Near to the Wild Heart (Penguin Modern Classics)

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The prize was a confirmation of what the Folha Carioca had discovered earlier that year when it asked its readers to elect the best novel of 1943.

Esordio fulminante, primo libro pubblicato quando la bella ucraina cresciuta in Brasile sin da piccola, Greta Garbo che incontra Marlene Dietrich, quando Clarice aveva solo ventitre anni e studiava legge.Published when she was just 23, Lispector's debut novel created a sensation in her home country of Brazil. She seems to experience life with a rare intensity of emotion – there are times when her mood switches from a deep sense of happiness to one of pain and suffering.

In the best stories, something deeply strange is fully visualized by Lispector, as though it had come in a waking dream and it needed to be given urgent substance. Our Members support all that we do and enjoy exclusive events, talks, tours and studio visits – find out how you can join! On reading the book such a statement seems understandable, given the visceral roughness of the language and the author's almost Swiftian preoccupation with the workings of the body : "She was traversed by long whole muscles. With this in mind, what better place to start than her debut novel, Near to the Wild Heart, first published in 1943 when Lispector was just twenty-three years old? Clarice shows in this novel that the path is only obscure if we do not find, recognize, identify, and transmit our light.Given your enjoyment of novels featuring introspection, then I’d say it’s worth giving Lispector a try.

In the book, she cites long passages from Spinoza, the longest quotes that appear anywhere in her novels; it seems that she felt an affinity with the Dutch philosopher's amoral conception of the world.Her whole body and soul lost their boundaries, they merged and fused into a single chaos, gentle and amorphous, relaxed and with uncertain movements, like matter that was simply alive. I hear it, the fall…I wait for myself, I wait for myself to slowly rise up and truly appear before my eyes.

That impossibility became extremely frustrating – and is probably, at the heart, the point of the book. I LOVED Kavan’s Ice when I read it two or three years ago and hope to revisit it at some stage as it feels like a novel with so much to offer. The plot almost doesn't exist, and if - it's secondary, because what really matters here is Joana's inner life. Leaning her forehead against the cold and shiny windowpane she gazed at the neighbor’s yard, at the big world of the hens-that-didn’t-know-they-were-going-to-die. I generally like books that incorporate these styles if only for the fact that it presents something different.

While in law school in Rio she began publishing her first journalistic work and short stories, catapulting to fame at age 23 with the publication of her first novel, 'Near to the Wild Heart' (Perto do Coração Selvagem), written as an interior monologue in a style and language that was considered revolutionary in Brazil. I think that I don’t necessarily have all the right “tools” at my disposal for a truly thoughtful approach to this book but I want to think about it within a few different contexts. Clarice Lispector's first novel, Near to the Wild Heart, was published in 1944, when its author was only nineteen years old. I still haven’t read her biography), looking at the book as a story with a beginning, a middle and an end, and how it embraces this idea while subverting it all the time. Images of the sea are also prevalent in this novel as Joana feels an affinity to the freedom and boundless nature of the ocean.