in a military hospital in Naples during World War II and writing, before leaving her husband and returning to Rio in 1959. Back home, she completed several novels including The Passion According to G.H. and The Hour of the Star before her death in 1977 from ovarian cancer.  - from New Directions Publishing web

Ambrosia Bousweau 

Mel u

"The Smallest Woman in the World" by Clarice Lispector (1960)

The Complete Short Stories of Clarice Lipsector, to be published August, 2015, translated by Katrina Dodson, edited and introduced by Benjamin Moser

My Posts on Clarice Lispector 

16 of 85

"The Smallest Woman in the World" is the first Lispector story which ventures beyond concrete reality, beyond the confines of the affluent side of Brazlian society.  It is a strange fable like story centering on a legendary explorer of Africa encounter with what the story tells us is "the smallest woman in the world".  The woman is 44 centimeters (just over 17 inches), she is pregnant and black.  Brazil has its own very complicated history of race relations in a once slave based economy and it would take some pondering how one should take this, I think. I do know that in Brazilian society in 1960, the lighter one was the higher your social status tended to be, especially for women in the marriage market.   The woman is described as leaving mostly in the trees and coming from an endangered tribe which is pursued by cannibals.  

The story line then returns to the slightly claustrophobic domestic scenes of Lispector when a picture of the woman appears in the Sunday Paper and a people begin to talk about her.  Part of the deeper themes of Lispector I see emerging is the need for people, women in particular, to hide from the true nature of their lives.  The small woman may be possibly taken as a symbol for the reduction in spirit women must seemingly take on to be accepted by society.  These lines get at the core of Lispector, so far:

"This is what the mother recalled in the bathroom, and she lowered her pendulous hands, full of hairpins. And considered the cruel necessity of loving. She considered the malignity of our desire to be happy. Considered the ferocity with which we want to play. And how many times we will kill out of love. Then she looked at her clever son as if looking at a dangerous stranger. And she felt horror at her own soul that, more than her body, had engendered that being fit for life and happiness."

Life is a double bind trap, a cruel joke on those who understand the masks they must wear and a reduction of us all to a much smaller person than we could be.  Love is a trap, but one we cannot escape while remaining human.

If you look, you can find this story online.  My first guess is that this is a violation of copyright but I don't  know how it came to be posted.  

Clarice Lispector (1920–1977) was Brazilian journalist, translator and author of fiction. Born in Western Ukraine into a Jewish family who suffered greatly during the pogroms of the Russian Civil War, she was still an infant when her family fled the disastrous post-World War I situation for Rio de Janiero. At twenty-three, she became famous for her novel, Near to the Wild Heart, and married a Brazilian diplomat. She spent much of the forties and fifties in Europe and the United States, helping soldiers in a military hospital in Naples during World War II and writing, before leaving her husband and returning to Rio in 1959. Back home, she completed several novels including The Passion According to G.H. and The Hour of the Star before her death in 1977 from ovarian cancer.  - from New Directions Publishing web

Ambrosia Bousweau 

Mel u

"Happy Birthday" and "Imitation of the Rose" by Clarice Lispector. (1960, in Family Ties)

The Complete Short Stories of Clarice Lipsector, to be published August, 2015, translated by Katrina Dodson, edited and introduced by Benjamin Moser

My Posts on Clarice Lispector 

Stories 14 and 15 of 85

The short stories of Clarice Lispector I have so far read center on marriages and family life.  There are layers of meaning built into the sophisticated narrative method of Lispector.  I plan for sure to read and post on all of the stories.  For a while until I feel more secure in my understanding of Lispector's stories I will just be largely journalizing my reading of the stories.   Later on I will try to talk in a bit deeper fashion about the stories.

"Happy Birthday" is a really great story that would make a terrific thirty minute TV show.  An extended family whose members do not especially like each other has gathered for the birthday of the 85 year old mother and grandmother and mother in law to the family.  The family members are all trying to make an impression on each other.  It is a very anchored in Rio story with lots of local references. The grandmother just sits their in silence, but she is thinking how did I give birth to this worthless pack of idiots and why did my sons marry these terrible women.  In a scene both hilarious and terribly sad the grandmother has a great outburst in which she curses out the entire family.  

