![]() It sounds crazy, but it’s as if she were watching me… reading my thoughts… Sometimes I’ll be laughing and I stop short, cold. “Even when Joana isn’t in the house, I feel on edge. The book is built around the character of Joana, a woman who, even as a child, was different enough to arouse fear in those in her vicinity: There’s no doubting who the star of the show is, though. There’s a mix of description and internal monologues, and the writer slowly develops her creation’s relationships, introducing important figures, such as her childhood teacher, and gradually setting her beside other women. While the first looks back at Joana’s childhood and introduces the novel’s main players, the second focuses on the disintegration of her marriage. ![]() Near to the Wild Heart is a fascinating story written in two parts. However, it’s clear from the offset that theirs is a relationship always destined to explode. Eventually, she deigns to marry the handsome Otávio, even though he’s not really a match for her. She’s beautiful but cold, brilliant but unapproachable, a woman who stands out for good reasons and for bad. Joana, the main protagonist of the novel, is a woman trying to work out what she wants from life. It’s a swirling, Woolfian tale of a young woman who stands out for her inability to conform to comfortable bourgeois norms – hers is certainly a mind less ordinary. Near to the Wild Heart(translated by Alison Entrekin, published by New Directions) was Clarice Lispector’s debut novel back in 1943, when she was just twenty-three years old. It was a pleasant surprise, so (of course) I put a hold on it, and it arrived in a fairly short time – which is why I have the pleasure of introducing today, for the first time on the blog, the woman the Brazilian press named Hurricane Clarice. While browsing the library databases recently, I stumbled across a book by a writer I’ve been meaning to try for a while now.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |