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mollymisek's review
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
I feel like this book taught me how to actually read
morgmaben's review against another edition
challenging
dark
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? N/A
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
I don’t understand this book, and also now because of it I understand everything and nothing at all.
thestoryofaz's review against another edition
challenging
reflective
slow-paced
5.0
Clarice Lispector's fourth novel is a heady, sprawling, and ambitious work of art. She contests and breaks all notions and rules of not just literature, but also of personhood and psyche. Nothing escapes her singular vision; even the air becomes an object to revere, describe and uphold. The novel may be described as one man's journey to self-discovery but what does that entail? What really happens, if anything happens at all? This is not a story to be rushed through and be done with, or perhaps even understood. Take your sweet time and savor each word, each breath, each sentiment as though each were the promise of a luscious apple dangling low and heavy in the dark of your probable incomprehension and inevitable amazement.
444ndromeda's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? N/A
- Diverse cast of characters? N/A
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
hay algo muy divertido en leer a lispector cuando piensas que ya te estabas acostumbrando a su estilo, porque después lees apple in the dark y te mueve las ideas.
la deconstrucción que nos presenta de martim es algo tardío y, al principio de la obra, cansado de leer. llega a crear un ambiente pesado que poco a poco renace en una claridad nunca antes percibida, tirándonos ideas existenciales y la eterna pregunta sobre qué es ser un individuo, que en el caso de martim le aflige por el crimen casi ignorado que aún así le respira en la nuca. había puntos, de todas maneras, en donde la curiosa devoción masculina de lispector resulta cansada y estanca nuevamente a la obra, pero después volvemos a la temática del amor, la duda y la inerte incertidumbre de la esperanza y que divertido se vuelve leerla.
will always love her eternal-internal characters.
cvall96's review against another edition
5.0
Your move, Camus. (Half of this, I read in the Rabassa translation, the other half in the new Ben Moser translation; the latter is slightly more musical and closer to the jagged rhythm of Clarice, but the first is by no means invalidated: it’s hard, diamondic in its own way. More soon, I’m writing a review for Frieze.)
“He also started to understand women once again. He didn't understand them in a personal way, as if he were the owner of his own name. But he seemed to understand why women are born when a person is a man. And that was a tranquil strong blood that would enter and leave his chest rhythmically. While dealing with the cows, the desire to have women was reborn with calm. He recognized it immediately: it was a kind of solitude. As if his body in itself weren't enough. It was desire, yes, he did remember that. He remembered that woman is more than the friend of a man, woman is the very body of the man. With a slightly pained smile, he then caressed the feminine hide of the cow and looked around: the world was masculine and feminine. This way of seeing gave him a deep physical contentment, the still and contained physical excitement that he had every time he “unveiled." A person has highly spiritual pleasures that nobody suspects, other people's lives always seem empty, but a person has his pleasures.”
“Martim had now started to get entangled in a curious sensation of having grasped some extraordinary thing. He'd gone through the mystery of wanting. As if he'd touched on the pulse of life. He who had always been dazzled by the spontaneous mystery of his body's being body enough in order to want a woman, and his body's being body enough to want food—he now had touched on the source of all that, and of living: he'd wanted…In a general and profound way, he'd wanted.”
“Suffering? He thought with his face irreparably offended facing the blank paper. But how could he not love even the Prohibition? if it had pushed him as far as he could go? if it had pushed him up to that final resistance where... Where the only unreasonable solution was great love. When a man is intimidated only great love occurs to him. Suffering? Only not being able to is how a man would know. A man anyway was measured by his neediness. And touching upon the great lack might be a person's aspiration. Would touching the lack be art? That man was savoring his impotence the way a man recognizes himself. He was frighteningly enjoying what he was. Since for the first time in life he was learning how much he was. Which was aching like the root of a tooth.”
