The Mookse and the Gripes discussion

The Complete Stories
by Clarice Lispector
translated from the Portuguese by Katrina Dodson
Brazil



The recent publication by New Directions of five Lispector novels revealed to legions of new readers her darkness and dazzle. Now, for the first time in English, are all the stories that made her a Brazilian legend: from teenagers coming into awareness of their sexual and artistic powers to humdrum housewives whose lives are shattered by unexpected epiphanies to old people who don’t know what to do with themselves. Clarice’s stories take us through their lives — and ours.

From one of the greatest modern writers, these stories, gathered from the nine collections published during her lifetime, follow an unbroken time line of success as a writer, from her adolescence to her death bed.

-On the very first page of the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector’s “The Complete Stories,” she signals that hers was never an ordinary sensibility, but one capable of perceiving anxiety and menace in even the most routine phenomena. ~Larry Rohter in The New York Times

-While some stories appear whimsical and read like exercises, and others muse at length and almost absent-mindedly, almost abstractly, on habit and motive, or something that happened, others have an exquisite sharpness, the fruit of a most original and daring mind. In the best stories, something deeply strange is fully visualized by Lispector, as though it had come in a waking dream and it needed to be given urgent substance. ~Colm Tóibín in The New York Review of Books

As I've said elsewhere I'm not a fan of the format - a dump of everything she wrote into one large book, which has no equivalent volume in the original Portuguese.

If anyone gets a copy I'd suggest dipping in and out and the following is a decent selection of stories to sample:

"Gertrude asks for Advice" - "The Escape" - "Love"- "A Chicken" - "Happy Birthday" - "The Buffalo" - "Disasters of Sofia" - "The Foreign Legion" - "Covert Joy" - "The Tale of so much Love" - "In Search of Dignity" - "Where were you at Night" - "Report on the Thing" -"Miss Algrave"--"Beauty and the Beast or the Enormous Wound"