Status
Available
Genres
Publication
New York : New Directions, 1990.
Description
Fiction. Literature. HTML: This new translation of Clarice Lispector's sensational first book tells the story of a middle class woman's life from childhood through an unhappy marriage and its dissolution to transcendence. Near to the Wild Heart, published in Rio de Janeiro in 1943, introduced Brazil to what one writer called "Hurricane Clarice": a twenty-three-year-old girl who wrote her first book in a tiny rented room and then baptized it with a title taken from Joyce: "He was alone, unheeded, near to the wild heart of life." The book was an unprecedented sensation �?? the discovery of a genius. Narrative epiphanies and interior monologue frame the life of Joana, from her middle-class childhood through her unhappy marriage and its dissolution to transcendence, when she proclaims: "I shall arise as strong and comely as a young colt."… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member heroineinabook
This is beyond exquisite. I injected half the book in one sitting and had stop because I was getting woozy on a Lispector overdose. She adroitly does things to language and words, even in translation from Portuguese to English that is just breathtaking. I am having trouble reconciling that it was
I’m terrible at fiction. I always feel so damned constricted when trying to form the rules of the game, my writing comes out halting and unsure. I’ve got brilliant ideas for stories, I see the stories in my head as they are played out but getting them onto paper? No. The ease of my language sounds immature and protracted. Sure, you could argue if I practice more it would mature and grow and there is some truth into that. But I think because I’ve been reading tightly bound prose for so long, I’m near drunk on Lispector’s stream of consciousness and realising that yes, this is how you do it. This is how you give birth to a story and how it will end.
Feral. Unstructured and messy, like life.
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published in 1943 as it reads so contemporary. Reading Lispector is breathing flames under the muse for me and I’m reconsidering how to write fiction.I’m terrible at fiction. I always feel so damned constricted when trying to form the rules of the game, my writing comes out halting and unsure. I’ve got brilliant ideas for stories, I see the stories in my head as they are played out but getting them onto paper? No. The ease of my language sounds immature and protracted. Sure, you could argue if I practice more it would mature and grow and there is some truth into that. But I think because I’ve been reading tightly bound prose for so long, I’m near drunk on Lispector’s stream of consciousness and realising that yes, this is how you do it. This is how you give birth to a story and how it will end.
Feral. Unstructured and messy, like life.
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LibraryThing member greegood
Elizabeth Bishop is described as "better than JL Borges"
LibraryThing member MSarki
A wonderful first trip into the Lispector interior. Amazing work for such a young woman. Lyrical and beautifully written. Easy to see the Hermann Hesse influences. I am not sure at all how she pulled this book off, but the sophistication was remarkable. It was a very slow read for me as I really
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was not interested in much of what was going on in it, but it was interesting for me to behold this Lispector power, unleashed and untamed. Show Less
LibraryThing member alanteder
There is a recent revival of interest in Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector's (1920-1977) work which includes biographies, new translations, new collections and now even audiobooks of the new translations such as this current 2018 Audible Audio edition of the 2nd (2012) translation of her first
I wish now that I had read this first prior to my actual introduction to her work in "The Complete Stories" where a lifespan of work in close to 80 stories covered many of the same themes of rebelliousness and yearning that were first captured in this early novel. It is still a revelation now though, especially knowing that she had not yet even read the stream of consciousness style works of Virginia Woolf and james Joyce (a quote from whose work "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" was suggested as the title to Lispector by her friend Lúcio Cardoso. The translation by Alison Entrekin flows smoothly and the narration by Rebecca Morris was excellent.
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novel written in 1942 when she was first working as a journalist and then published to great acclaim in 1943. I wish now that I had read this first prior to my actual introduction to her work in "The Complete Stories" where a lifespan of work in close to 80 stories covered many of the same themes of rebelliousness and yearning that were first captured in this early novel. It is still a revelation now though, especially knowing that she had not yet even read the stream of consciousness style works of Virginia Woolf and james Joyce (a quote from whose work "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" was suggested as the title to Lispector by her friend Lúcio Cardoso. The translation by Alison Entrekin flows smoothly and the narration by Rebecca Morris was excellent.
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LibraryThing member over.the.edge
Fantastic work of emotional resonance and depth. Her use of stream of consciousness to explain her past and present is wonderful. Encompassing the psychological, philosophical, and metaphysical sense of her emotional state made Joanna, the main character so accessible and easy to follow. I loved
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her descriptive style and brutal truth. Show Less
LibraryThing member greeniezona
Of course I'd known about Lispector for a while, and she was on my list of "authors I really know I should read someday," but I found something about the way people talked about her to be just a little bit... intimidating. But when I went on my Women in Translation Month shopping trip, this was the
I don't know what I was worried about. I was in love with the fierce and wild Joana from the very beginning. On the second page she announces to her father that she's made up a poem called "The Sun and I." "The hens in the yard have eaten the worms but I didn't see them." The surety in herself, the disappointment that her dad doesn't get it -- I adored her. As she grows, the richness of her introspective interiority only grows, as does her determination to not sway from whatever she feels to be right for herself. No matter what others might think is good or evil, normal or strange. How can you not root for a character like that, especially since everyone else seems simple, weak, conventional by comparison.
