A review by paigeweb
Near to the Wild Heart by Clarice Lispector

challenging mysterious reflective sad slow-paced

• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

Returning to Clarice’s beginning after exposure to the majority of her written corpus -  and while currently making my way through her semi-autobiographical chronicles - I can recognize in Near to the Wild Heart the origin of many motifs and themes that she would repeat and reinvent continuously for the next 30 years. As with her later works, I’m not sure I have the capacity to completely understand this novel in all of its ambitious complexity. But as with her later works, comprehension is only one aspect of the Lispectorian reading experience, and maybe not even the most important… it’s much more about the sonority in her prose, the entrancing intimacy of the stream of consciousness she evokes, the tension between abstraction of expression and conceptual depth.


The chapter “The Encounter with Otavio” and the ending will haunt me for some time. I’m not sure Joana will ever go away.


I only have one life and this life slips through my fingers and travels to death serenely and I can do nothing and all I do is watch my depletion with each passing minute, I am alone in the world, those who are fond of me don’t know me, those who know me fear me and I am small and poor, I won’t know I existed in a few years’ time, all that is left for me to live is little and yet all that is left for me to live will remain untouched and useless, why do you not take pity on me?