“…because I don't want grace, because I'd rather die without ever having seen than to have seen a single time! because God in his goodness allows, you hear, allows and advises people to be cowardly and to protect themselves, His favorite sons are those who dare but He is severe toward those who dare, and benevolent toward those who don't have the courage to look straight on and He blesses those who abjectly take care not to go too far in rapture and in the search for joy, disappointed He embraces those who don't have the courage. He knows that there are people who can't live with the happiness that's inside them, and so He gives them a surface they can live off of, and gives them a sadness, He knows that there are people who need to fake it, because beauty is arid, why is beauty so arid? and so I said to myself ‘be afraid, Vitória, because being afraid is salvation.’ Because things mustn't be seen straight on, nobody's that strong, only those who are damned have strength. But for us joy has to be like a star smothered in the heart, joy has to be nothing more than a secret, our nature is our great secret, joy ought to be like a radiance that the person never, never ought to let escape. You feel a pang and you don't know where: that's how joy ought to be you shouldn't know why, you should feel like: ‘but what's wrong with me?’ and not know.”
“And then Martim became actually frightened.
—Are you aware, my son, of what you're doing?
—I am, my father.
—Are you aware that, with hope, you'll never again have rest, my son?
—I am, my father.
—Are you aware that, with hope, you'll lose all your other weapons, my son?
—I am, my father.
—And that without cynicism you'll be naked?
—I am, my father.
—Do you know that hope is also not believing, my son?
—I know that, my father.
[…]
—My son. You are aware that from now on, wherever you go, you'll be stalked by hope?
—I am, my father.
—Are you ready to accept the heavy weight of joy?
—I am, my father.
—But, my son! you know that's almost impossible?
—I know, my father.
—You know at least that hope is the great absurdity, my son?
—I know, my father.
—You know that you have to be an adult to have hope!!!—I know, I know, I know!
—Then go, my son. I command you to suffer hope.
But already in the first nostalgia, the final one as if just before never again, Martim cried for help:
—What's that light, papa? he cried already solitary in hope…”
______
‘But now, having removed the layer of words from things, now that he’d lost the language, he was finally standing in the calm profundity of the mystery.’
After encountering the scandalous, miraculous writings of the Brazilian author Clarice Lispector, a new morality becomes visible, one that rejects a surface-level identification with the mirrored self. This new morality, in the dazzling world of Clarice – as her Brazilian disciples refer to her – sets the self at a healthy remove, an odd angle, in order to feel comfortable with the unknown. It’s a realm in which words need not clarify; instead, she takes the reader through a vortex of meanings and contradictions, clashing with each other yet harmonizing upon certain key principles – which, as it turns out in her 1961 novel The Apple in the Dark, are mystery, hope, love.
Until Benjamin Moser’s new translation, Apple has been the most difficult of Clarice’s novels to find in English. Its republication brings a fitting conclusion to New Directions’s project to retranslate all Clarice’s novels for a new English-speaking generation who will now be weaned on her alongside Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, Marcel Proust, Marguerite Duras, Katherine Mansfield and the Brontë sisters, her closest siblings. (Her extraordinary collected newspaper columns and children’s books were published in English last year. Now, all that’s left is her correspondence, which already exists in Portuguese and French editions.)
It’s fitting that Apple came last in the project – it takes a bit more getting used to than Clarice’s other novels. If you’re new to her world, I wouldn’t recommend jumping into it – unless you are into cold showers. One of the later novels – An Apprenticeship (1967) or Agua Viva (1971) or The Hour of the Star (1977) – might be a better first read. Apple will ask a lot of you. It’s a descent into madness – the splintering-away of the real in language – without ever becoming mad itself. One can only think so much, whether on a crowded Metro or a Proustian bedroom!
Plot: a man called Martim has committed a crime and is on the run. A Raymond Chandler yarn, this ain’t. His crime is so immense he has been banished from his ‘normal’ life, banished even from the realm of language. He cannot speak. He sits on a rock and crushes a bird, a majestic, weirdly engaging scene that takes nearly 30 pages to describe. He must find the will to speak again.
