A review by lispectorsexual
Água viva by Clarice Lispector

challenging emotional mysterious reflective tense medium-paced

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

5.0

When you first go into this book, the whole “no plot” or “story” to follow might throw you off a bit, but when you start reading more into it you forget all about its abstract nature. You first start to feel, her words bring forth life to your perceptions. She has now bewitched you. A breath of life. This is written almost like a confession or something directed/intended for a specific person, you, the reader. It was meant for you. You don’t necessarily have to understand but feel, you have to feel her words. Sometimes resonance can appear in a “meaningless” sense or a way you can’t comprehend but the way it touches you, the way the arrangement of these words make you feel is enough. 

She goes into freedom, death, birth, time, creation and destruction. Every sentence is independent but as a paragraph they all seem to be chained together. She goes into her own philosophical concepts such as formless thinking - freedom. Thoughts that appear of their own volition, especially during creativity such as painting or writing, when your hand seems to be moving on its own, writing whatever it wants or painting whatever it wants. “The true thought seems to have no author”. And that’s how I think she was able to write this masterpiece.

The writing style is flawless as always and you can never predict where her sentences could lead you to. Her unique punctuations are always the highlight of it all. The book is short but powerful, as expected of her. Will definitely be rereading this in the months to follow. 5/5.

Favourite Quotes : 

We desperately try to find an identity of our own and the identity of the real. And if we understand ourselves through the symbol that is because we have the same symbols and the same experience of the thing itself: but reality has no synonyms.

Dying must be a mute internal explosion. The body can no longer stand being a body.

No, I was never modern. And this happens: when I think a painting is strange that’s when it’s a painting. And when I think a word is strange that’s where it achieves the meaning. And when I think life is strange that’s where life begins. I take care not to surpass myself.

But I know that I shall have peace before death and that one day I shall taste the delicateness of life.

Please tell me what time it is so I can know that I am living in that time. I am finding myself: it’s deadly because only death concludes me. But I bear it until the end. I’ll tell you a secret: life is deadly. I’ll have to interrupt everything to tell you this: death is the impossible and intangible. Death is just future to such an extent that there are those who cannot bear it and commit suicide. It’s as if life said the following: and there simply was no following.