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A review by ube_cake
Água Viva by Clarice Lispector
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.