Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts tagged ‘books’

book collecting

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Non-stop bookishness today that began with a trip to my favorite 2nd hand bookstore in Lausanne. I had to engage in a small but mostly polite skirmish with another Anglophone and obvious book-lover as he and I negotiated four slim shelves of English books, eyeing each other to make sure the other wasn’t about to grab a coveted title. I was in a hurry but did get this little stack of paperbacks:

  • The Penguin Book of Welsh Short Stories
  • Borges and the Eternal Orangutans by Luis Fernando Verissimo (I read almost a third of this on the train ride back to home and so far it is a light & clever satire, written as a letter to Borges and involving a fiftyish translator and an Edgar Allan Poe conference in Buenos Aires)
  • The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
  • Best American Essays 1987, edited by Gay Talese & Robert Atwan (some great names in this collection)
  • The Calcutta Chromosome by Amitov Ghosh
  • Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour An Introduction by J.D. Salinger

I also raced through the French section and picked up Alain de Botton’s Petite Philosophie de l’Amour.

Then onto lunch with a good friend of mine who is also a translator and we had a quick book trade – I’m pretty sure I came out the winner here (although I did give her a copy of Robert Pagani’s Mon Roi, Mon Amour, a book I really enjoyed) with these lovelies:

  • Une Forme de Vie by Amélie Nothomb
  • The Frozen Thames by Helen Humphreys (Apparently the Thames has frozen over exactly forty times between 1142 and 1849, and this is a book of stories that tell of those freezings – it’s small and square and has plenty of illustrations. It looks wonderful).
  • Fireworks by Angela Carter
  • The People’s Act of Love by James Meek
  • The Diving Pool by Yoko Ogawa
  • Foreign Words by Vassilis Alexakis
  • See Under: Love by David Grossman (this book looks wonderful, but no publisher should ever be allowed to print in type this small)

On the back and forth from my still-moderately-snowy mountain to town, I read Salman Rushdie’s essay in The New Yorker about the beginning of his time in hiding, about how it happened that he needed to invent a new name and life for himself after the publication of The Satanic Verses. It’s a personal history piece and he’s written it, but it’s done in the 3rd person, which tricks you into thinking it’s investigative journalism (and there’s probably much to be discussed about this choice), but it’s clearly an excerpt from his memoir Joseph Anton and I enjoyed it, especially the history he gives on the inspiration for writing The Satanic Verses as well as his telling of how he came up with the pseudonym he would live under for so many years.

And finally, as if all this concentrated bookishness were not enough – I arrived home to a box of books from The Folio Society, including a really beautiful and slim edition of Turgenev’s novella First Love. I think it’s safe to say that if the snow comes back and I’m forced to stay inside, I’ll have plenty to read.

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Clarice Lispector – Água Viva

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For this week’s review at Necessary Fiction, I reviewed Clarice Lispector’s seventh novel, Água Viva. This strange and wonderful book was originally published in 1973, first translated into English in 1978 and now re-translated by Stefan Tobler for New Directions and published this year as one of four Lispector novels in re-translation.

Here is some of what I had to say in my review:

Written by an unnamed narrator and written to an unnamed “you”, Água Viva is a meditation on the act of creation using the idea of the written word, as opposed to other creative media, as its vehicle. With this “letter,” Lispector asks what it really means to write to someone, how to transpose thought into missive or message, and what part of an individual is captured or lost in the act of writing:

I want to write to you like someone learning. I photograph each instant. I deepen the words as if I were painting, more than an object, its shadow. I don’t want to ask why, you can always ask why and always get no answer—could I manage to surrender to the expectant silence that follows a question without an answer? Though I sense that some place or time the great answer for me does exist.

It is also a meditation on the individual—how does a narrator portray the self? Is this possible? Is it desirable? Lispector’s stated goal throughout the text is to somehow re-create, through words, the instantaneous instant, the “instant now.” An instant that is constantly changing, constantly being reborn. This rebirth becomes painful for the narrator, and she both embraces it and rejects it repeatedly.

You can read the whole review here.

I’ve had the pleasure of reading two Lispector novels now, and it’s definitely time to read her start to finish. I felt somewhat at a disadvantage reading and reviewing Água Viva without having read all of her earlier works. It is an incredible book—strange in a beautiful way, challenging but also rich with thought and image. I enjoyed it for what it was, and I think anyone interested in this kind of self-reflexive hybrid essay/fiction would find much to savor in this short novel. It is definitely a book to be read and read again, and new meanings will come out of it all the time.