"Imitation of the Rose" is yet another story of a woman waiting for her husband to come home.  In this very interesting story the woman appears to have just returned from treatment for some sort of break down.

The editors did not provide the publication data on the stories so we are on our own with this.  We should not be.

Clarice Lispector (1920–1977) was Brazilian journalist, translator and author of fiction. Born in Western Ukraine into a Jewish family who suffered greatly during the pogroms of the Russian Civil War, she was still an infant when her family fled the disastrous post-World War I situation for Rio de Janiero. At twenty-three, she became famous for her novel, Near to the Wild Heart, and married a Brazilian diplomat. She spent much of the forties and fifties in Europe and the United States, helping soldiers in a military hospital in Naples during World War II and writing, before leaving her husband and returning to Rio in 1959. Back home, she completed several novels including The Passion According to G.H. and The Hour of the Star before her death in 1977 from ovarian cancer.  - from New Directions Publishing web

Mel u

"The Chicken" by Clarice Lispector (1952?)

The Complete Short Stories of Clarice Lipsector, to be published August, 2015, translated by Katrina Dodson, edited and introduced by Benjamin Moser)

My Posts on Clarice Lispector 

"Alone in the world, without father or mother, she ran, panting, mute, focused. At times, mid-escape, she’d flutter breathlessly on the eave of a roof and while the young man was stumbling over other roofs she’d have time to gather herself for a moment. And then she seemed so free. Stupid, timid and free. Not victorious as an escaping rooster would have been. What was it in her guts that made her a being? The chicken is a being."

"The Chicken", a brief work one can read in under five minutes, is as close to a comic tale as I have yet come upon in my reading of the short stories of Clarice Lispector, if a story about a chicken that ends in a meaningless death can be considered comic.  I enjoyed the story and I think it might be a good class room discussion work.  If I were inclined to I could write a post on how it reflects existential philosophies of the 1950s views on the absurdity of life but I am not inclined for now. 

Clarice Lispector (1920–1977) was Brazilian journalist, translator and author of fiction. Born in Western Ukraine into a Jewish family who suffered greatly during the pogroms of the Russian Civil War, she was still an infant when her family fled the disastrous post-World War I situation for Rio de Janiero. At twenty-three, she became famous for her novel, Near to the Wild Heart, and married a Brazilian diplomat. She spent much of the forties and fifties in Europe and the United States, helping soldiers in a military hospital in Naples during World War II and writing, before leaving her husband and returning to Rio in 1959. Back home, she completed several novels including The Passion According to G.H. and The Hour of the Star before her death in 1977 from ovarian cancer.  - from New Directions Publishing web

Ambrosia Boussweau 

"Love" by Clarice Lispector (1952)

"All her vaguely artistic desire had long since been directed toward making the days fulfilled and beautiful; over time, her taste for the decorative had developed and supplanted her inner disorder. She seemed to have discovered that everything could be perfected, to each thing she could lend a harmonious appearance; life could be wrought by the hand of man."

The Complete Short Stories of Clarice Lipsector, to be published August, 2015, translated by Katrina Dodson, edited and introduced by Benjamin Moser)

My Posts on Clarice Lispector 

"Love" is a fascinating story about hiding from the darker aspects of life, creating meaning, hiding things from yourself.  "Love" is told in the person of a married woman whose life centers on her husband and her children.  I read the story three times and feel I have just begun to appreciate the depth of this work.  The woman senses an emptiness in her life, one she cannot quite understand or articulate.   The core event in the story occurs when she goes for a walk in a Botanical Garden.  The story does not say but there is a giant botanical garden in Rio de Janeiro.  She sees a blind man and from this her consciousness goes away from her safe secure carefully constructed view of life where blind strangers don't intrude.  There is so much in this story.  