What was the crime? We don’t know. Maybe he killed someone he loved. Maybe he abandoned them, or they him. Whatever the crime, he rediscovers what it means to say the word ‘crime’ on a secluded ranch overseen by ‘a strong woman’, Vitória, and her cousin Ermalinda, who is nervous and tetchy and falls into a weird love spell with Martim. But it’s not quite love, it’s something both less and more. (Here, Clarice lays the seeds for the manic situationship at the heart of the all-too-relatable An Apprenticeship.) These two women help this man find his tongue again. More than that, though: the women find themselves, independent of the tethers of conventional speech to which society would otherwise doom them. All three of these swirling lost souls come to realize ‘that we are born to love, and then you don’t understand yourself.’
Sudden shifts of pronouns like that are strewn throughout the novel, and they come refreshed by the new translation. Apple has already been translated into English once before – in 1967, by Gregory Rabassa, the grand doyen of Latin American literature who introduced Julio Cortázar and Gabriel García Márquez to English-speaking audiences. Indeed, it was the first novel of Clarice’s to appear in English. What has been added to the out-of-print Rabassa translation, of which Clarice herself approved?
Let’s compare. First, read the original Portuguese in which the writer describes the awesome force of Vitória, from the beginning of chapter five: ‘Vitória era uma mulher tão poderosa como se um dia tivesse encontrado uma chave. Cuja porta, é verdade, havia anos se perdera. Mas, quando precisava, ela podia se pôr instantaneamente em contato com o velho poder.’
Now, here is how it was first translated by Rabassa: ‘Vitória was such a strong woman that somewhere in the past she must have found a key. The door it opened had been lost many years back, of course. But when she needed to, she could bring back her old power at once.’
Finally, here is the new Moser translation: ‘Vitória was a woman as powerful as if she’d one day found a key. Whose door, it’s true, had been lost years before. But, when she needed to, she could place herself instantly in touch with her former power.’
A cursory glance shows how closely the new translation hews to Clarice’s original syntax and punctuation: that comma after the ‘but’ that adds a necessary rhythmic breath (‘But, when she needed to […]’), those weird sentences of hers which, with a period, start and stop where you’re not ‘supposed’ to: ‘a key. Whose door […]’
Whereas Rabassa elegantly transposes the content of Clarice’s gist to English, easing our understanding, Moser directly transposes the form of her harsh, loopy sentences. To my ear steeped in the other New Directions translations of Clarice’s Portuguese, Moser’s was a smoother read. We need not necessarily prefer one translation over the other. But when we consider an author who wants to look directly at the stuff of life – and, by extension, derange our sense of reality – it’s clear that Moser preserves that volcanic Clarician intensity so central to her Portuguese original. That sudden ‘é verdade.’ The fact that Vitória does not ‘bring back her old power’ (Rabassa) but is rather ‘plac[ing] herself instantly in touch’ with it (Moser).
Apple is Clarice’s longest novel: nearly 400 pages. Compare that to the slim-yet-just-as-packed Agua Viva, an 80-page diamond pressed for seven years. Much of Apple could have been baggy and saggy, but strangely it isn’t. It’s something of a sister-piece to The Passion According to G.H. (1964), except that in Apple, beyond the vague crime, there are no active scenes pushing Martim’s, Vitória’s or Ermalinda’s thoughts forward. Correction: everything pushes them forward, such as the questions why was I cursed to life? How much of myself should I know? Where can I find the words to express the suffering I feel? And if I find those words, will anguish dissipate for the night – for that is all I ask for, I who is so strange to me? Obviously, we get no answers. But the questions feel like they’re being asked in entirely new ways, antiquity and modernity collapsing into each other like failing stars. May we all, after reading The Apple in the Dark, ‘stand in the calm profundity of the mystery.’
