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4.1 AVERAGE
4.1 AVERAGE
challenging
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Tried this a long time ago on a recommendation but it wasn't for me (same person also recommended Sexing the Cherry by Winterson).
The entire plot of this book is about a woman who kills a cockroach and then spirals into depersonalization, but holy cow this book floored me. When I was reading, there’s a lot of it that felt like total incomprehensible nonsense (which is part of the point) and then all of a sudden there was a statement so profound I had to read it 5 times. This isn’t for everyone, but for the philosophical types, it’s a gem.
For now the first timid pleasure I am having is realizing I lost my fear of ugliness. And that loss is such goodness. It is a sweetness.This is my first absolute favorite of the year, but not because I like it. Rather, it crept up on me and made me question the value of the research I'm looking to do, as it seems near everything I'd like to say is already here, in as imperfect a form as translation offers. As such, I don't value the convergence of this with my thoughts, but the divergence, for it shows I still have something to contribute. A selfish reason, but with seven billion present currently in the age of the Internet and an unknowable number of dead, the human race has superimposed itself so much in the white portion of it all that I can never be too careful when it comes to subconscious and simultaneous calcification and mimicry. I'd be less concerned if capitalism wasn't an issue, but you can't conquer systemic murder in a day.
Why? why didn't I want to become as unclean as the roach? what ideal was fastening me to the sentiment of an idea? why shouldn't I become unclean, exactly as I was discovering my whole self to be? What was I afraid of? becoming unclean with what?
[R]elinquishing hope means that I shall have to start living, and not just promise myself life. And this is the greatest fright I can have.I wish to explore what gives certain demographics life and others death in the land of reality and selective genocide, but I have no interest in convincing the former of the latter's value. What I am targeting is what the psychoanalysts call the abject and I call pharmakos, where the pinnacle and most ideal society is defined on what it casts out. The casting out involves science and art, beauty and fame, glory and honor, and so all considered as meaning of life in human terms is suspect, for anyone who says bigotry is not taught and not enforced and not made to evolve is a liar and a fool. Disgust ejects poison, as does the taste buds sensing bitterness and the pain nerves shying away from their electric impulses, and so it is time to study what deadly conditioning renders infant human beings, who literally die if they aren't embraced enough, capable of instinctive disgust upon viewing their fellows. You could argue this is natural if humans were unsocial as species, but considering how often psycho/sociopath is bandied about as valid scientific term instead of cinematic jump scare, I'd say the status quo doesn't want that either. So, what to do what to do what to do.
Because I'd looked at a living roach and was discovering in it the identity of my deepest life. In a difficult demolition, hard and narrow paths were opening within me.
Whenever I had needed to, I'd excused myself by arguing that I was a woman. But I was well aware that it's not just women who are afraid to see, everyone fears seeing what is God.I don't care about convincing those in power that they should view others as they would themselves. What I want is to strip the power from them until their sadism and greed and opportunistic exploitation is nothing but the isolated mutterings of someone who isn't neuroatypical, oh no, just hateful. To do that, I work from the direction of literature to show that, when characters begin to perceive in themselves the characteristics the abject (mental illness in this case being a double stab to the heart), they are that much more likely to kill themselves. I've covered [b:Jane Eyre|10210|Jane Eyre|Charlotte Brontë|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1327867269s/10210.jpg|2977639] and [b:The Tenant of Wildfell Hall|337113|The Tenant of Wildfell Hall|Anne Brontë|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1479652419s/337113.jpg|1389477] thus far (both main characters express the wish 2/3rds of the way through), and even if I exclude subjects such as race and toxic masculinity and poverty on the basis of lack of personal experience, there's a wealth of narratives to cover when it comes to the multifarious grind and considerations of the final plunge. Never underestimate an overtly murderous world's ability at getting those it perceives as trash to take out themselves.
Will the man of the future understand us as we are today? He distractedly, with some distracted tenderness, will pet our head as we do with a dog that comes over to us and looks at us from within the darkness, with mute and afflicted eyes. He, the future man, would pet us, remotely understanding us, as I remotely would understand myself latter, beneath the memory already lost of a time of pain, not knowing that our time of pain would pass just as a child is not a static child, it's a growing being.