Clarice Lispector (1920–1977) was Brazilian journalist, translator and author of fiction. Born in Western Ukraine into a Jewish family who suffered greatly during the pogroms of the Russian Civil War, she was still an infant when her family fled the disastrous post-World War I situation for Rio de Janiero. At twenty-three, she became famous for her novel, Near to the Wild Heart, and married a Brazilian diplomat. She spent much of the forties and fifties in Europe and the United States, helping soldiers in a military hospital in Naples during World War II and writing, before leaving her husband and returning to Rio in 1959. Back home, she completed several novels including The Passion According to G.H. and The Hour of the Star before her death in 1977 from ovarian cancer.  - from New Directions Publishing web

Mel u

"Day Dreams and the Drunkenness of a Young Lady" by Clarice Lispector(1955?)

The Complete Short Stories of Clarice Lipsector, to be published August, 2015, translated by Katrina Dodson, edited and introduced by Benjamin Moser)

My Posts on Clarice Lispector 

"Day Dreams and the Drunkenness of a Young Lady" is replete with levels of irony and perceptivity.  In time I think perhaps once her full set of short stories is published and digested those into what I guess is called "women studies" will find them a very rich fascinating resource.  In this story, narrated by a somewhat intoxicated woman I see, as I have in her prior stories, a woman looking at herself looking at her self looking at herself.  She also fixates on how she thinks others look at her.  She is competive in comparing her looks to other women, denigrating a woman for wearing a hat.  She is comfortably upper middle class, married with children and servants. She, during a business dinner with her husband and a wealthy male client, during which she is a bit drunk, she imagines the man is checking out her body.  Somehow it is, in her mind, acceptable for a married woman out with her husband to be a bit drunk, but she sees single upper class women out alone as obviously on the make.  Lispector makes us feel Braźil in the rhythm of her style.

There is a lot to ponder in thus story on narrative method.  I think it would make for good class room discussion.

Clarice Lispector (1920–1977) was Brazilian journalist, translator and author of fiction. Born in Western Ukraine into a Jewish family who suffered greatly during the pogroms of the Russian Civil War, she was still an infant when her family fled the disastrous post-World War I situation for Rio de Janiero. At twenty-three, she became famous for her novel, Near to the Wild Heart, and married a Brazilian diplomat. She spent much of the forties and fifties in Europe and the United States, helping soldiers in a military hospital in Naples during World War II and writing, before leaving her husband and returning to Rio in 1959. Back home, she completed several novels including The Passion According to G.H. and The Hour of the Star before her death in 1977 from ovarian cancer.  - from New Directions Publishing web

Mel u

"Obsession" by Clarice Lispector - Her First Truly Great Story plus "Gertrudes Asks for Advice" and "Another Couple of Drinks"

The Complete Short Stories of Clarice Lipsector, to be published August, 2015, translated by Katrina Dodson, edited and introduced by Benjamin Moser

"Obsession", the third story in the collection convinced me of the oft proclaimed genius of Clarice Lispector.  We have to guess the date of publication of the stories as they are not to be found in the collection.   It is about a woman's multi-layered passage of self discovery.  I will just quote a few passages as I am disinclined right now to say more.  A short blog post done for those who have not read the story would not be useful right now.  

"And the greatest harm Daniel did me was awaken within me that desire that lies latent inside us all. For some people it awakens and merely poisons them, as for me and Daniel. For others it leads to laboratories, journeys, absurd experiences, to adventure. To madness."

One of the tensions I find animating the short stories of Lispector is the bipolar desires to rise above what she sees as a world in a stupor to a quietitude from thought.

Almost all the stories I gave so far read center on a woman with problematic relationships with a man, a man perhaps or probably her intellectual inferior but who she nevertheless anchors her world upon.

"Perhaps Daniel had acted merely as an instrument, perhaps my destiny really was the one I pursued, the destiny of those set loose upon the earth, of those who don’t measure their actions according to Good and Evil, perhaps I, even without him, would have discovered myself some day, perhaps, even without him, I would have fled Jaime and his land. How can I know?"

I think this story would be very good for class discussions.

The other two stories are very interesting. 

