Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector by Benjamin Moser offers
what seems to be the fullest account possible of the life and thought pro-
cesses of a writer who did not like to be interviewed and whose friends and
relations speak, after her death, of a person whose behaviour and thought
processes were sometimes contradictory and bewildering.
Moser is often gushing in his praise of Lispector, placing her, I think, in a too-
exalted position in the best of 20th c. literature. He seems, at times, to
become caught up in the idolatrous mythology that her Brasilian readership
promulgated, questioning it , to be sure, but retaining some of the feverish
enthusiasm her name evoked .
For those of us who find her work strangely fascinating but, at times,
baffling, Moser goes deeply into the origins of her philosophy and artistic
desire. The history of her parents' and sisters' terrible suffering in Ukraine
and Russia during the civil war is appalling and their stoicism in the fight for
survival humbling. Lispector was born in Russia during the family's migration
from one place to another, as they sought a way out to the west and arrived
with them as an infant in Brazil in 1922. Being the youngest, she felt less the
poverty of the family's first years in their new home, but was burdened with a
sense of having to "save" her ill mother. When Mania (an apt name, unfortu-
nately) Lispector died in 1930, when Lispector was 8 years old, the
child felt burdened then with a sense of failure and guilt that lasted all her life.
"Like Kafka, she despaired; but unlike Kafka she eventually, and
excruciatingly, struck out in search of the God that had abandoned her."
"She recounted her quest" in a way that describes " the soul of a Jewish
mystic who knows that God is dead and, in the kind of paradox that recurs
throughout her work, is determined to find Him anyway."
Moser discovers the many and contradictory ideas of who and what she was
in the eyes of her admirers and detracters: " . . .a woman and a man, a native
and a foreigner, a Jew and a Christian, a child and an adult, an animal and a
person, a lesbian and a housewife, a witch and a saint."
She never liked the fawning adoration and speculation heaped upon her: "My
mystery . . . is that I have no mystery." "I need money . . . The position of a
myth is not very comfortable." "They wouldn't understand a Clarice Lispector
who paints her toenails red."
This biography is well worth reading for anyone interested in Lispector or in
how a person with a troubled soul and a mind often suicidally depressed can
find in art a means to "confess" or to express her most profound thoughts
and feelings, a voice that speaks in symbols but with disturbing clarity to her
readers.