[D]isgust is as necessary for me as the defilement of the waters is necessary for the reproduction of the things in the waters.This book isn't so ambitious or as diverse. What it is is a single story of a single woman who, for whatever reason, attempts to take on all what the narratives terms 'accretions' inside her, all the death-dealing ideals and dehumanizing disgusts and instinctive rejections of life on the scale of microaggression, and forcibly eject them. Not all of it makes sense, even from my point of view, but I don't call books favorites out of the guarantee that the action will render them a static point of forever return. As I grow, so should they, else I'll develop the same poisonous sentiments which induce people to cut others down to their "right" size out of a combination of having a certain idea of the world and being in the position of power to make an artificial hell of it. This may be the first favorite, though, that I'm relying on for purposes of returning not just for the personal, but for the future research. That may not even happen, but any reference point is good in an uncertain storm.
[B]ecoming human can be transformed into an ideal, and suffocate beneath accretions.
Since I need to know exactly this: am I feeling what I am feeling, or am I feeling what I would like to feel? or am I feeling what I might need to feel?If this is all too political for you, remember that Lispector ended up in the country she did as a direct consequence of antisemitism performed on a national scale. If you're twisted enough to thank that hate, persisting as it does to this day, you're the one I aim to take down.
Because I no longer even want the concretization of an ideal, what I want to be is just a seed. Even if afterwards from that seed ideals are born again, either the real ones, which are the birth of a path, or the false ones, which are the accrections.
I no longer want the completed movement that never is really complete, and we are the ones who complete it out of desire; I no longer want to delight in the easiness of liking a thing only because, being apparently completed, it no longer scares me, and therefore is falsely mine—I, devourer that I was of beauties.
I do not want beauty, I want identity. Beauty would be an accrection, and now I shall have to dispense with it.
I knew that the basic error in living was being disgusted by a roach. Being disgusted by kissing the leper was erring the first life within me—since being disgusted contradicts me, contradicts my matter within me.It took me three books of Lispector to strike my personal definition of gold. This is why I persist.
Everything that characterizes me is just the way that I am most easily visible to others and how i end up being superficially recognizable to myself.
Nederlands (English below)
Clarice Lispector (1920-1977) werd geboren in Podolië in Oekraïne, dichtbij de grens met Moldavië, en groeide op in Brazilië, waar ze één van de belangrijkste schrijvers werd. In tegenstelling tot tijdgenoten die zich vooral richtten op de politieke situatie van het land, koos Lispector haar eigen thema’s. In het plotloze De passie volgens G.H. (1964) trakteert ze de lezer op een partij innerlijke contemplatie die moeiteloos kan leiden tot verwarring.
Lispector wekt de indruk dat de hoofdpersoon – G.H. – iets heeft gevonden of gewaar is geworden dat ze kwijt wil aan de lezer, hoewel het haar niet meevalt daar woorden aan te geven: Ik zal moeizaam telegraafseinen moeten vertalen - het onbekende vertalen in een taal die ik niet ken, en zonder zelfs maar te begrijpen waar de tekens voor staan. Ik zal in die slaapwandelaarstaal spreken die als ik wakker was geen taal zou zijn. De lezer doolt mee met G.H. en ontdekt zelf al gauw dat er maar één concreet aanknopingspunt is: de aanblik van een stervende kakkerlak, die haar in een staat van vervoering brengt die… ja, die wat eigenlijk…
Tijdens het lezen schoten me verschillende associaties te binnen. Naar andere contemplatieve werken als [b:Zie: Liefde|10394906|Zie Liefde|David Grossman|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327617700l/10394906._SY75_.jpg|2431528] van David Grossman of [b:Donker woud|34728949|Donker woud|Nicole Krauss|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1498124423l/34728949._SY75_.jpg|54315215] van Nicole Krauss natuurlijk; naar de madeleine van Proust, hoewel hier van een herinnering nauwelijks sprake is; naar Bohemian rapsody van Queen (‘Moeder: ik heb een leven gedood’); en zeker ook naar de taferelen van Jeroen Bosch:
Genot heb ik van De passie volgens G.H. niet gehad. Toen de hoofdpersoon zich halverwege begon te richten tot een jij-figuur die ik niet kon plaatsen, overwoog ik om het boek weg te leggen, maar daarvoor is het dan weer veel te fascinerend. Ik twijfel er niet aan dat anderen meer uit het boek halen; de veelgemaakte vergelijking met [b:De gedaanteverwisseling|16139894|De gedaanteverwisseling|Franz Kafka|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1547476461l/16139894._SX50_.jpg|2373750] van Franz Kafka moet toch ergens vandaan komen. Ik twijfel er evenmin aan dat dit boek een andere ervaring oplevert met stimulerende middelen. Ik las het sober en dat ging uiteindelijk ook prima.
