A Breath of Life (New Directions Paperbook) [Paperback]

Clarice Lispector (Author), Johnny Lorenz (Translator), Benjamin Moser (Preface)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 13, 2012 | Series: New Directions Paperbook

A mystical dialogue between a male author and his creation, this posthumous work has never before been translated, and is a book of particular beauty and strangeness.

A mystical dialogue between a male author (a thinly disguised Clarice Lispector) and his/her creation, a woman named Angela, this posthumous work has never before been translated. Lispector did not even live to see it published.

At her death, a mountain of fragments remained to be “structured” by Olga Borelli. These fragments form a dialogue between a god-like author who infuses the breath of life into his creation: the speaking, breathing, dying creation herself, Angela Pralini. The work’s almost occult appeal arises from the perception that if Angela dies, Clarice will have to die as well. And she did.

Editorial Reviews

From Bookforum

Epiphanies are delivered one after the other in a book-length relay, a final and magnificent apotheosis of Lispectorisms. I could quote every line and still not do the book justice. —Rachel Kushner

Review

“One of the twentieth century’s most mysterious writers in all her vibrant colors.” (Orhan Pamuk )

“Lispector is an author that requires the reader's full participation, but the rewards are sizable.” (Barnes & Noble Review )

“I had a sort of missionary urge with her...but I started thinking, even when I was 19: How can I help this person reach the prominence she deserves?” (Benjamin Moser - SFGate )

“Her images dazzle even when her meaning is most obscure, and when she is writing of what she despises she is lucidity itself.  ” (The Times Literary Supplement )

“Reading Lispector is an intellectual adventure...Serious writing is a dangerous business, and unlike any other author, Lispector is willing to embrace the danger and come out the other side of the void.” (The Coffin Factory )

“Both dazzling and difficult.” (SFGate )

“The raw, demanding pace and the dialogic form of A Breath of Life provoke an urgent meditation on life, self, and time. In fact, reading this novel may be a form of meditation.” (Full Stop )

“One of 20th-century Brazil’s most intriguing and mystifying writers.” (The L Magazine )

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 220 pages
• Publisher: New Directions (June 13, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811219623
• ISBN-13: 978-0811219624
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.5 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #194,653 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3.0 out of 5 stars It was alright June 15, 2013

By Karla G

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

Read it for an experimental novel class. To be honest, I could not get into it. It just wasn't for me and that in no way should translate to it being crap because it wasn't. I was able to appreciate the messages and manner of writing but like I said, it didn't appeal to me personally. The last of Ms. Lispector's work as her life withered away, I have no doubt in my mind that it is a beauty that sadly, I could not fully appreciate.

5.0 out of 5 stars A Dance around the Void May 25, 2013

By M.J. Boone

Format:Paperback

Part 1:

Reading Clarice Lispector is mad love, it's convulsive beauty. I think so few people have written amazon reviews of the new translations because it is frightening to talk about her she's so intimate.

Depending on your mood, Clarice will either sound like the closest thing to truth or the most preposterous self-magnification. She writes on the line between truth and bad taste, and it is a dangerous line, and she goes closer than anyone else: she stands on it and whispers in your ear.

The following is a page-long article she published in the newspaper that explains in her own words: http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=7L-5VO_kwWAC&pg=PA67&dq=charlatans+clarice+lispector&hl=zh-CN&sa=X&ei=EvOgUb-hLYP7kAWYg4GYBg&ved=0CDEQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=charlatans%20clarice%20lispector&f=false

This is a book to read in the quiet of yourself. It is a book to read when you're ready to receive intensity. This book and Agua Viva were the two most emotionally intense and affirming reading experiences I've had. She writes narrative epiphany, and you're carried.

She has a way of arresting your interior reality on the page. She is the universal in the particular. Here is a dialogue of death and particulars, a criss-crossing of two inextricable creations: author and text. You have to be highly structured about writing a book when it comes down to it, but the text is so free. The reader can only feel the freedom of the autonomous word. You love the text, perhaps you're even jealous of it, but you know you have to kill it in the end, you know it must die. There is a last word. But that ending is a freedom for you, and for the text, but it's a frightening freedom. It is the beginning of the silence......

The text is born of the author, but goes on to affect the author in the most mysterious ways, time and time again...

This is not a book "to be made sense of," but it is a book that makes sense, and deeply. It is not a stream of consciousness, it is an architecture of consciousness, and wild.

Part 2:

There are so many great authors, but I have never encountered a better writer. Her sentences are sharp-edged miracles. She is one of the two writers who has made me cry.

So many of her sentences are monuments in themselves and would be strange and wonderful secrets in the desert if they did not also stand together-- Her writing is like looking at La Sagrada Familia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagrada_Fam%C3%ADlia

Here are a few examples from memory (from this book and Agua Viva):

"Life is a kind of madness that death makes. Long live the dead because we live in them."
"The true thought seems to have no author."
"This is life seen by life: I may lack meaning but it is the same lack of meaning that the pulsing vein has."
"In every word a heart beats."
"I am already in the future. This future of mine shall be for you the past of someone dead. When you finish this books cry a hallelujah for me."

"It was intensely cold without any possible shelter. And the driver of the yellow cab had a bad cold. I forgot to say that, when I first jumped out of the taxi, in the middle of Avenida Rio Branco, people were crying out to me: I looked and saw everything that belonged to me exposed without blood in the asphalt of the street. And people were helping me in the middle of the traffic to gather my secrets. Because my purse had opened and been disemboweled: its entrails and my trampled prayers scattered across the ground. I gathered everything and stood humble and dignified waiting for who knows what. And while I was waiting a thin woman appeared and said, startling me: pardon me for asking, ma'am, but where did you buy that lovely green shawl? I was dismayed, and said to her defeated: I don't remember. Small unusual facts were happening to me, and I at their mercy."

And most of all:

"My question is the size of the Universe. And the only response that fills in my question is the Universe itself.
But something scares me: that if I search I won't find."

I recommend her with my whole self.
Barthes wrote: "I am only interested in my eyes when they're looking at you."

It's painful telling you to read her because I am afraid of how you will react. O, she's a universe in a fragile body... Read more ›