At the same time, it made me want to have all of her writings in my head for constant reference against this strange novel. I’m just greedy that way. From what I understand, Água Viva is different enough from her other works (and it was different enough from The Hour of the Star for me to believe this) that it sits in its own category. Meaning that among her already innovative/experimental body of work, it is an extreme. So I spent much of my time reading her thinking that I wanted to go back and experience all she’d written that had brought her to the moment of writing this particular book, just to see the development.

Also, I think I will get a few copies of Lispector in French, including Água Viva, just to see how she reads in another romance language. So much of the discussion around Lispector focuses on her language and how she plays with grammar and punctuation. Stefan Tobler’s translation was incredibly smooth, easy to read and obviously careful, but not so smooth that I couldn’t experience the strangeness of Lispector’s writing. There are moments when the images don’t make sense or when words come together in unexpected ways. I loved that.

So next on my Lispector list is Near to the Wild Heart – her first. And I can hardly wait to move through her nine novels in the order they were published.

But to wrap up today, I give you some of my favorite lines from Água Viva:

And all of this is me. All is weighted with sleep when I paint a cave or write to you about it—from outside it comes the clatter of dozens of wild horses stamping with dry hoofs the darkness, and from the friction of the hoofs the rejoicing is freed in sparks: here I am, I and the cave, in the very time that will rot us.

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catching up

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Things have been quiet around here lately, but I have been reading some wonderful fiction.

First is Jean Stafford’s The Mountain Lion. I read this book for the Dead Writers Book Group and we discussed it (a little) on Twitter two Mondays ago. Discovering Stafford is a real find – an American writer I’d never heard of and one with a wonderfully unique voice. There are some great comparisons to be made between Stafford and Carson McCullers, for example, because Stafford has much of that Southern Gothic feel, except she isn’t a Southern writer but a Western writer (who lived in New York for most of her adult life). She is better known for her short stories… and so I’ve just picked up her Collected Stories and will write about them once I’ve started reading.

In a perfect universe, I will come back and write up my thoughts (properly) on The Mountain Lion but for now let me say that this is a book about two children, a brother and a sister, stuck between two vastly different worlds, and how those worlds pull at them and shape them in different ways. The two children are mostly unloved, and so both do things to become unlovable, as children unfortunately will. It is a powerful story, simply told, with a unique structure.

Next is Karen Brown’s Little Sinner & Other Stories – which I reviewed this past week for Necessary Fiction. I say as much in my review, but these were excellent:

Despite the mini-novel feel to each of these stories, when looked at as a collection there are several themes linking throughout—one I especially enjoyed was Brown’s explorations of infidelity, and in particular, the feminine side of what is too-often portrayed to be an exclusively male issue. First presented in the collection’s second piece, “Swimming,”—a dark and delightful recasting of John Cheever’s classic “The Swimmer”—several of the stories in the collection tell of women (of all ages) who cheat on their partners or spouses. One of the best parts of the way Brown handles this theme is that it isn’t ever a story’s main preoccupation but a kind of subtle side-story, a detail of a life turned upside down, and the woman’s infidelity could be the cause or the result of that upset.

You can read the entire review here.

Also, I just finished reading my second Clarice Lispector – Agua Viva. I’ll be reviewing this title in a few days, so will mention it again soon. But let me just say now that my first impression of Lispector holds firm. An incredible writer, a vivid talent. The Lispector revival that is currently underway in the English-speaking world is exciting and I can’t wait to read her start to finish. She’s got nine novels and the two I’ve read are from her later work, so it’s time to go to her first, Near to the Wild Heart, and start reading her properly.

