A Breath of Life (New Directions Paperbook) Paperback – June 13, 2012

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=falseThis 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%ADliaHere 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...

A Breath of Life is a collection of hundreds of fragments, structured and arranged by Olga Borelli after the death of Clarice Lispector, at 57, of ovarian cancer. More than any of Lispector’s other works, this final book is for the true believers, the obsessive fans -- a group not small in number! Specifically, it is right to turn to this book if you loved Agua Viva, a book in some ways similar. If you read Agua Viva and thought, “What’s the point?”, then turn to the stories or to the cronicas.In the introduction Benjamin Moser, Lispector’s brilliant biographer, writes, “Was Clarice, more or less dying as she wrote it, mad?” I sighed with relief when I read that. We do get to ask that question. It is not off the table. This is, in many ways, a mad book, a monologue swirling like smoke. It is frequently maddening -- and for long stretches! There is no real difference between “the author” and “Angela Pralini”, her character. Nothing ever happens, no one even knocks at the door. Does the phone ever ring? Maybe.If you get stuck, if it all seems too crazy, too shapeless, all is not lost. My advice. Read the first 10 pages. Then read the last 15. Those 2 sections are by far the most unified, the most readable. They’re gorgeous. Then read the middle in an aleatory fashion, as you would consult an oracle, picking it up and reading a page, paragraph, or sentence, not penalizing yourself if you get overwhelmed, not straining too hard to “get” it. Because if you’re trying hard to “follow” this book -- you’re already on the wrong track! Like Agua Viva, this book is utterly not for everyone, but the true devotees will love it, will cherish it, as indeed it deserves to be cherished, as a monument not only to Lispector, but also to Olga Borelli, who deserves to be remembered, too, as one of literature’s heroes.

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.