A review by casskrug
The Passion According to G. H. by Clarice Lispector

3.0

i hate to say it but this one did not do it for me </3 i DNFed this last year hoping i’d have a better experience returning to it later and… i did not. i’ve often mentioned in my reviews of other lispector books that they work best when you let go of trying to understand every single thing, but too much of this book i simply could not make sense of. kind of ironic because so much of the book is about (not) understanding. the narrator, a sculptress named gh, has an encounter with a cockroach that spirals into philosophical ramblings on the meaning of life and what makes us human. as always, the passages that did resonate were incredibly impactful, but i had a difficult time sifting through to find them. i enjoyed the first half of the book more than the second. not sure what i’m missing here but an apprenticeship, agua viva, and near to the wild heart were much better reads for me.

“But I'm afraid of newness and I'm afraid of living whatever I don't understand-I always want to be sure to at least think I understand, I don't know how to give myself over to disorientation. How could I explain that my greatest fear is precisely of: being? and yet there is no other way. How can I explain that my greatest fear is living whatever comes? how to explain that I can't stand seeing, just because life isn't what I thought but something else-as if I knew what! Why is seeing such disorganization?”