Finally, I’ve had a number of great books make their way into the house recently. Here’s just a sample of what I’m looking at for fall reading:

  • • Going to Meet the Man – James Baldwin
  • • Best European Fiction 2013 – ed. Alexsander Hemon
  • • My Mother was an Upright Piano (stories) – Tania Hershman
  • • The Slow Natives – Thea Astley
  • • The Very Air – Doug Bauer
  • • Athena – John Banville

Looking forward to all of these and more…

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Louis Armand – Breakfast at Midnight

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This week at Necessary Fiction, I review Louis Armand’s Breakfast at Midnight, a book published by the Prague-based Equus Press in 2012:

Overall, plot does not so much matter in this book—the mood, the style, the imagery and emotion are really at the heart of the work; also, Armand is experimenting with depression and psychosis, how to describe them, how they are experienced—but for the sake of review, here is a bare bones that will suffice: a young man in Prague relives a past relationship when the body of a young redheaded woman surfaces in the river and he goes with his friend (if that’s really the word to describe their connection), Blake, to photograph the body. Blake is a pornographer of women’s bodies, both dead and alive, although he seems to prefer them dead. Our narrator is a fugitive, having exchanged his life (via swapped passport in a South American jungle) for a dying man’s ten years before. The reason for his shadowy existence is slowly and circuitously revealed and has everything to do with the body of a young red headed woman. Not the corpse we meet in chapter two, but that body from his past, a powerful physical presence that hovers throughout the entire book.

You can read the entire review here.

Charlotte Smith – Emmeline: The Orphan of the Castle

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It’s been a while since I’ve read anything pre-1950s – and so it was great fun to sit down with Charlotte Smith’s Emmeline, or The Orphan of the Castle this week. The book was published in 1788 and was Smith’s first novel (of ten).

The story centers on a young woman – Emmeline Mowbray – who is raised on her own in a castle belonging to her uncle. The castle was once her father’s, but his death (which shortly followed her mother’s death in childbirth) has left her an orphan and, more importantly, an orphan without claim to her father’s or his family’s name. The uncle provides for her basic needs but is not planning to raise her as a part of his family. When Emmeline is sixteen her caregiver dies, leaving her exposed to the advances of one of the servants. She sends a letter to her uncle, asking for help, and eventually he arrives to sort out Emmeline’s future, but he has brought along his son, Delamere, who instantly falls in love with the young and beautiful and softspoken Emmeline. He decides he must have her at any cost. His obstinate pursuit of her (because his family does not approve of the match, nor does Emmeline love him) sets in motion the next 527 pages of passionate speeches, near escapes, clever subterfuge and so on and so forth.

The book is highly entertaining and I stayed up far too late several nights in a row just wanting to see what would happen and how it would all work out. I’ll put your fears at rest – the book has a fantastic happy ending. Highly satisfactory.

But Emmeline is definitely a novel of its times—extremely sentimental. The endless weeping, sobbing and fainting becomes tiresome about halfway through the book. The slightest emotional upset will send any one of the female characters into a dead faint, or at the very least, a high fever that may last for several days. Luckily, our Emmeline is a plucky woman and in the midst of her near-fainting, she is able to deliver some amazing speeches. She is a model of integrity and it is only through her sound mind and clever thinking (while crying, while sobbing, while falling down with fatigue), that she manages to keep her “honor” intact.

Where I found myself enjoying the book the most was in its social critique. Smith is clearly arguing against the social and family structures of the era that leave women so open to “moral compromise.” Two of Emmeline’s closest friends in the novel have been forced into horrible marriages and their lot in life is not a happy one. They are without any means to correct their situations themselves, and must rely on their male friends (a risky maneuver) or relatives for any assistance. Because Emmeline is the only character without any real family ties, especially male ones, she is at the greatest risk. And of course this is what drives the story—how will she avoid all the traps that surround her, how will she manage to maintain her honor when her social situation makes it so easy for men to take advantage of her? The simple act of crossing town in the company of a man who is not a brother or established “safe” connection, is fraught with danger.

As Emmeline was Smith’s first novel, I’m keen to see how her work developed, in terms of theme but also style, and I look forward to reading her other novels. I’d also really like to read Mary Wollstonecraft’s Mary: A Fiction, which was published the same year as Emmeline but may be quite different. At least Wollstonecraft was supposed to have been very critical of the sentimental novels and their tradition. So we shall see – I do love it when one book leads to another right away.

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Barbara Comyns – Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead

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Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead is the fourth Barbara Comyns novel that I’ve read. I started with Our Spoons Came from Woolworths, then went to The Vet’s Daughter and after that read The Juniper Tree. My reading of her has been completely haphazard, dictated mostly by which book I happened to come across in a second hand bookshop (except for Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, which I got from a friend.)

