Reading post: Clarice Lispector in July

The long hot month of July is over, so it's time for another reading post. In July I decided to read books by Clarice Lispector (1920-1977). She was around my mother's age, but led a completely different life. She was born in Ukraine, but her (Jewish) parents emigrated to Brazil when she was a baby to escape the pogroms after World War I. She earned a law degree and published her first novel at the age of 23. Then she married a classmate who was a diplomat, lived with him in Italy, England, and the U.S., and had two sons. Finally in her late 30s she left her husband to return to Brazil, where she lived another 20 years before dying of cancer.

For years I've read references to her as being an "important" writer, but I've never read her or met anyone who's read her. Who is this person? I decided to find out.

• The Apple in the Dark (1961), translated by Benjamin Moser. This was the first book to arrive at the library, but it was NOT a good introduction to Clarice Lispector. It is the longest (385 pages) and most complex of her works, and I spent five miserable days reading it. The story: a man who is running away from a crime he committed ends up at a ranch owned by an older woman. She hires him to do menial work for low pay, and eventually reports him to the authorities. But that's not what the book is "about" -- it's about the man's epiphanies, which I mostly didn't understand. The language, the phrasing was so difficult, so hard to read. I read a Goodreads review that suggested maybe there was something wrong with this translation, that Benjamin Moser made the language weirder than it is in Portuguese. But Moser claims the Portuguese is even weirder than what he did with the English. In the Afterword by her son, he says the book was "a commercial and critical success in Brazil." I'm sorry, but there is no way this book, as translated, could be any sort of a success in an English-speaking country. I don't know. Reading The Apple in the Dark made me feel stupid and I did not enjoy it.
  
  
• The Passion According to G.H. (1964), translated by Idra Novey. According to Wikipedia, "one of her most shocking and famous books." OK, now this was better. And I suspect it's because Idra Novey is a novelist and poet in addition to being a translator. However, this is a very strange book. A wealthy woman who lives in a high-rise apartment in Rio de Janeiro goes into her maid's room (her maid had quit the day before) and discovers that it is more empty than she expected, with strange drawings on the wall. But when she opens the door of the wardrobe she sees a very large cockroach. She closes the door on it and manages to cut the cockroach mostly in half, trapping it so that it stares out at her, still alive, while a thick white paste oozes out of it. And that's about all that happens, except that toward the end she actually eats some of the cockroach, some of the white paste. (I guess I should have said SPOILER! but this information is all over the internet.)
  
  The rest of the book is all philosophizing, which was hard for me to follow. She talks a lot about what she and the cockroach have in common, and I liked that part. But many pages I read without comprehending. In the Afterword to the next book I read, her son explains how this novel was actually very political, that people like the maid were in desperate straits, that the cockroach represents the maid... Oh dear, I did not get that at all...
  
  
• The Hour of the Star (1977), translated by Benjamin Moser. Her last novel, published the year she died, and it's recommended as a place to start reading her. Now having read it, I'm debating whether or not that's true. It's very short, less than 100 pages. At first, I didn't like it any better than the other two, and I didn't find it so easy to read. But the book improved. It's the story of a very poor, disadvantaged young woman named Macabea (probably Jewish), from northeastern Brazil, and she is very sweet and easy to like, though her story is terrible. The problem is the structure: Macabea's story is told by a male narrator named Rodrigo who I found irritating. He doesn't sound male, he sounds exactly like Clarice Lispector -- so why did she bother trying to create him? Once he gets out of the way, I was charmed by Macabea, but I'm not sure it's fair to ignore Rodrigo. He has a purpose, something to do with how narrative works. As with all Lispector's books, I was confused by this one.
  

So what's my final word on Clarice Lispector? I don't think she translates well, and more context would be helpful. There's a spark there, but I'm having trouble grasping it. Maybe because you can't really grasp a spark, if I'm going to continue that metaphor. I liked the second and third books better than the first, but I can't really say I liked them. I didn't fall under her spell, as people are said to.

Part of me thinks I should go on reading her. Maybe her short stories -- they're supposed to be more accessible than her novels, and very good. But for the most part I don't think she's really my kind of writer, and I'm puzzled by all the people who think she's amazing. Well, anyway, I tried.

***

In July, I also read, very slowly, a long (over 500 pages), weird biography of Florence Harding, Warren G.'s wife. I started it in June and spent the first half of July reading it as well. I would read Clarice Lispector during the long hot days and the Harding bio at night before I turned out my light. It was supposed to make me sleepy, and sometimes it did, but I finally finished it. 

