Near to the Wild Heart by Clarice Lispector

The prize was a confirmation of what the Folha Carioca had discovered earlier that year when it asked its readers to elect the best novel of 1943. Sixteen years later a journalist wrote, “We have no memory of a more sensational debut, which lifted to such prominence a name that, until shortly before, had been completely unknown.” “The whole book,” critics wrote, “is a miracle of balance, perfectly engineered,” combining the “intellectual lucidity of the characters of Dostoevsky with the purity of a child.” In October 1944 the book won the prestigious Graça Aranha Prize for the best debut novel of 1943. For almost a year after publication, articles about the book appeared continuously in every major city in Brazil. Get the BookĪs soon as the book was ready she began sending it out to critics, and the reviews still bear witness to the excitement “hurricane Clarice” unleashed among the Brazilian intelligentsia. A thousand copies were printed in lieu of payment, she got to keep a hundred.

“As I devoured the chapters the author was typing, it slowly dawned on me that this was an extraordinary literary revelation,” he said, calling her, “Hurricane Clarice.” He steered it to the book publishing wing of their employer, where it appeared with a bright pink cover, typical for books by women, in December 1943. He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life.” A newspaper colleague recalled his amazement. He suggested a title, borrowed from James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which Clarice had not yet read: “He was alone. “When I reread what I’ve written,” she said, “I feel like I’m swallowing my own vomit.” A friend, the slightly older writer Lúcio Cardoso, assured her that the fragments were a book in themselves. At length the book took shape, but she feared it was more a pile of notes than a full-fledged novel. To concentrate, she quit the tiny maid’s room in the apartment she shared with her sisters and brother-in-law and spent a month in a nearby boardinghouse. Confused, “groping in the darkness,” she started by jotting down ideas in a notebook. When Clarice Lispector began writing Near to the Wild Heart, in March 1942, she was a twenty-two year old law student who had recently begun work as a journalist. Near to the Wild Heart by Clarice Lispector