Clarice Lispector was the Brazilian author who was said to look like Marlene Dietrich and write like Virginia Woolf. She was compared to James Joyce, called “the great witch of Brazilian literature” and the American poet Elizabeth Bishop said she was “the most non-literary writer I’ve ever met”. She was, as you might have gathered, talked about as much as she was read. Gossip followed her throughout her life.
Clarice Lispector was born Chaya Pinkhasovna Lispector in 1920, in Ukraine, to a syphilitic mother whose parents believed pregnancy would cure her of the disease. In the aftermath of the First World War, while Lispector was still an infant, she was taken to Brazil, and became famous at the age of 23 with her first novelNear to the Wild Heart. “Hurricane Clarice” created a furore wherever she wrote. This collection includes 85 of her short stories, packed with poetic prose. “In the trees the fruits were black, sweet like honey. On the ground were dried pits full of circumvolutions, like little rotting brains.”
“Some biographical subjects get smaller and smaller as you get closer to them,” said her biographer Benjamin Moser. “With her, the closer I got to her, the more grandiose she became.” Which is the same with her weird tales. No matter how small or large the subject — a girl’s love of her pet chicken who subsequently gets eaten, a first kiss between classmates, or a discontent housewife’s daydreams — they become magnified in her hands.
Collected Stories by Clarice Lispector, translated by Katrina Dodson (Penguin Classics, 645pp; £14.99. To buy books for reduced prices visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop)