"Genre won't help: there are parables, fairy tales, nightmares, sketches, prose-poems, meditations, interior monologues, newspaper cronicas...she considers herself sui generis, an isolado, and, indeed, her choppy brushstrokes often seem those of an alien." -Lispector translator Alexis Levitin
She was so good at explaining gestures and small moments:
"When the monkey jumped onto the woman's lap, she repressed a frisson and the shy pleasure of one who is chosen."
Then I found this slip of paper in my library copy of Soulstorm, her collected stories.
The paper is from a hotel in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. I looked it up and there is a Clarice Lispector Avenue on the map. And it felt, having a few other books of hers, very much as if the publisher had added this slip on purpose so that a reader could have an extra layer of meaning, a perfect weirdness, [tell me you know that feeling when weirdness is perfect, right?] a nice mystery that can't be explained.
She wrote in "Such Gentleness":
"A dark hour, perhaps the darkest, in broad day, preceded this thing I don't even want to try to define. In the middle of the day it is night, and this thing I still don't want to define is a peaceful light inside me, you might call it gladness, gentle gladness."
"I am not a thing that is thankful for having been transformed into something else. I am a woman, I am a person, I am an attention. I am a body looking out through the window. Just as the rain is not grateful for not being a stone. It is rain. Perhaps it is this that might be called being alive. No more than this, but this: alive. And alive just through gentle gladness."