Although I’d like to do a start-to-finish read of her at some point, I’m quite happy to have read these four in the order that I did because Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead was actually somewhat different from the other three. It still felt very much like a Barbara Comyns novel, but it was much starker and more grotesque. I wonder whether it would have unsettled me too much to look for her other work right away, if I had read it first. Our Spoons Came from Woolworths and The Juniper Tree, both unusual novels with elements of this same stark vision and bizarre perspective, seem positively gentle compared to Who Was Changed, and even The Vet’s Daughter doesn’t get as strange and violent.

Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead is about a small village in England and the internal struggles of a particular family (the wealthiest) in the village, but it’s also about a mysterious illness that suddenly affects many of the inhabitants. I’ve lent my copy to a friend so I cannot provide verbatim any of the fantastic descriptions of the villagers becoming ill and going crazy. It’s incredible. Comyns makes it all so horrible and violent. And then once the villagers figure out what’s happening, they burn someone’s house down. That scene is one I will not likely forget soon.

For all of the book’s fantasy, Comyns’s omniscient third-person narrator is straightforward and unemotional, maintaining an almost frighteningly clinical distance from what’s going on. The narrator passes over many of the novel’s gruesome details quite quickly, changing subjects from one sentence to the next. Often the narrator juxtaposes something outrageous with something benign. This narrative technique had a way of making me gasp out loud, like I might be the only one noticing how utterly amiss everything was in this little village. I love that Comyns brought me through the text this way.

Comyns has a way of creating characters with a lurking monstrous side. The father in The Vet’s Daughter and the mother in The Juniper Tree, for example, but in Who Was Changed it is hard to find a character without this monster-within. The grandmother is an absolute caricature (wonderfully done) of an obese tyrant. The father a weakling with a pathologically selfish side. Even Emma, the oldest daughter of the family and the person we are meant to find the most sympathetic, has a way of making unsettling statements and misunderstanding vital situations. The village and the family and the story all end up feeling like a carnival somehow, or a gruesome fairytale, and yet as a reader I was incredibly attached to what was happening. It’s fascinating to me how she manages (and she’s done this in each book) to both reflect and distort reality.

With each book of hers I read, I become more and more impressed with the uniqueness of her style and fictional vision. All of her books are available but several have been re-issued lately (she wrote most of them in the 50s and 60s) and so it feels like the world is going through a little Barbara Comyns revival. I hope this is the case, and I hope it continues.

 

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John Colman Wood – The Names of Things

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I had the pleasure of reading and reviewing a lovely book for Necessary Fiction this week. This book comes from a small press in Ashland, Oregon called Ashland Creek Press. I’ve been quite impressed with the books on their list and I really enjoyed John Colman Wood’s novel, one of their “literary fiction” titles. Here is just a teaser from the review:

On the surface, The Names of Things is a simple novel of grief. Of one man’s negotiation of the empty spiritual and physical places created after the death of his wife. That’s a story that has been told a thousand times before. But not, I can safely say, in exactly the way that Wood tells it—building a narrative out of anthropological observations, easy travel (emphasis on easy) to a situation of extreme physical and mental isolation, and the asking of questions pertinent to the story’s 21st century setting. In short, what could be just another Grief story becomes absolutely unique, even exotic.

Read the full review here.

Jess Stoner – I Have Blinded Myself Writing This

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A few weeks ago I read (twice) a strange and beautiful and melancholy novel, I Have Blinded Myself Writing This by Jess Stoner (who is, despite having never met her, a friend of mine). I want to call this book a novella, or even a hybrid poem/novella, because while the book itself has the physical weight of a novel, what is written on the pages is a wonderful mix of style and metaphor that fits nicely with the idea of a prose poem.

Here is the story—a young woman has an unusual disease; if she is cut or injured in any way she loses a memory. Not all of her memories, but one, or maybe sometimes, several. The memory literally “seeps” out of her, whether the injury is internal (bruise) or external (wound). She is married to a man named Teddy and eventually she has a child. There is also a smaller story of the death of her brother, an event she has more than once forgotten. The book is about her marriage and her motherhood, but all within the context of her disease and how being in a relationship with someone like this—someone who might forget you if she gets a papercut—might cause some stress, might even make it impossible to trust her. Also, once the baby is born, the narrator worries continually that she will forget she has a child.

I’ve read much of Stoner’s writing before, her short fiction and poetry, and what I love about her work is its focus on science (in I Have Blinded Myself that focus is medical and philosophical) and how she turns that focus into sheer emotional projection. More than projection, I should call it emotional speculation. The book is more question than story, although the thread of story is still very strong.