English
It’s not hard to see why Clarice Lispector has a cult following. Despite its preface, The passion according to G.H. is certainly not your average novel. Trapped in the mind of a woman who encounters a cockroach in a closet, the reader follows her into an abyss of contemplation, doubt, and whatever other activity the human brain is capable of. I sometimes lost track of the narrative, but curiosity kept me reading.
Clarice Lispector (1920-1977) werd geboren in Podolië in Oekraïne, dichtbij de grens met Moldavië, en groeide op in Brazilië, waar ze één van de belangrijkste schrijvers werd. In tegenstelling tot tijdgenoten die zich vooral richtten op de politieke situatie van het land, koos Lispector haar eigen thema’s. In het plotloze De passie volgens G.H. (1964) trakteert ze de lezer op een partij innerlijke contemplatie die moeiteloos kan leiden tot verwarring.
Hopelijk ben ik, als ik dan toch de dag van morgen moet redden, een vorm moet vinden omdat ik me niet sterk genoeg voel om ontregeld te blijven, als ik noodgedwongen het monsterlijke vlees moet inkaderen en in stukken snijden die ik kan overzien en die in mijn mond passen, en als ik toch onherroepelijk zal bezwijken voor de behoefte aan een vorm, die voortkomt uit mijn angst om onbegrensd te zijn – hopelijk ben ik dan op zijn minst zo moedig om die vorm vanzelf te laten ontstaan, als een roofje dat uit zichzelf hard wordt, als rook die koud neerslaat op de grond. En de verleiding weerstaan om een vorm te verzinnen.
Lispector wekt de indruk dat de hoofdpersoon – G.H. – iets heeft gevonden of gewaar is geworden dat ze kwijt wil aan de lezer, hoewel het haar niet meevalt daar woorden aan te geven: Ik zal moeizaam telegraafseinen moeten vertalen - het onbekende vertalen in een taal die ik niet ken, en zonder zelfs maar te begrijpen waar de tekens voor staan. Ik zal in die slaapwandelaarstaal spreken die als ik wakker was geen taal zou zijn. De lezer doolt mee met G.H. en ontdekt zelf al gauw dat er maar één concreet aanknopingspunt is: de aanblik van een stervende kakkerlak, die haar in een staat van vervoering brengt die… ja, die wat eigenlijk…
Tijdens het lezen schoten me verschillende associaties te binnen. Naar andere contemplatieve werken als [b:Zie: Liefde|10394906|Zie Liefde|David Grossman|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327617700l/10394906._SY75_.jpg|2431528] van David Grossman of [b:Donker woud|34728949|Donker woud|Nicole Krauss|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1498124423l/34728949._SY75_.jpg|54315215] van Nicole Krauss natuurlijk; naar de madeleine van Proust, hoewel hier van een herinnering nauwelijks sprake is; naar Bohemian rapsody van Queen (‘Moeder: ik heb een leven gedood’); en zeker ook naar de taferelen van Jeroen Bosch:
De hel is de mond die bijt en het open vlees vol bloed eet, en wie gegeten wordt jankt met vreugde in zijn oog: de hel is de pijn als genot van de materie, en met de lach van het genot stromen de tranen van pijn.
Genot heb ik van De passie volgens G.H. niet gehad. Toen de hoofdpersoon zich halverwege begon te richten tot een jij-figuur die ik niet kon plaatsen, overwoog ik om het boek weg te leggen, maar daarvoor is het dan weer veel te fascinerend. Ik twijfel er niet aan dat anderen meer uit het boek halen; de veelgemaakte vergelijking met [b:De gedaanteverwisseling|16139894|De gedaanteverwisseling|Franz Kafka|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1547476461l/16139894._SX50_.jpg|2373750] van Franz Kafka moet toch ergens vandaan komen. Ik twijfel er evenmin aan dat dit boek een andere ervaring oplevert met stimulerende middelen. Ik las het sober en dat ging uiteindelijk ook prima.
English
It’s not hard to see why Clarice Lispector has a cult following. Despite its preface, The passion according to G.H. is certainly not your average novel. Trapped in the mind of a woman who encounters a cockroach in a closet, the reader follows her into an abyss of contemplation, doubt, and whatever other activity the human brain is capable of. I sometimes lost track of the narrative, but curiosity kept me reading.
challenging
emotional
hopeful
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
emotional
funny
mysterious
reflective
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
challenging
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I feel so dumb rn
impenetrable in the most beautiful way, but unsatisfying. the experience of reading it was just like I could not leave the room that the protagonist was in.
This book gave me the calmest existential crisis I’ve ever had.