The book wanders a bit toward the end and I started to wonder where it was going, but it ended with the same fierce resolution it began with. A wonderful book, and I am glad to finally know what all the fuss over Lispector is about.
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only recognizable woman in translation I found (in the new books section, anyway), so this is what I got. Appropriate it's the first book I read for Women in Translation Month this year.I don't know what I was worried about. I was in love with the fierce and wild Joana from the very beginning. On the second page she announces to her father that she's made up a poem called "The Sun and I." "The hens in the yard have eaten the worms but I didn't see them." The surety in herself, the disappointment that her dad doesn't get it -- I adored her. As she grows, the richness of her introspective interiority only grows, as does her determination to not sway from whatever she feels to be right for herself. No matter what others might think is good or evil, normal or strange. How can you not root for a character like that, especially since everyone else seems simple, weak, conventional by comparison.
The book wanders a bit toward the end and I started to wonder where it was going, but it ended with the same fierce resolution it began with. A wonderful book, and I am glad to finally know what all the fuss over Lispector is about.
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LibraryThing member b.masonjudy
Near to the Wild Heart sucked me in and its unexpected palpations in the quiet suction, like bring stuck in a whirlpool of green, have lodged themselves into my heart, my brain, even maybe my calves. It's hard to read Lispector without holding my breath and each book of hers feels like a beautiful
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and terrible gift. Show Less
LibraryThing member lethalmauve
As this slips in and out of consciousness it stays at the bottom of a dreary pool of misery. An enduring dissatisfaction pervades throughout the novel where the unconventional woman in focus, Joana, is anchored down by existential anguish. And perhaps like most of us drift from one “life
Near to the Wild Heart is chipping cold on its edges and doesn’t beat for anything but in its bouts of unanswered questions on one’s purpose and reason. Here, mortality is never fully grieved whilst love lost is willingly misplaced. Yet the most embittered turn to these underwhelming circumstances, of burrowed emotions and apathetic reactions, is the belief that an exterior alteration is causal to contentment. Motherhood is similarly treated as such—both as a product of female rivalry and societal expectations born out of the “patriarchal womb.” Beyond all of this I can say Near to the Wild Heart only nearly sadly hits. It is most often than not near to the wildest delusions to cope.
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milestone” to another: at times to be in touch, tethered with our own being, on others to be in an “acceptable” headspace of living. It rides the same train of life’s cyclic clichés. But the dissatisfaction of marriage and relationships glare and glimmer without hope and further tumbles down when indifference shadows them into obscurity and neglect. The minimal encounter with other women (or lack thereof) are somehow fraught with negative feelings that there is a sense of isolation in Joana’s thoughts and views which are so often interspersed with others’. It is all very grim and infectiously so.Near to the Wild Heart is chipping cold on its edges and doesn’t beat for anything but in its bouts of unanswered questions on one’s purpose and reason. Here, mortality is never fully grieved whilst love lost is willingly misplaced. Yet the most embittered turn to these underwhelming circumstances, of burrowed emotions and apathetic reactions, is the belief that an exterior alteration is causal to contentment. Motherhood is similarly treated as such—both as a product of female rivalry and societal expectations born out of the “patriarchal womb.” Beyond all of this I can say Near to the Wild Heart only nearly sadly hits. It is most often than not near to the wildest delusions to cope.
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LibraryThing member mkfs
This is one of those books that will be described as evocative, introspective, vivid.
It is all of those things, yet somehow unsatisfying - a journey of self-discovery which never reaches its destination. More accurately, it is a journey on which self-discovery happens every page or few, and the
So while the prose is a pleasure to read, as well as being Deep and Meaningful, it provides no incentive to keep reading, and the book thus gathers dust (or whatever the Kindle equivalent is). It is probably best to read the book in one sitting, or not at all.
Alternate take:
There's a certain type of French film, where the actors sit there in silence, absolutely still, staring at each other or studiously ignoring one other, and one says "oui" and five minutes later the other says "non", and after ten or fifteen minutes the woman says "where did it all go wrong" or "what became of us", and then after looking off into space while finishing the world's longest-lived cigarette the man says "you bitch".
Near to the Wild Heart captures what those characters are probably thinking the entire time, and which neither the director nor the actors are able to convey effectively, because really this sort of thing does work a lot better in a novel than in a film.
It is all of those things, yet somehow unsatisfying - a journey of self-discovery which never reaches its destination. More accurately, it is a journey on which self-discovery happens every page or few, and the
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narrative ends rather abruptly, without a realization or conclusion of any import.So while the prose is a pleasure to read, as well as being Deep and Meaningful, it provides no incentive to keep reading, and the book thus gathers dust (or whatever the Kindle equivalent is). It is probably best to read the book in one sitting, or not at all.
Alternate take:
There's a certain type of French film, where the actors sit there in silence, absolutely still, staring at each other or studiously ignoring one other, and one says "oui" and five minutes later the other says "non", and after ten or fifteen minutes the woman says "where did it all go wrong" or "what became of us", and then after looking off into space while finishing the world's longest-lived cigarette the man says "you bitch".
Near to the Wild Heart captures what those characters are probably thinking the entire time, and which neither the director nor the actors are able to convey effectively, because really this sort of thing does work a lot better in a novel than in a film.
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Awards
PEN Translation Prize (Shortlist — 2013)
Language
Original language
Portuguese