Reviews

I have picked this book knowing nothing but the fact that this book, abondant with wonderful descriptions and beautiful prose, was a deeply introspective story of a woman who slowly, through the lens of mutual admiration and attachment, learns how to love again.

However, having already read the book, I believe that those who consider it a story of a woman learning how to love have misread it in a truly spectacular manner. Yes, of course, this is a story of a woman learning how to love again, but that's not all - what's more, that's not even the main focus of the book. The protagonist's relationship with others is nothing but a finishing touch, a final step of a journey that is meant to teach her something for more profound: how to live. For this is not really a story of love in a romantic sense, but rather of a much more primordial, fundamental sentiment - the one of love for life, of learning how to feel whole with the world around you, of accepting our existence as its and of finding the most profound, exhilarating joy in the mere fact of being alive. Of recognizing the titular pleasures of living, embracing them, uniting with them. Of conscious rejection of life devoid of pain, but also of any other feeling or emotion that would make life worth living and enjoying. Of accepting the full range of sensations and experiences that constitute the human condition and of finding true peace in it.

Clearly, this sounds like the perfect book for me: the introspective prose, existential questions, breathtaking writing. When choosing to pick it up, I was expecting to end up at least as enamored with Lispector as it was the case with Virginia Woolf and her incredible works which were, in many ways, a turning point in terms of my literary and artistic tastes, expectations and preferences. Yet nothing of the sort happened - quite the contrary. Though the book is only 140 pages long, it took me a week to read it, and in that time I managed to read two other ones that I picked up as some sort of a break from Lispector. I found<i> An Apprenticeship... </i>tiring - what was meant to be profound, personal, and groundbreaking in terms of its approach to life or its literary style I found rather shallow, meaningless and repetitive. Though I generally consider comparisons in writing neither useful nor justified,<i> An Apprenticeship... </i>was to me like Woolf on steroids, but deprived of the emotional, existential values that made her works so unique and so impactful. The introspective elements - which were the very core of the book - were for me so artificially exalted and sophisticated that they thus became stripped of any real meaning or merit, whether it be literary or, so to say, philosophical. The book focusing on small pleasures seemed to be rendered unjustly and pointlessly grand, and the inherent contradiction effectively spoiled any genuine pleasure I would normally have while reading it. At the end of the day, Lispector's beautiful prose quite often had little substance - while the aesthetic and artistic merit of her work is hardly questionable, it seems sometimes as if the abundance of metaphors, poetic descriptions and internal monologues was not only a means of rendering her book more appealing, but also of concealing the haziness of the author's real message that her writing was meant to pass on.

At the end of the day, therefore, it was quite a major letdown. I wish I loved it the way others did - yet while I loved the premise and equally adored the message and the overall idea of the book, the final effect turned out to be a huge disappointment for me.