Editing Clarice Lispector (section)

==Later years==

===''Family Ties''===
{{main|Family Ties (story collection)}}

In Brazil, Lispector struggled financially and tried to find a publisher for the novel she had completed in Washington several years before, as well as for her book of stories, ''Laços de família'' (''Family Ties''). This book included the six stories of ''Some Stories'' along with seven new stories, some of which had been published in ''Senhor''. It was published in 1960. The book, her friend [[Fernando Sabino]] wrote her, was "exactly, sincerely, indisputably, and even humbly, the best book of stories ever published in Brazil."<ref>Fernando Sabino and Clarice Lispector, ''Cartas perto do coração'', p. 124.</ref> And [[Érico Veríssimo]] said: "I haven't written about your book of stories out of sheer embarrassment to tell you what I think of it. Here goes: the most important story collection published in this country since [[Machado de Assis]]", Brazil's classic novelist.<ref>Lispector, ''Correspondências'', [[Érico Veríssimo]] to Lispector (September 3, 1961).</ref>

===''The Apple in the Dark''===
''A Maçã no escuro'' (''The Apple in the Dark''), which Lispector had begun in [[Torquay]], had been completed in 1956 but was repeatedly rejected by publishers, to Lispector's despair. Her longest novel and perhaps her most complex, it was finally published in 1961 by the same house that had published ''Family Ties'', the {{interlanguage link|Livraria Francisco Alves|pt}} in [[São Paulo]]. Driven by interior dialogue rather than by plot, its purported subject is a man called Martim, who believes he has killed his wife and flees deep into the Brazilian interior, where he finds work as a farm laborer. The real concerns of the highly allegorical novel are language and creation. In 1962, the work was awarded the Carmen Dolores Barbosa Prize for the best novel of the previous year. Around this time she began a relationship with the poet [[Paulo Mendes Campos]], an old friend. Mendes Campos was married and the relationship did not endure.<ref>Her marriage with the diplomat Maury Gurgel Valente seems to have been a marriage of convenience. Gurgel was more interested than she was. After the end of her marriage to Gurgel, Lispector fell in love with poet Paulo Mendes Campos ("Byron, at 23"). "For a brief time, Clarice and Paulinho lived a great passion. (...) They were an odd couple: Clarice, tall, blond and glamorous; and Paulinho (...) short, dark and, despite his charm, physically unattractive." In terms of neurosis, the two were made for each other," said Ivan Lessa. In Bula Revista (January 13, 2010) by Euler França Belém</ref>

===''The Passion According to G.H.'' and ''The Foreign Legion''===
{{main|The Passion According to G.H.}}
In 1964, Lispector published one of her most shocking and famous books, ''[[The Passion According to G.H.|A paixão segundo G.H.]]'', about a woman who, in the maid's room of her comfortable Rio penthouse, endures a mystical experience that leads to her eating part of a cockroach. In the same year, she published another book of stories and miscellany, ''The Foreign Legion''.

The American translator [[Gregory Rabassa]], who first encountered Lispector in the mid-1960s, at a conference on Brazilian literature, in Texas, recalled being "flabbergasted to meet that rare person [Lispector] who looked like [[Marlene Dietrich]] and wrote like [[Virginia Woolf]]".<ref>{{cite web |last=Salamon |first=Julie |author-link=Julie Salamon |title=An Enigmatic Author Who Can Be Addictive |publisher=[[The New York Times]]. nytimes.com |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/11/books/an-enigmatic-author-who-can-be-addictive.html |date=March 11, 2005 |access-date=March 31, 2018}}</ref>

On September 14, 1966, Lispector suffered a serious accident in her apartment. After taking a sleeping pill, she fell asleep in her bed with a lit cigarette. She was seriously injured and her right hand almost had to be amputated. {{blockquote|text=The fire I suffered a while back partially destroyed my right hand. My legs were marked forever. What happened was very sad and I prefer not to think about it. All I can say is that I spent three days in hell, where—so they say—bad people go after death. I don't consider myself bad and I experienced it while still alive.<ref>Gotlib, p. 368.</ref>}}

The next year, Lispector published her first children's book, ''O Mistério do coelho pensante'' (''The Mystery of the Thinking Rabbit'', 1967), a translation of a book she had written in [[Washington, D.C.|Washington]], in English, for her son Paulo. In August 1967, she began writing a weekly column ("''[[crônica]]''") for the ''[[Jornal do Brasil]]'', an important Rio newspaper, which greatly expanded her fame beyond the intellectual and artistic circles that had long admired her. These pieces were later collected in the posthumous work ''A Descoberta do mundo'' (''The Discovery of the World'', 1984).

===''The Woman Who Killed the Fish'' and ''An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasure''s===
In 1968, Lispector participated in the political demonstrations against Brazil's hardening military dictatorship, and also published two books: her second work for children, ''A Mulher que matou os peixes'' (''The Woman Who Killed the Fish''), in which the narrator, Clarice, confesses to having forgotten to feed her son's fish, and ''An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures.''

