After hearing so many people rave about her, I finally read a Clarice Lispector novel. And I hated it. I wanted to DNF The Passion According to G.H. so many times; I again got through it out of sheer obstinacy. Though I’m not sure I can say I “read” it since often I just literally read the words without processing them. I honestly don’t see how so many people like this. It’s so dense and tedious and nonsensical.
I will say that I did enjoy the first 28 pages maybe. The part where she was discussing her transformation before she actually related seeing the roach. The part where the narrator is referring to some unknown event and how it impacted her identity and it’s on the reader to place meaning into that unknown event. I actually liked that part. You could identify what she was saying with any significant event in your own life. And then the rest of the book was an utter slog. I’m not sure if it’s because I can appreciate her writing only in small doses or if by the time she related her encounter with the roach, all I could think was, “Just kill the roach. This can’t be the first thing you’ve ever killed. You probably step on ants every day. No need for an existential crisis.”
And that’s not to say that I don’t normally appreciate authors analyzing the miniscule, the everyday, the seemingly inconsequential. But this woman got to the point where she couldn’t write a straightforward sentence. And I truly could not be bothered the majority of the time to figure out what she was trying to say. Just kill the roach, babes. If it doesn’t work the first time, slam the armoire door harder. Though a shoe for the larger and a folded-up paper towel for the smaller bugs are typically my weapons of choice. Don’t be a ninny.
Could be I read this at the wrong place, wrong time. But I’m not going to revisit it again. I do have another Lispector book in my personal library, so I suppose I’ll try her again when I’m feeling very, very patient to endure her ramblings.
But I will say that she had a few nicely formulated sentences. And I enjoyed the metaphors of the third leg and the quotation marks. These are some snippets I enjoyed, most of which come from the aforementioned enjoyable first 28 pages:
“I’m searching, I’m searching. I’m trying to understand. Trying to give what I’ve lived to somebody else and I don’t know to whom, but I don’t want to keep what I lived. I don’t know what to do with what I lived, I’m afraid of that profound disorder. I don’t trust what happened to me. Did something happen to me that I, because I didn’t know how to live it, lived as something else?”
“I don’t want to confirm myself in what I lived—in the confirmation of me I would lose the world as I had it, and I know I don’t have the fortitude for another.”
“The fine death that let me brush up against the forbidden fabric of life. It’s forbidden to say the name of life. And I almost said it.”
“All sudden understanding closely resembles an acute incomprehension.”
“And knowing might be the murder of my human soul.”
“Life that I had tamed to make it familiar.”
“the enormous surprise I shall feel at the poverty of the spoken thing.”
“As one loves an idea. The witty elegance of my house comes from everything here being in quotes. Out of honest respect for true authorship, I quote the world, I quoted it, since it was neither me nor mine.” —> “it was a violation of my quotation marks, the quotation marks that made me a citation of myself.”
“I want the present without dressing it up with a future that redeems it.”
“And I saw, while the silence of those who really had died was invading me as ivy invades the mouths of the stone lions.”
“I could no longer stand it and am confessing that I already knew a truth that never had use or application, and that I would be afraid to apply, since I’m not grown-up enough to know how to use a truth without destroying myself.”
“No, I had not even known how to ask the question. Yet the answer had imposed itself upon me since I was born. Because of this continual answer I, the wrong way around, had been forces to seek the corresponding question. So I had got lost in a labyrinth of questions, and asked questions at random, hoping that one of them would occasionally correspond to the answer, and that I could then understand the answer.”
