Why This World
A Biography of Clarice Lispector
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- 10,99 €
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- 10,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
'Glamorous, cultured, moody, Lispector is an emblematic twentieth-century artist who belongs in the same pantheon as Kafka and Joyce. Benjamin Moser has brought to life her essentially tragic nature in all its complexity' Edmund White
'That rare person who looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf,' Clarice Lispector was one of the twentieth century's most extraordinary modernist writers. The brilliant, beautiful and enigmatic daughter of Russian-Jewish émigrés, she achieved instant celebrity at the age of twenty-three with her debut novel Near to the Wild Heart, and became a literary icon in Latin America.
In Why This World Benjamin Moser unravels the turbulent life of an elusive genius: her birth in the nightmarish landscape of postwar Ukraine, her long exile in Brazil, her stormy personal life, her fierce talent, and how she transformed her struggles into a universally resonant art.
'One of the twentieth century's most mysterious writers is finally revealed in all her vibrant colours' Orhan Pamuk
'A smart, passionate portrait of a truly remarkable writer' Jonathan Franzen
'As Moser begins to unpeel the layers of her complicated life, Why This World sucks you into its subject's strange vortex' Dwight Garner, The New York Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This pioneering biography of Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector (1920 1977) a genius of character as much as a literary magician captures the luminescent and singular author for an English-speaking audience that may not be familiar with her. She was born Chaya Pinkhasovna in 1921; soon after, her family left pogrom-torn Ukraine, arriving in Brazil in 1922. She became a law student seeking justice for prisoners and then a journalist, and in 1943, around the time of her marriage to a career diplomat, Lispector published her first book, the critically esteemed Near to the Wild Heart. The life of the roving diplomatic wife took its toll on the visionary and strikingly beautiful Lispector, who also had a longtime love for the homosexual poet L cio Cardoso among others. One of her sons was diagnosed as schizophrenic, which further fostered Lispector's sense of isolation. Among her champions was Elizabeth Bishop, but Lispector remains under the Anglo-American literary radar. This well-researched biography by Moser, New Books columnist for Harper's, should send readers in search of this indescribable author, whose work in many ways is closer to cabalistic writing than to more contemporary modernists like Woolf, Kafka or Joyce. 37 b&w photos.
