A review by screen_memory
A Breath of Life: Pulsations by Clarice Lispector

challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective sad medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

"I asked God to give Angela a cancer that she can't get rid of." This is the only line left out of the manuscript for A Breath of Life by Lispector's friend who compiled her paper's after her death. This absent line, though, haunts the text from outside. It's something like a key, or kernel of truth, or at least some spectral voice whispering something 'real' in this strange, elusive text. What to call this book? The character of 'the Author' calls this The Book of Angela at one point. We might similarly call this a book of mysteries. 

In any case, however, this breath of life implicated by the book's title is the last breath of life before death - the point at which, in the end, the author and Angela die together. "Death is a biblical demeanor. And it has no discursive history: it is an instant. To die once and for all. The stopping of the heart takes no time. It's the tiniest fraction of a second." It's apropos that this text was left incomplete. It could be no other way; in some sense because it is death which closed the book - A Breath of Life, the Book of Angela, and, ultimately, the Book of Lispector. 

It's from this book that we get the familiar quote, "I write as if to save somebody's life. Probably my own." This comes earlier in the text. Near the end, so close to death, the character of the Author writes, "I am looking for somebody whose life I can save. The only one who allows me to do that is Angela. And as I save her life, I save my own." Angela is, of course, a character in the book the Author has written - his creation, the character he has breathed life into. What we see unravel near the end is the author of the Author (Lispector, the author for whom the Author is a fictive character) coming to terms, in some sense, with the failure of her project, of her aim. Has she saved her own life, or has she willed it to end? We see all of the emotions attending to the confusion of living and dying all at once: joy, fear, confusion, anxiety, comfort. She trembles despite reconciliation; Angela writes, "A place in the world is waiting for me to inhabit it. I was made for no one to need me. 

 

And yet Angela, like the Author and like Lispector, remains in some sense placeless. She was made for no one to need her, and as swiftly it seems as she was created, she is so soon to die - character and author alike. This fictional pretense of 'character and author,' even given that the Author is male, is a thin veneer. We know this is Lispector, though we often (not only) hear her through these figures who are other. This is because writing, for Lispector (and of course in general), is this strange hall of mirrors refracting the author into a plurality of selves, all of which are other to the self viewing them (which, then, is the *true* self; the one looking, or the one looked upon? Impossible to tell). It signals to the split at the heart of Lispector's soul, a rupture she has always suffered. 

These characters keep her company - as they do for us - and yet they are so distant, so close to absent, because, much like Lispector who might have always felt apart from inhabiting any place, her characters can only retain that same sense of exile within them. Disregarding Lispector from consideration to focus only on the Author and Angela, their voices are so similar, if not at turns identical, that if we don't pay close attention to the dialogue tags, we often won't know who is speaking (neither do we always need to know. If this book imparts any lesson, it might be to allow ourselves to know less, to forget more - to ask and inquire into those things with which we took familiarity for granted; to treat nearly everything as participating in the same perpetual mystery of creation whose manifold depths we ourselves are lost within).
 
 The Author is behind Angela's lines, despite his claims that she is autonomous. We know she is not. The Author won't allow her to be. Because Lispector won't allow for the character of the Author to be autonomous from her. He must speak her truth. He must as well speak her untruth. He speaks her confusion, her joy, her troubles, her eagerness for and unconquerable fear of death. Her utter and irresolvable fear of the burden of creation - of enduring it as well as condemning her characters to bear this same traumatic wound. 

 
A moment of the violation of the text's logic makes this clear (a violation Lispector is so fond of, as in the Hour of the Star where, in The Author's Dedication prefacing The Hour of the Star, Lispector lists her alias as Clarice Lispector, rendering her real name as psuedonymous as a pen name. Because, of course, we are other to ourselves when and as we write) when Angela refers to the book she has written entitled The Besieged City. This claim of authorship is strange because this is of course one of Lispector's own books. This is what makes the shroud of fictive pretense in this book (is this a book, or is this text a volume of books?) so wispish and thin, because even it's author delights in tearing through it in moments like these, making her presence - her name, her authorship - so terribly clear, imposing her overwhelming presence on the reader. However, this presence is not only overwhelming (for what reason would it be? merely because she is this text's author?). It is also humble, and so too is it quiet. Unassuming. Modest. Fearful. As if her voice were at times shaking. 

We don't see an author in control when we see Lispector appear in her own text (as she arguably does in the heart of every word trembling in the body of every delicate and crystalline sentence). We see an author contending with her own authority, or lack thereof. An author struggling with the guilt of repeating the trauma of her own creation on her characters, marking them to a lifelong spell of exile and wandering similar to hers, and condemning them to death. She writes as if to save somebody's life, though she succeeds, in the end, in writing to end them all. Because in her final days, in the hour when her star grew dim and fell from the sky, she succeeded in writing to end her own life.

Her friend Olga Borelli, in writing on her work, states that Lispector stated that everyone chooses the way they die. Here we must remind ourselves of that absented line: "I asked God to give Angela a cancer that she can't get rid of." It was in the midst of writing this book that Lispector died of ovarian cancer. 

There on the last page we see the final words in which we see Angela asserting her being while in the very throes of dying. "As for me, I am. Yes. 'I...I...no. I cannot end.' I think that...". That last breath of life, extinguished in the midst of speaking, in the middle of writing, perishing in the heart of the matter's articulation, leaves only this precipice whose heights and depths are as astounding as they are terrifying. This, or it reveals this precipice in, on, before and over which Lispector has perhaps trembled for all of her life, until she was finally read to ascend downward into them, nearer to heaven, carried by the pulsations of this same breath until it gave out.