Too Much of Life
The Complete Crônicas
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
In the magnificent feast of Clarice Lispector’s books, her crônicas—short, intensely vivid newspaper pieces—are the delicious canapés
The things I’ve learned from taxi drivers would be enough to fill a book. They know a lot: they really do get around. I may know a lot about Antonioni that they don’t know. Or maybe they do even when they don’t. There are various ways of knowing by not-knowing. I know: it happens to me too.
The crônica, a literary genre peculiar to Brazilian newspapers, allows writers (or even soccer stars) to address a wide readership on any theme they like. Chatty, mystical, intimate, flirtatious, and revelatory, Clarice Lispector’s pieces for the Saturday edition of Rio’s leading paper, the Jornal do Brasil, from 1967 to 1973, take the forms of memories, essays, aphorisms, and serialized stories. Endlessly delightful, her insights make one sit up and think, whether about children or social ills or pets or society women or the business of writing or love. This new, large, and beautifully translated volume, Too Much of Life: The Complete Crônicas presents a new aspect of the great writer—at once off the cuff and spot on.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A decade of crônicas—short essays and anecdotes—published by Lispector (The Passion According to G.H.) primarily in the Jornal do Brasil from 1967 up to her death in 1977 come together in this rewarding work. Lispector asks in one entry "Is the crônica a story? Is it a conversation? Is it the summation of a state of mind?" and then, in pieces ranging from a few sentences to several pages, she shows the form as all those and more. As she ruminates on the world around her and within herself, Lispector blends casual meditations on the mundane with philosophical reveries on such topics as identity, death, and spirituality. A prime time TV host is absurd and "sadistic," insomnia brings with it loneliness, and "Saturday in the wind is the rose of the week." Lispector also contemplates the act of writing, a process she describes as "remembering the thing that never existed" and "rather like selling your soul." Her prose shifts smoothly from poetic and serious—"The most difficult thing is doing nothing: facing the cosmos alone"—to playful and comedic—"Dear God, who could possibly love her? The answer: dear God." Lispector's fans will relish dipping into these thoughtful musings.