“He also started to understand women once again. He didn't understand them in a personal way, as if he were the owner of his own name. But he seemed to understand why women are born when a person is a man. And that was a tranquil strong blood that would enter and leave his chest rhythmically. While dealing with the cows, the desire to have women was reborn with calm. He recognized it immediately: it was a kind of solitude. As if his body in itself weren't enough. It was desire, yes, he did remember that. He remembered that woman is more than the friend of a man, woman is the very body of the man. With a slightly pained smile, he then caressed the feminine hide of the cow and looked around: the world was masculine and feminine. This way of seeing gave him a deep physical contentment, the still and contained physical excitement that he had every time he “unveiled." A person has highly spiritual pleasures that nobody suspects, other people's lives always seem empty, but a person has his pleasures.”
“Martim had now started to get entangled in a curious sensation of having grasped some extraordinary thing. He'd gone through the mystery of wanting. As if he'd touched on the pulse of life. He who had always been dazzled by the spontaneous mystery of his body's being body enough in order to want a woman, and his body's being body enough to want food—he now had touched on the source of all that, and of living: he'd wanted…In a general and profound way, he'd wanted.”
“Suffering? He thought with his face irreparably offended facing the blank paper. But how could he not love even the Prohibition? if it had pushed him as far as he could go? if it had pushed him up to that final resistance where... Where the only unreasonable solution was great love. When a man is intimidated only great love occurs to him. Suffering? Only not being able to is how a man would know. A man anyway was measured by his neediness. And touching upon the great lack might be a person's aspiration. Would touching the lack be art? That man was savoring his impotence the way a man recognizes himself. He was frighteningly enjoying what he was. Since for the first time in life he was learning how much he was. Which was aching like the root of a tooth.”
“…because I don't want grace, because I'd rather die without ever having seen than to have seen a single time! because God in his goodness allows, you hear, allows and advises people to be cowardly and to protect themselves, His favorite sons are those who dare but He is severe toward those who dare, and benevolent toward those who don't have the courage to look straight on and He blesses those who abjectly take care not to go too far in rapture and in the search for joy, disappointed He embraces those who don't have the courage. He knows that there are people who can't live with the happiness that's inside them, and so He gives them a surface they can live off of, and gives them a sadness, He knows that there are people who need to fake it, because beauty is arid, why is beauty so arid? and so I said to myself ‘be afraid, Vitória, because being afraid is salvation.’ Because things mustn't be seen straight on, nobody's that strong, only those who are damned have strength. But for us joy has to be like a star smothered in the heart, joy has to be nothing more than a secret, our nature is our great secret, joy ought to be like a radiance that the person never, never ought to let escape. You feel a pang and you don't know where: that's how joy ought to be you shouldn't know why, you should feel like: ‘but what's wrong with me?’ and not know.”
“And then Martim became actually frightened.
—Are you aware, my son, of what you're doing?
—I am, my father.
—Are you aware that, with hope, you'll never again have rest, my son?
—I am, my father.
—Are you aware that, with hope, you'll lose all your other weapons, my son?
—I am, my father.
—And that without cynicism you'll be naked?
—I am, my father.
—Do you know that hope is also not believing, my son?
—I know that, my father.
[…]
—My son. You are aware that from now on, wherever you go, you'll be stalked by hope?
—I am, my father.
—Are you ready to accept the heavy weight of joy?
—I am, my father.
—But, my son! you know that's almost impossible?
—I know, my father.
—You know at least that hope is the great absurdity, my son?
—I know, my father.
—You know that you have to be an adult to have hope!!!—I know, I know, I know!
—Then go, my son. I command you to suffer hope.
But already in the first nostalgia, the final one as if just before never again, Martim cried for help:
—What's that light, papa? he cried already solitary in hope…”
______
‘But now, having removed the layer of words from things, now that he’d lost the language, he was finally standing in the calm profundity of the mystery.’
After encountering the scandalous, miraculous writings of the Brazilian author Clarice Lispector, a new morality becomes visible, one that rejects a surface-level identification with the mirrored self. This new morality, in the dazzling world of Clarice – as her Brazilian disciples refer to her – sets the self at a healthy remove, an odd angle, in order to feel comfortable with the unknown. It’s a realm in which words need not clarify; instead, she takes the reader through a vortex of meanings and contradictions, clashing with each other yet harmonizing upon certain key principles – which, as it turns out in her 1961 novel The Apple in the Dark, are mystery, hope, love.
