Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector

by Benjamin Moser

Hardcover, 2009

Status

On hold

Genres

Biography & Memoir

Biography

Publication

Oxford University Press (2009), Edition: 1ST, Hardcover, 496 pages

Description

"That rare person who looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf," Clarice Lispector is one of the most popular but least understood of Latin American writers. Now, after years of research on three continents, drawing on previously unknown manuscripts and dozens of interviews, Benjamin Moser demonstrates how Lispector's development as a writer was directly connected to the story of her turbulent life. Born in the nightmarish landscape of post-World War I Ukraine, Clarice became, virtually from adolescence, a person whose beauty, genius, and eccentricity intrigued Brazil. Why This World tells how this precocious girl, through long exile abroad and difficult personal struggles, matured into a great writer. It also asserts, for the first time, the deep roots in the Jewish mystical tradition that make her the true heir to Kafka as well as the unlikely author of "perhaps the greatest spiritual autobiography of the twentieth century." From Chechelnik to Recife, from Naples and Berne to Washington and Rio de Janeiro, Why This World strips away the mythology surrounding this extraordinary figure and shows how Clarice Lispector transformed one woman's struggles into a universally resonant art.… (more)

Media reviews

NRC Handelsblad

De legende Lispector was een vrouw van wie werd gezegd dat ze ‘leek op Marlene Dietrich en schreef als Virginia Woolf’, die ‘was wat Kafka geweest zou zijn’ als hij als vrouw was geboren en die vaker werd vergeleken met mystici en heiligen dan met collega-schrijvers. Een vrouw die in de

Oekraïne ter wereld kwam en zou uitgroeien tot ‘de prinses van de Portugese taal’, een van de grootste schrijvers van het Latijns-Amerikaanse continent.

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— 2 more

The New York Times Book Review

Lively, ardent and intellectually rigorous... [This] energetically researched, finely argued biography will surely win Lispector the English-language readership she deserves.

The New York Times

Mr. Moser, for the most part, is a lucid and very learned tour guide, and his book is a fascinating and welcome introduction to a writer whose best work should be better known in this country.

User reviews

LibraryThing member jeterat

I enjoyed this overview of Clarice Lispector and learning some small facts about her life and personality helped immensely with being able to read her works. Why this World fell short of a four star for me because I thought that Moser dedicated too much page space to his own analysis of her works

and imposed his own judgements on the facts of her life. He was present on every page, often overshadowing and imposing on Clarice. I would have liked to see more of the content from letters and diaries of friends discussing her as contemporaries and something from her own personal papers that are not part of her published bibliography. Instead, there were incredibly long passages quoted directly from her short stories and novels followed by long passages of Moser's analysis taking almost half of the page count. Although I know this sort of analysis is common in literary biography, I wanted to know about Clarice Lispector and not about what Benjamin Moser thinks of Clarice Lispector's works.

I thought he treated her metaphysical learning cursorily and substituted the background the reader needed on Spinosa and Cabbalism with long passages of analysis of Brazilian politics and political leaders that had only roundabout connection to Clarice (she met them a few times or her husband knew them). Her children, who were incredibly important to her and her understanding of herself (by her own admission many times), feature almost not at all (we are told that Pedro's illness affected her from a young age and the Paulo married - but beyond that nothing else of their lives). Maury appears for only a few pages. Her sisters and the female friends who made up her day-to-day life each have perhaps a page. It was incredibly disappointing. I wanted to know her and the people who surrounded her and influenced her, and instead I know something of the succession of Brazilian leaders in the 20th century and about how Moser reads her works (and even his analysis I thought was pompous and overblown - I started skipping it around the last third of the book). If you like Lispector and are an English reader, I do recommend persevering through this, but if you have not read her works, do not expect this book to inspire you to. Try first with her short stories.

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