Her first novel since ''G.H.'', ''Uma Aprendizagem ou O Livro dos Prazeres'' was a love story between a primary teacher, Lóri, and a philosophy teacher, Ulisses. The book drew on her writings in her newspaper columns, as she conducted interviews for the glossy magazine ''Manchete''. The book received a new translation in April 2021 by New Directions. ''Cleveland Review of Books'' called it "a novel about the distance between people, but also the distances between the self and the self, the self and 'the God.'"<ref>{{Cite web|title=The Nothing is The Everything: On Clarice Lispector's "An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures"|url=https://www.clereviewofbooks.com/home/clarice-lispector-an-apprenticeship-review|access-date=December 7, 2021|website=Cleveland Review of Books|language=en-US}}</ref>

=== ''Covert Joy'' and ''Água Viva (The Stream of Life)'' ===

In 1971, Lispector published another book of stories, ''Felicidade clandestina'' (''Covert Joy''), several of which hearkened back to memories of her childhood in [[Recife]]. She began working on the book that many would consider her finest, ''[[Água Viva (novel)|Água Viva]]'' (''The Stream of Life''), though she struggled to complete it. Olga Borelli, a former nun who entered her life around this time and became her faithful assistant and friend, recalled: {{blockquote|text=She was insecure and asked a few people for their opinion. With other books Clarice didn't show that insecurity. With ''Água viva'' she did. That was the only time I saw Clarice hesitate before handing in a book to the publisher. She herself said that.<ref>Franco Júnior, Arnaldo. "Clarice, segundo Olga Borelli", ''Minas Gerais Suplemento Literário'', December 19, 1987, pp. 8-9.</ref>}} When the book came out in 1973, it was instantly acclaimed as a masterpiece. "With this fiction," one critic wrote, "Clarice Lispector awakens the literature currently being produced in Brazil from a depressing and degrading lethargy and elevates it to a level of universal perennity and perfection."<ref>Ribeiro, Leo Gilson. "Auto-inspeção." ''Veja'' (September 19, 1973).</ref> The book is an interior monologue with an unnamed first person narrator to an unnamed "you", and has been described as having a musical quality, with the frequent return of certain passages.<ref name="iowareview.uiowa.edu">[http://iowareview.uiowa.edu/reviews/oct-14-2013/clarice_lispector_s_gua_viva "Clarice Lispector's Água Viva"] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131020083139/http://iowareview.uiowa.edu/reviews/oct-14-2013/clarice_lispector_s_gua_viva |date=October 20, 2013 }}, ''Iowa Review''.</ref> ''Água viva'' was first translated into English in 1978 as ''The Stream of Life'', with a new translation by Stefan Tobler published in 2012.<ref name="iowareview.uiowa.edu" />

===''Where Were You at Night'' and ''The Via Crucis of the Body''===
In 1974, Lispector published two books of stories, ''Onde estivestes de noite'' (''Where Were You at Night'')—which focuses in part on the lives of aging women—and ''A via crucis do corpo'' (''The Via Crucis of the Body''). Though her previous books had often taken her years to complete, the latter was written in three days, after a challenge from her publisher, [[Álvaro Pacheco]], to write stories about themes relating to sex. Part of the reason she wrote so much may have had to do with her having been unexpectedly fired from the ''Jornal do Brasil'' at the end of 1973, which put her under increasing financial pressure. She began to paint and intensified her activity as a translator, publishing translations of [[Agatha Christie]], [[Oscar Wilde]], and [[Edgar Allan Poe]].

In 1975 she was invited to the First World Congress of Sorcery in [[Bogotá]], an event which garnered wide press coverage and increased her notoriety. At the conference, her story "The Egg and the Hen", first published in ''The Foreign Legion'', was read in English. {{blockquote|text="The Egg and the Hen" is mysterious and does indeed have a bit of occultism. It is a difficult and profound story. That is why I think the audience, very mixed, would have been happier if I had pulled a rabbit out of my hat. Or fallen into a trance. Listen, I never did anything like that in my life. My inspiration does not come from the supernatural, but from unconscious elaboration, which comes to the surface as a kind of revelation. Moreover, I don't write in order to gratify anybody else.<ref>Isa Cambará, "Clarice Lispector--Não escrevo para agradar a ninguém," ''Folha de S.Paulo'', September 10, 1975.</ref>}}

===''A Breath of Life'' and ''The Hour of the Star''===
{{main|The Hour of the Star}}

Lispector worked on a book called ''Um sopro de vida: pulsações'' (''[[A Breath of Life]]: Pulsations'') that would be published posthumously in the mid-1970s. The book consists of a dialogue between an "Author" and his creation, Angela Pralini, a character whose name was borrowed from a character in a story in ''Where Were You at Night''. She used this fragmentary form for her final and perhaps most famous novel, ''A Hora da estrela'' (''The Hour of the Star'', 1977), piecing the story together, with the help of Olga Borelli, from notes scrawled on loose bits of paper. ''The Hour of the Star'' tells the story of Macabéa, one of the iconic characters in Brazilian literature, a starving, poor typist from [[Alagoas]], the state where Lispector's family first arrived, lost in the metropolis of Rio de Janeiro. Macabéa's name refers to the [[Maccabees]], and is one of the very few overtly [[Jews|Jewish]] references in Lispector's work. Its explicit focus on Brazilian poverty and marginality was also new.<ref>{{cite web |last1=Martins |first1=Gilberto Figueiredo |title=A narrativa da peregrinação – experiência e forma (uma leitura do Itinerarium Aetheriae) |url=https://revistas.pucsp.br/index.php/kaliope/article/view/7881 |website=Kalíope. Revista do Programa de Estudos Pós-Graduados em Literatura e Crítica Literária |access-date=27 October 2024 |language=pt |date=2011}}</ref>