Until Benjamin Moser’s new translation, Apple has been the most difficult of Clarice’s novels to find in English. Its republication brings a fitting conclusion to New Directions’s project to retranslate all Clarice’s novels for a new English-speaking generation who will now be weaned on her alongside Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, Marcel Proust, Marguerite Duras, Katherine Mansfield and the Brontë sisters, her closest siblings. (Her extraordinary collected newspaper columns and children’s books were published in English last year. Now, all that’s left is her correspondence, which already exists in Portuguese and French editions.)
It’s fitting that Apple came last in the project – it takes a bit more getting used to than Clarice’s other novels. If you’re new to her world, I wouldn’t recommend jumping into it – unless you are into cold showers. One of the later novels – An Apprenticeship (1967) or Agua Viva (1971) or The Hour of the Star (1977) – might be a better first read. Apple will ask a lot of you. It’s a descent into madness – the splintering-away of the real in language – without ever becoming mad itself. One can only think so much, whether on a crowded Metro or a Proustian bedroom!
Plot: a man called Martim has committed a crime and is on the run. A Raymond Chandler yarn, this ain’t. His crime is so immense he has been banished from his ‘normal’ life, banished even from the realm of language. He cannot speak. He sits on a rock and crushes a bird, a majestic, weirdly engaging scene that takes nearly 30 pages to describe. He must find the will to speak again.
What was the crime? We don’t know. Maybe he killed someone he loved. Maybe he abandoned them, or they him. Whatever the crime, he rediscovers what it means to say the word ‘crime’ on a secluded ranch overseen by ‘a strong woman’, Vitória, and her cousin Ermalinda, who is nervous and tetchy and falls into a weird love spell with Martim. But it’s not quite love, it’s something both less and more. (Here, Clarice lays the seeds for the manic situationship at the heart of the all-too-relatable An Apprenticeship.) These two women help this man find his tongue again. More than that, though: the women find themselves, independent of the tethers of conventional speech to which society would otherwise doom them. All three of these swirling lost souls come to realize ‘that we are born to love, and then you don’t understand yourself.’
Sudden shifts of pronouns like that are strewn throughout the novel, and they come refreshed by the new translation. Apple has already been translated into English once before – in 1967, by Gregory Rabassa, the grand doyen of Latin American literature who introduced Julio Cortázar and Gabriel García Márquez to English-speaking audiences. Indeed, it was the first novel of Clarice’s to appear in English. What has been added to the out-of-print Rabassa translation, of which Clarice herself approved?
Let’s compare. First, read the original Portuguese in which the writer describes the awesome force of Vitória, from the beginning of chapter five: ‘Vitória era uma mulher tão poderosa como se um dia tivesse encontrado uma chave. Cuja porta, é verdade, havia anos se perdera. Mas, quando precisava, ela podia se pôr instantaneamente em contato com o velho poder.’
Now, here is how it was first translated by Rabassa: ‘Vitória was such a strong woman that somewhere in the past she must have found a key. The door it opened had been lost many years back, of course. But when she needed to, she could bring back her old power at once.’
Finally, here is the new Moser translation: ‘Vitória was a woman as powerful as if she’d one day found a key. Whose door, it’s true, had been lost years before. But, when she needed to, she could place herself instantly in touch with her former power.’
A cursory glance shows how closely the new translation hews to Clarice’s original syntax and punctuation: that comma after the ‘but’ that adds a necessary rhythmic breath (‘But, when she needed to […]’), those weird sentences of hers which, with a period, start and stop where you’re not ‘supposed’ to: ‘a key. Whose door […]’
Whereas Rabassa elegantly transposes the content of Clarice’s gist to English, easing our understanding, Moser directly transposes the form of her harsh, loopy sentences. To my ear steeped in the other New Directions translations of Clarice’s Portuguese, Moser’s was a smoother read. We need not necessarily prefer one translation over the other. But when we consider an author who wants to look directly at the stuff of life – and, by extension, derange our sense of reality – it’s clear that Moser preserves that volcanic Clarician intensity so central to her Portuguese original. That sudden ‘é verdade.’ The fact that Vitória does not ‘bring back her old power’ (Rabassa) but is rather ‘plac[ing] herself instantly in touch’ with it (Moser).
