Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector

Letters are quite small : - (

Lispector is a mystery that has been with me ever since I was a child. I relate a lot to her. The author provides some good reseach and insight about her life, which debunks some myths. This makes the book worth it. However, there are some assumptions to do with religious beliefs and you can see a male perspective on it which is sometimes condescending. Either way, more information about her then you'll ever find elsewhere.

This is Benjamin Moser's first biography, and here he demonstrates his innovative and thorough method of reading through the writer's published work and disjecta membra to create an approximation of her mental state, anguished and redolent with guilt while having to put on the happy, gracious face of a diplomat's wife. Anyone who imagines Latin American literature as alien and provincial will find Lispector's writing to be anything but, and Benjamin Moser's attention to the quotidian detail of her life answers the question posed by the book's title (Why This World? So Lispector could write about it!) Moser follows Lispector from her early childhood, when her family’s "civilized" world devolved into the horror of war and then Holocaust, to a life of (apparent) ease in Brazil, a land of vast social disparity, which the writer’s family found itself at the top of, along with the country’s benevolent dictators. This account of a sensibility undimmed by humanity's never-ending tendencies to commit atrocities on scales large or small, is well worth reading, along with Lispector’s creepy, touching, amazing novels and stories.

excellently written and a fascinating subject

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