Uniquely challenging

Landeg White in the TLS:

Not much happens in a Lispector novel. In Near to the Wild Heart, Joana recalls her childhood, is orphaned and adopted by an aunt, attends boarding school, marries, chats with her husband’s mistress, takes a lover, and loses both husband and lover. But this “plot” is incidental to the life of her mind, where all the real action takes place. In The Passion According to G. H. (A paixão segundo G. H., 1964), the heroine, known only by her initials, goes to clean the room of the maid who has given notice the day before, and has an apocalyptic encounter with a cockroach. The whole book takes place in the maid’s room, or rather, in G. H.’s thoughts. Água Viva (Água viva, 1973), has no trace of a plot, being instead a series of rhapsodic fragments, while A Breath of Life (Um sopro de vida; pulsções, 1978) explores the purely mental relationship between a character called “the author” and “Angela”, his creation. All four works are better described as internal dialogues: between Joana and Otávio; between G. H. and various interlocutors (her former husband, the doctor who performed her abortion and, of course, the cockroach); and between “the author” and Angela. Even Água Viva is addressed, in combative terms, to a putative reader called “you”.

Lispector can be a bafflingly elusive writer. But her images dazzle even when her meaning is most obscure, and when she is writing of what she despises she is lucidity itself. In The Passion According to G. H., the disintegration of the protagonist is superbly done, as she describes the woman she has ceased to be, organized in terms of what others saw in her, living perpetually in quotation marks, adopting “the elegant, ironic, and witty replica of a life” as a sort of extra leg. But as she advances into meaninglessness, identifying with the prehistoric, prehuman, inert world of the wounded cockroach, she enters a waste land of fragments of what she was before – we find bits of religion, mysticism and philosophy expressed in a form in which the separate words make sense, but the combinations are baffling.