The brain changes when we make a memory. It’s supposed to be burned into. But there isn’t heat in the brain from this branding, from those electrical impulses that supposedly happen. So what of the engram, that hypothetical permanent change in the brain that should show a memory’s existence?

If we can’t observe where a memory was, how can we ever hope to find where it went?

The book is spare in a way, in the sense that it could be read in a few hours, but it begs for slow reading and leaves the impression of a much longer book. I actually started reading at my usual breakneck pace, got through about forty pages and realized that I had to go back and start again. Not because I wasn’t following exactly, but because this book deserved careful, slow and quiet reading. My second and third reading were done at leisure, and I found that most pages were best read several times over.

I use the word “melancholy” to describe I Have Blinded Myself Writing This because while the book gives off this feeling of sorrow, it’s also very contemplative. There are bursts of frustration and rage, but the overarching feeling is one of introspection and deliberation. While the narrator worries that her daughter will have the same disease, she’s also already accepted that she has, that she needs to be prepared for what this constant memory loss will be like for her as well. The book’s look at parenthood, filtered through this idea of memory, is extremely touching, very raw.

One of the book’s central questions is asked in different ways again and again, in various poetic formulations, but eventually Stoner lets her narrator ask her question directly.

It is good to remember?

Or it is a tragedy.

I love the punctuation here – the question on the statement and the period on the next line, which you think will be a question but is actually a resigned statement.

As the book moves toward its ending, the narrative becomes more and more disjointed. Not incoherent, but there are more fragments of text and more white space. The narrator is beginning to unravel. The larger feeling of melancholy begins to give way to despair and anger. Stoner keeps this section of the book short and I read it several times, wanting to understand what was happening but also to just let myself experience the shift in emotion.

I found the ending interesting in that it pulls toward a real point of resolution, and yet it resists the idea at the same time. I think I know what has happened to this narrator and Teddy and their daughter, but I’m not completely certain. There are no details, there is only poetry and the questions raised by the text that precedes. It’s wonderfully done.

Let me finish with another excerpt, one of many that I marked:

What if we didn’t build monuments in memory of, but we returned to making quilts, knowing the texture of those worn fingertips stitched what now keeps us warm. What if we didn’t keep memories underneath the sink, where we thought other people would never think to look, but burned them and then we could remember the burning but we wouldn’t have the thing, just the heat of what it was, which everyone tells us will wane.

 

 

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Tove Jansson – The Summer Book

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While on holiday two weeks ago, I read Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book. Not even the unruly multi-family party of Scandinavians sharing our hotel, who slammed doors, ran down hallways at 3am and yelled to each other from their balconies at midnight, could make me unlove this beautiful book (of Finland). I wrote immediately on Twitter how this book fits my idea of a “perfect” piece of writing—plotless but absolutely riveting, graceful and honest—and several weeks after finishing its pages, this still holds true.

The Summer Book is set on a small island in Finland, in a vacation home, and the book catalogues the interactions and adventures of an elderly grandmother and her young granddaughter Sophie. In quite short, disarmingly simple and themed chapters like “Playing Venice,” “The Cave” or “The Robe,” Jansson comments on a variety of powerful subjects. The book is, quite simply, about life and the many difficult questions of existence that humans ponder. And that pondering is presented honestly, through the unique ways that humans consider such things, and by that I mean: off-hand, in absurd conversations, in solitude, in our physical relationship to nature and in our love and hate for other human beings.

One of the things that Jansson does, and does incredibly well, is evoke how human beings find magic in the simplest things. Not real magic, she never goes quite so far, but she knows how to bring the reader (through her characters’ actions and thoughts) to that little feeling of awe that strikes at any given moment and for unexplainable reasons. Jansson really has her finger on this human impulse and this is what most of The Summer Book seems to be about. These moments of awe aren’t always joyful, of course, and both sorrowful awe or angry awe are strong currents in the book as well.

Something I found very curious about the book was the portrayal of the father character. I would have to double check, but I don’t think he ever speaks a line of dialogue, and mostly he is absent—either working or away in his boat. But he is this incredibly affecting presence throughout the book, yet without any real engagement with either the grandmother or Sophie. They talk about him, they disobey his stern rules, they watch him a lot. It’s a technique I haven’t come across before in other books, at least not often or that I can remember. I loved it. Also, the reader learns quite early that Sophie’s mother has died. Jansson gives us this piece of information quickly and without ceremony, and she never goes back to it. But this reality haunts the entire book, and these two people—one truly absent, the other perhaps absent out of grieving or loneliness—are powerful characters.

The Summer Book is a serious book, but it’s filled with some excellent humor. Sophie and her Grandmother are often in conversation about very difficult things, although they don’t often touch these subjects head on. Instead, they talk “around” things or they say silly things which are truly very serious. And they are often prickly with one another, but that prickliness reveals a deep mutual need and love. I do not think I have seen this kind of love expressed so well in many other books. Perhaps, however, this is especially striking because it’s accomplished through the non-traditional pairing of a grandmother and a little girl.

It’s a real pleasure to discover a novel and know immediately that I will reread it often. The Summer Book is the kind of book that doesn’t have to be picked up and gone through from start to finish (although I will do this and am looking forward to doing this again soon), but I could nearly choose a chapter at random and enjoy its atmosphere again whenever I feel like it. It is an example of one of those rare books that become life companions. I do not put many books in this category, and it’s a very special treat to be able to add another volume to this, my most precious of book lists.

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Clarice Lispector – The Hour of the Star

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“One cannot prove the existence of what is most real but the essential thing is to believe. To weep and believe.”
-Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

There has been a lot of talk in bookish circles lately about the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector. After my curiosity got the best of me, I picked up a copy of her 1977 (and second to last) novel, The Hour of the Star. There can be nothing more exciting for a committed reader to stumble across than a previously unknown (to me) literary voice and be absolutely blown away. I don’t think I’ve been as excited about a piece of literature since reading my first Nadine Gordimer novel some ten years ago now. I’ll stop the comparison right there, however, because they are very different writers. Still, I now feel the same need to read Lispector from start to finish as I did upon that first encounter with Gordimer.

The Hour of the Star is absolutely unique. Both easily readable and unfathomable at the same time. A straightforward story of life and love and death and yet every page filled with inscrutable and delightful little tangents. Its central concern is an impoverished, ugly, uneducated young woman named Macabéa who has moved from a backwater town to Rio. She’s hopeless and hopelessly unlovable, even though the narrator is desperately obsessed, you could even say, in love with, this woman’s life and, eventually, with her death.

The book has a strange narrator—a man named Rodrigo about whom the reader ultimately learns very little. He is interested in truth/reality and storytelling and how the two affect one another; he often says things like the following:

Forgive me if I add something more about myself since my identity is not very clear, and when I write I am surprised to find that I possess a destiny. Who has not asked himself at some time or other: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?

That “when I write I am surprised to find that I possess a destiny,” that’s just brilliant. As is the final question in that quote.

Rodrigo could easily be Lispector and the blurring between these two writerly identities is a wonderful and fascinating part of the book. Rodrigo doesn’t really influence the story, not as a character would, but only as the person selected to tell Macabéa’s story. There is some notion of the two having met at some point, but it isn’t important and Lispector could have easily taken an authoritative omniscient and told the story herself. And yet Rodrigo’s voice adds something really unique to the narrative—an ordinary human obsessed with the pathetic story of another ordinary human. There is this sense that Rodrigo as a writer has created Macabéa, turned her from fiction into flesh and in that transformation he’s given a part of himself, so whatever happens to Macabéa happens to him as well.

To be frank, I am holding her destiny in my hands and yet I am powerless to invent with any freedom: I follow a secret, fatal line. I am forced to seek a truth that transcends me. Why should I write about a young girl whose poverty is so evident? Perhaps because within her is seclusion.

And what does happen to Macabéa? Not much really. She lives in a slum, works as a typist. Has small entertainments on the weekends. She has a friend named Gloria who seems to know more about the world. She has a crush on a young man who pays her some attention. But Macabéa is heading toward a moment of fame, a sad and horrible kind of fame, but fame nonetheless. And Rodrigo must tell the reader all about it.

I haven’t even scratched the surface of all I could say about this tiny little novel. As it’s one of her later ones, I plan to come back to it once I’ve had a chance to read her earlier works. She has nine novels and nine collections of short fiction, so I’ll have my hands full with this for awhile.

If I’ve piqued your curiosity about Lispector, take a look at the New Directions page for her. They’ve just come out with several of her books in new translations and there are links on this page to many, if not all, the critical reviews that have been floating around about her work.

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