Florence Harding was an interesting person and an interesting First Lady, but at the same time she was sort of awful. Her marriage to Warren G. was a disaster, but she never gave up on it, never gave up on trying to prevent Warren from cheating on her, even though they hadn't been intimate in many years. She made terrible decisions regarding who to trust (as of course did he). I don't know. Strange lady, strange book. I think I'm done with the Hardings for now, until someone writes a better book about them. I've already requested a biography of Calvin Coolidge from Prospector.

It was also my month to read a book I already own from the bookcase in the dining room, so I grabbed Beyond the Hundredth Meridian by Wallace Stegner and spent the last few days of the month engrossed in that. It's about John Wesley Powell, the first person to map the Colorado River. The first section, about exploring the river, was fascinating, and then it gradually bogged down, with its detailed chronicle of the failures of politicians of that time. Still very interesting for anyone who lives in the dry, dry west. 

The only thing was -- it was published in 1952. I wanted an update! Obviously Wallace Stegner has been dead a long time, but I feel as though someone else should write a final chapter that could be tacked on. But, of course, the story will never be over. Water in the west will be fought over as long as there are people in the west.

***

I've been really torn recently regarding the accusations against Alice Munro. Such a great writer, and then it turns out that she blew off her own daughter when the daughter, Andrea, revealed that Munro's second husband had abused her sexually. Munro refused to denounce her husband and maybe even blamed Andrea for the abuse, I don't know. Such an old, ugly story: mothers not believing daughters, mothers choosing to stay with abusers, mothers not protecting daughters...

I just can't think about Alice Munro the same way anymore. I don't really want to read her at all now. But does that make sense? I don't like "cancel culture" for the most part, although it's nice when some very powerful man gets cut down to size. I don't know.

Another writer in the news recently is Neil Gaiman, who has been accused of sexual abuse. The women who have spoken out were "of age" (barely) and the abuse occurred within consensual relationships, but it's hard to know what "consent" would mean when one person is much older, famous, and in one case the woman's employer. It's thought that this is probably the tip of the iceberg...

I love Gaiman's spooky, weird books, and it doesn't make them (much) less wonderful if I know their author is an asshole. That's because I've never turned to Neil Gaiman for advice on how to live my life. He's just fun. So for now I will still read Neil Gaiman. Maybe. 

But is this fair? To get angry at Munro and give Gaiman a pass? I feel sorrier for Alice Munro's daughter, who was nine years old when the abuse started, but I also feel sorry for these young women whose trust Neil Gaiman abused. 

I wish great writers could just not be assholes, but a lot of them are. So what do you do?

***

This month the New York Times published a list of what it thinks are the 100 best books so far of the 21st century (books published from 2000 to 2024). I discovered that I'd read 26 (now 27) of the 100 books -- and I'd like to read several of the others. So now I'm adding that goal to my reading plans, as if I needed another goal. There's also now another list, of 100 best books submitted by readers who didn't like the NY Times list. It's similar to the NY Times list, but contains more mainstream fiction (I've read 34 out of the 100 on that list).

Of the top 10 books on the main NY Times list, I'd read five, so I thought maybe reading the others would be a place to start (the greyed-out titles are the ones I've read). And so I read Austerlitz, which I already had sitting in my to-be-read pile, and was blown away by it. I love everything I've read by W. G. Sebald, but that book is incredible.

1. My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
2. The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson
3. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
4. The Known World by Edward P. Jones
5. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
6. 2666 by Roberto Bolano
7. The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
8. Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald
9. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
10. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
    

In August, it's time for another male author, and for some reason those are harder for me to come up with, even though the world is full of male authors. I thought seriously of choosing Kafka, but after Clarice Lispector's cockroach, I needed a break from stories about insects.

So I took a closer look at that NY Times list. There are several male authors with two books on the list, so I thought I'd choose one of them. First I thought I'd go with Philip Roth. I've read several early books by Roth, but nothing in a long time. He's won all sorts of awards for his later works, but I haven't felt inspired to read them. Still, I thought I could give him one month of my life. But then I realized that his two books on the NY Times list are both checked out at the library.

So then I considered Denis Johnson, whose Train Dreams I actually have meant to read for a long time. But his two books on the NY Times list are not only checked out, they have long waiting lists. I think I'm not the only person in Boulder who's decided to read everything on the NY Times list!

Hmm. OK, well, what about Colson Whitehead? He's written a lot of books, they're always well reviewed, and one of his books is at #7 on the list. Plus, his books aren't all checked out.

Not to keep you in suspense, or anything, but I ended up not deciding. I got a book by Colson Whitehead out of the library, but I also got a book by Denis Johnson and a book by Philip Roth and a book by Percival Everett. And I'll just see how it goes. Depending on who I like, I could put my name on some waiting lists, check out the Bookworm or Barnes & Noble, even order something from Amazon. August is a long month. We'll see how it goes.