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itslibraryofbea's review
adventurous
challenging
emotional
hopeful
mysterious
reflective
tense
slow-paced
5.0
baechuzz's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
joeduncan's review against another edition
5.0
It's wild to me that something like this even exists. Simply stated, Agua Viva is about 100 pages of pure creative fury spoken in the form of a soliloquy. One might be tempted to compare it to Beckett if it weren't for the fact that Lispector's tone is about as opposite from that as you can get. The voice is full of life and color. It's hard to even compare it to anything. Maybe Dylan Thomas? Nathaniel Mackey? It's definitely uncommon, especially in fiction. Maybe because positive, life-affirming books are hard to pull off without sounding contrived. Thankfully, Agua Viva is anything but contrived. I could see someone complain that it doesn't have narrative focus or that it is a little hard to follow, but it's undeniable that what she accomplishes feels organic and real. You get the feeling at times that the book itself is alive and full of blood. And that is something pretty incredible.
ube_cake's review
5.0
“A fantastical world surrounds me and is me. I hear the mad song of a little bird and crush butterflies between my fingers. I'm a fruit eaten away by a worm. And I await the orgasmic apocalypse (…) What a fever: I can't stop living. In this dense jungle of words that thickly wrap around whatever I feel and think and live and transform everything I am into something of mine that nonetheless remains entirely outside me.”
“Água Viva” is a feat of quicksilver writing and a masterclass in demonstrating an economy of means through words. Here, Lispector’s prose is sensual and impressionistic, occasionally ecstatic, as she dives deep into the concept of the self—the expansive notion of identity and the internal world; how it organises itself for each consecutive, infinitesimally brief instant it occupies—and her reflections into the very act of writing, faced with the troubles of finding les mots justes and the exact meaning expressed between each word (the silences, echoes of Debussy).
The title translates to “Living Water” in English, denoting Christian undertones, which the text certainly has. However, the fact that the term is used by the Portuguese-speaking world to refer to “Jellyfish” very much reveals this book’s structure—or lack thereof. The text is scant, aphoristic, full of gaps intentionally placed to allow the work to breathe: and it is this scantness which reminded me of another Portuguese classic, Fernando Pessoa’s “The Book of Disquiet”. The book is itself a collection of aphorisms that explore the concept of the self, albeit in a more nihilistic manner.
Other things that this book reminds me of: Federico Mompou’s “Cants magics” or his “Música callada” (intensely introspective, boldly displaying the magic of the internal world)—and Samuel Beckett’s “Not I” (the ecstatic whisperings, stream-of-consciousness).
Overall, one of Lispector’s finest attempts at writing. Suis general, she is—no one can ever come close to her inimitable style.
“Água Viva” is a feat of quicksilver writing and a masterclass in demonstrating an economy of means through words. Here, Lispector’s prose is sensual and impressionistic, occasionally ecstatic, as she dives deep into the concept of the self—the expansive notion of identity and the internal world; how it organises itself for each consecutive, infinitesimally brief instant it occupies—and her reflections into the very act of writing, faced with the troubles of finding les mots justes and the exact meaning expressed between each word (the silences, echoes of Debussy).
The title translates to “Living Water” in English, denoting Christian undertones, which the text certainly has. However, the fact that the term is used by the Portuguese-speaking world to refer to “Jellyfish” very much reveals this book’s structure—or lack thereof. The text is scant, aphoristic, full of gaps intentionally placed to allow the work to breathe: and it is this scantness which reminded me of another Portuguese classic, Fernando Pessoa’s “The Book of Disquiet”. The book is itself a collection of aphorisms that explore the concept of the self, albeit in a more nihilistic manner.
Other things that this book reminds me of: Federico Mompou’s “Cants magics” or his “Música callada” (intensely introspective, boldly displaying the magic of the internal world)—and Samuel Beckett’s “Not I” (the ecstatic whisperings, stream-of-consciousness).
Overall, one of Lispector’s finest attempts at writing. Suis general, she is—no one can ever come close to her inimitable style.
tinydumptruck's review against another edition
5.0
I loved it. I’ve never read an abstract book or seen an piece of abstract art that felt like I knew exactly what the author was saying until this one. I feel like I could read it over an over again and still find new things to discover. I truly felt like she had wrote down my thoughts, it was beautiful.
emily2348's review against another edition
5.0
i fear this has changed me forever will be reading everything she has written.
“the suffering afar, I come from the hell of love but now I am free of you. I come from afar from a weighty ancestry. I who come from the pain of living. And I no longer want it. I want the vibration of happiness.”
“the suffering afar, I come from the hell of love but now I am free of you. I come from afar from a weighty ancestry. I who come from the pain of living. And I no longer want it. I want the vibration of happiness.”
diargiron's review against another edition
4.0
Peculiar ejercicio inclasificable. Híbrido entre meditaciones y prosa poética. Definitivamente es un libro para regresar.