Near to the Wild Heart by Clarice Lispector

At length the book took shape, but she feared it was more a pile of notes than a full-fledged novel. To concentrate, she quit the tiny maid’s room in the apartment she shared with her sisters and brother-in-law and spent a month in a nearby boardinghouse. Confused, “groping in the darkness,” she started by jotting down ideas in a notebook. When Clarice Lispector began writing Near to the Wild Heart, in March 1942, she was a twenty-two year old law student who had recently begun work as a journalist. She died in 1977, shortly after the publication of her final novel, The Hour of the Star.Near to the Wild Heart by Clarice Lispector

After living variously in Italy, the UK, Switzerland and the US, in 1959, Lispector with her children returned to Brazil where she wrote her most influential novels including The Passion According to G.H. Many felt she had given Brazillian literature a unique voice in the larger context of Portuguese literature.

She published her first novel, Near to the Wildheart in 1943 when she was just twenty-three, and the next year was awarded the Graça Aranha Prize for the best first novel.

In 1933, Clarice Lispector encountered Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf, which convinced her that she was meant to write. She was born in the Ukraine in 1920, but in the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Civil War, the family fled to Romania and eventually sailed to Brazil. References to her literary work pervade the music and literature of Brazil and Latin America. Her innovation in fiction brought her international renown. As Joana, endlessly mutable, moves through different emotional states, different inner lives and different truths, this impressionistic, dreamlike and fiercely intelligent novel asks if any of us ever really know who we are.Ĭlarice Lispector was a Brazilian novelist and short story writer. It tells the story of Joana, from her wild, creative childhood, as the 'little egg' who writes poems for her father, through her marriage to the faithless Otávio and on to her decision to make her own way in the world. Clarice Lispector's sensational, prize-winning debut novel Near to the Wild Heart was published when she was just twenty-three and earned her the name 'Hurricane Clarice'.