Mel u

Clarice Lispector (1920–1977) was Brazilian journalist, translator and author of fiction. Born in Western Ukraine into a Jewish family who suffered greatly during the pogroms of the Russian Civil War, she was still an infant when her family fled the disastrous post-World War I situation for Rio de Janiero. At twenty-three, she became famous for her novel, Near to the Wild Heart, and married a Brazilian diplomat. She spent much of the forties and fifties in Europe and the United States, helping soldiers in a military hospital in Naples during World War II and writing, before leaving her husband and returning to Rio in 1959. Back home, she completed several novels including The Passion According to G.H. and The Hour of the Star before her death in 1977 from ovarian cancer.  - from New Directions Publishing web

"Letters to Hermengardo" by Clarice Lispector (1941)

The Complete Short Stories of Clarice Lipsector, to be published August, 2015, translated by Katrina Dodson, edited and introduced by Benjamin Moser)

My Posts on Clarice Lispector 

"This preamble also serves as an apology. It is because I realize, even through the sweetest words that the miracle of your breathing inspires in me, my destiny is to throw stones. Never get angry with me for that. Some are born to cast stones. And after all, (here is where my task begins) why would it be wrong to cast stones, unless because they will hit things that belong to you or to those who know how to laugh and adore and eat? Once this point has been clarified and you allow me to throw stones, I shall speak to you of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony."

As I read and post on the short stories of Clarice Lispector I feel a bit bad as right now only those who can read Portugese or have an advance review copy of her collected stories can read her them.  I hope to read and post individually on each of her 86 stories prior to the scheduled August 2015 publication date.  

In "Letters to Hermengardo" the very high intelligence of the woman narrator 

 begins to show itself, not hiding in the shadows.  She wrote this story in an era when high intelligence was not a greatly characteristic of women.  Lispector knows high intelligence can harm those who have it in ways most cannot fathom.  In this story I think we see a woman trying to unravel her thoughts, find her anchor.  In just a few pages Lispector takes us deeply into the narrator's very complex psyche.  

I will note I am guessing  based on a Google search that this story was first published in 1941, when the author was 21.  I really wish this collection included date and place of first publication information.  

Mel u

"Extract" by Clarice Lispector

My Posts on Clarice Lispector 

"Dear sirs, now of all times, when I had so much to say, I don’t know how to express myself. I’m a solemn and serious woman, dear sirs. I have a daughter, dear sirs. I could be a good poet. I could have anyone I wanted. I know how to play every role, dear sirs. I could get up now and give a speech against humanity, against life. Asking the government to create a department of abandoned and sad women, who will never again have something to do in the world. Asking for some urgent reform. But I can’t, dear sirs. And that’s the reason there will never be any reforms. Because, instead of shouting, complaining, all I feel like is crying very softly and staying still, silent."

"Extract" centers on a woman waiting in a cafe for a man, one who left her but now says he will meet her in the cafe.  We have seen such a figure in some of Lispector's other stories.  A crucial element in the stories of Lispector, not found in other stories about women waiting for men, is the reflections of the woman on her existential situation.  You can see in the quote above that she is very perceptive, she knows she has given the man too much power  in her life.  

In her stories you feel the beauty of Rio de Janeiro, the wet warmth of the ocean.  (Often I drift back to the occasions I was there during dark moments.). Maybe as I progress through her 86 stories we can see the differences between hanging out in a cafe in Rio or Recife versus Paris or London.

Mel u

Clarice Lispector (1920–1977) was Brazilian journalist, translator and author of fiction. Born in Western Ukraine into a Jewish family who suffered greatly during the pogroms of the Russian Civil War, she was still an infant when her family fled the disastrous post-World War I situation for Rio de Janiero. At twenty-three, she became famous for her novel, Near to the Wild Heart, and married a Brazilian diplomat. She spent much of the forties and fifties in Europe and the United States, helping soldiers in a military hospital in Naples during World War II and writing, before leaving her husband and returning to Rio in 1959. Back home, she completed several novels including The Passion According to G.H. and The Hour of the Star before her death in 1977 from ovarian cancer.  - from New Directions Publishing web