Apple is Clarice’s longest novel: nearly 400 pages. Compare that to the slim-yet-just-as-packed Agua Viva, an 80-page diamond pressed for seven years. Much of Apple could have been baggy and saggy, but strangely it isn’t. It’s something of a sister-piece to The Passion According to G.H. (1964), except that in Apple, beyond the vague crime, there are no active scenes pushing Martim’s, Vitória’s or Ermalinda’s thoughts forward. Correction: everything pushes them forward, such as the questions why was I cursed to life? How much of myself should I know? Where can I find the words to express the suffering I feel? And if I find those words, will anguish dissipate for the night – for that is all I ask for, I who is so strange to me? Obviously, we get no answers. But the questions feel like they’re being asked in entirely new ways, antiquity and modernity collapsing into each other like failing stars. May we all, after reading The Apple in the Dark, ‘stand in the calm profundity of the mystery.’
paigeweb's review against another edition
dark
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.25
Abstract, obscure and enthralling. The Apple in the Dark went from being my least favorite Clarice book in the first half to ranking among my favorites during the second and third parts. Somewhere around the midway point, something clicked... As Clarice would say, in her signature phrasing, "something had happened"; as a reader, I "awoke."
In The Apple in the Dark, Clarice deconstructs a man down to his basest elements before setting about the laborious process of his incremental psychological resurrection. As his mental landscape evolves, so does the clarity of the writing; it is as if, with the character of Martim as surrogate, Clarice is giving birth to herself in a dual act of self-creation on part of both author and protagonist (comparisons to A Breath of Life would be interesting on this point). The catalyst for Martim's metamorphosis? A crime that is at once central and peripheral to the story. Its particulars are of small importance to the plot, yet its consequence is a profound existentialist meditation on what it means to be and to communicate, and the cost of individuality.
"Are we bad?", he wondered perplexed as if he'd never lived. What dark thing is it that we need, what greedy thing is this existence that makes a hand grasp like a claw? and yet that greedy wanting is our strength and our clever and helpless children are born from our darkness and inherit it, and beauty is in this dirty wanting, wanting, wanting -- oh body and soul, how to judge you if we love you?
In The Apple in the Dark, Clarice deconstructs a man down to his basest elements before setting about the laborious process of his incremental psychological resurrection. As his mental landscape evolves, so does the clarity of the writing; it is as if, with the character of Martim as surrogate, Clarice is giving birth to herself in a dual act of self-creation on part of both author and protagonist (comparisons to A Breath of Life would be interesting on this point). The catalyst for Martim's metamorphosis? A crime that is at once central and peripheral to the story. Its particulars are of small importance to the plot, yet its consequence is a profound existentialist meditation on what it means to be and to communicate, and the cost of individuality.
"Are we bad?", he wondered perplexed as if he'd never lived. What dark thing is it that we need, what greedy thing is this existence that makes a hand grasp like a claw? and yet that greedy wanting is our strength and our clever and helpless children are born from our darkness and inherit it, and beauty is in this dirty wanting, wanting, wanting -- oh body and soul, how to judge you if we love you?
joshbushey's review
dark
mysterious
reflective
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
mirrortower's review against another edition
3.5
there were pieces and passages that i REALLY liked. i understand lispector's sentiment about this novel being her most conventionally structured, but even so, at times it felt like a chore to get through, which is never something i want from my favorite author. towards the end, though, i started to like it more.
dragonfiddler's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
4.0
Content Warnings
Moderate: Misogyny
Minor: Racism