The Apple in the Dark
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
“The best one,” as Clarice Lispector called The Apple in the Dark, her famously intense 1961 novel
“It’s the best one,” Clarice Lispector remarked on the occasion of the publication of The Apple in the Dark: “I can’t define it, how it is, I can only say that it’s much better constructed than the previous ones.” A book in three chapters, with three central characters, The Apple in the Dark is in fact highly sculpted, while being chiefly a metaphysical book, and in this stunning new translation, the novel’s mysteries and allegories glow with a fresh scintillating light.
Martim, fleeing from a murder he believes he committed, plunges into the dark nocturnal jungle: stumbling along, in a state of both fear and wonder, eventually he comes to a remote, quiet ranch and finds work with the two women who own it. The women are tranquil enough before his arrival, but are affected by his radical mystery. Soaked through with Martim’s inner night (his soul is in the darkness where everything is created), the novel vibrates with his perpetual searching state of vigil. Often he feels close to an epiphany: “for the first time he was present in the moment in which whatever is happening is happening.” Yet such flashes flicker out, so he’s ever on the watch for “life to take on the dimensions of a destiny.”
In an interview, Lispector once said: “I am Martim.” As she puts it in The Apple in the Dark: “All I’ve got is hunger. And that unstable way of grasping an apple in the dark—without letting it fall.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
New Directions completes its series of 15 new Lispector translations with this existential epic of a desperate criminal. Martim flees the scene of his unspecified crime and ventures deep into the Brazilian jungle, coming at last upon a secluded ranch. There, he meets two women: the ranch's imperious owner, Vitoria, and her younger cousin, the impressionable Ermalina. Vitoria puts Martim to work as a handyman while Ermalina spies on and gradually falls for the stranger, who wishes not only to conceal his past and identity but, from this new vantage, to "reconstruct the world." A philosophically charged love triangle develops, as Ermalina, largely dependent on tranquilizers, sees in Martim a means to awaken to the realities that Vitoria would rather shield her from. When another stranger arrives at the plantation, he brings with him the details of Martim's crime, which come as a surprise to Martim as well as the reader. Lispector (1920–1977) expertly sustains tension as she plumbs Martim's dark heart to explore the consequences of isolation. Complemented by a bracing translation from Moser, this stands among Lispector's finest and most enigmatic achievements.
