Benjamin Moser

Oxford University Press

July 2009

A.J. Goldmann

The French writer Hélène Cixous likened her to a female Kafka and the Elizabeth Bishop claimed she was “better than Borges.” In Brazil today, her books are sold in vending machines in subway stations and her image adorns postage stamps. But the Portuguese-language author Clarice Lispector has yet to secure a place of widespread literary recognition in this country.

Now, we have the first English-language biography of the writer from Benjamin Moser, New Books columnist for Harper’s Magazine.

The unfortunate dearth of translations of her works has meant the sensual and utterly unique prose of this “radical mystic author” is not as widely known as it should be. In the English-speaking work, her reputation mostly rests on the collection of short stories Family Ties and her final novel, The Hour of the Star.

Clarice Lispector was born Chaya Pinkhasonva on December 10, 1920 in Checkelnik, part of the western Ukrainian province of Podolia. Her parent fled the pogroms that followed the Russian Revolution, and arrived in Brazil when Clarice was not a year and a half old. The family settled in Recife, where the first synagogue of the New World, Kahal zur Israel had been founded in 1637.

“Madame Bovary c’est moi,” the mysterious and beautiful author once responded to a journalist’s question about similarities between her and one of her fictional creations. Throughout this unique biography, Moser uses her novels as a key to unlock the mysteries of her life, which he often examines through the prism of Jewish mysticism.

“I am a mystic,” she once professed in an interview. Moser argues that Lispector struck out in search of the God who abandoned her and recorded that search through her writings as bound up in questions of language and its utility in understanding God. Moser claims that Lispector partook in the mystical experience by “removing language to discover an ultimate and necessarily nameless, truth.”

The connections the Moser makes between Lispector’s spiritual atheism and the Jewish mystical tradition is the most interesting part of his analysis, although he doesn’t give himself the space necessary to make a thoroughly convincing argument. For instance, Moser uses mysticism to fuse Lispector’s preoccupations with God and language as represented by “the great holy name of God, which for the Jews is simultaneously unknowable and the ultimate mystical goal.”

Following Gershom Scholem, Moser claims that “mysticism as a historical phenomenon is a product of crises.” Moser contends that the “tragic consistency” of the Jewish experience allowed Lispector to recreate ”the entire ethical and spiritual structure of Judaism” in her fiction. Jewish motifs are, he claims are, “reworked, disguised, but undeniably present,” he claims. But were they deliberate? In a footnote, Moser tells us that the Jewish ideas in her fiction “seem to have developed from her own insights, not from any prolonged study of other writers.”

The exception here is Spinoza. Moser mentions the recent discovery of a French anthology of Spinoza in Lispector’s library that explains the Spinozian echoes in her first novel, Near to the Wild Heart. There she wrote: “Nothing else can be created, only revealed.” Like Spinoza, she rejected the idea of a conscious God as “horribly unsatisfying.” In essence, part of the vision of the novel is of the world as a constant flow, “an infinite chain of cause and effect.”

Lispector was often accused of being obscure and avant-garde, but she herself claimed to never be playing games. Moser makes a convincing argument for seeing her unique writing style as part of her lifelong quest for an “authentic language in which meaning and expression are finally united.”

In Near to the Wild Heart, Lispector wrote that “vision consists of capturing the symbol of the thing in the thing itself,” which Moser links to the mystical quest of “the word that has its own light”: “Just as God, in Clarice’s writing, is utterly devoid of any moral meaning, so does language signify nothing beyond what it expresses,” he argues.

Moser uses the cabalistic notion of striving for nothingness as a way of encountering the divine to describe Lispector’s agenda. Moser most successfully integrates his discussion of mysticism, Spinoza and language in discussing The Passion According to G.H. It is here, Moser contends, that she describes her encounter with God, whom she approaches only passing through “the opposite of the thing being approached,” until she reaches the conclusion that “beyond mankind, there is nothing else at all.”

As Moser shows, Lispector was not always a critical darling. Critics wrote of “the writer tangled in her own web of precious images” and prose that “succumbs beneath the weight of her own richness.”

Even after we’ve been being guided through “one of the most extraordinary careers in twentieth-century literature,” Lispector remains as cryptic as much of her fiction, since Moser serves us generous helpings of mysticism and literary criticism. It is equally puzzling when her reputation was made. At various points in the book, Moser tells us “by now, she was a household name,” or “she enjoyed a great reputation throughout Latin America.” The book leaves off with the author’s death in 1977 and does not discuss her posthumous reception and influence.

While the book is thoroughly researched and well written, Moser’s analysis of Lispector’s output is somewhat uneven (he hardly discusses Family Ties except to say that it “cemented her reputation”) and the book suffers in places from frequent repetition and a not a few grandiose statements.

For an author as radically individualistic as Lispector, it is difficult to compare her with other authors, and Moser rarely attempts this. Brazilian literary critics often drew connections with modernists, but Lispector herself denied the influence of figures like Joyce and Woolf.

In the end, “Why this World” is an uneasy mixture of biographical sleuthing, mystical exegesis and literary analysis; the last of which is most successful in discussing G.H. and The Hour of the Star, the work where “her inflexible individuality would find its last and greatest expression.” What isn’t as persuasive is whether Clarice truly “became her own fiction.” Even so, Moser should be applauded for writing a biography that will hopefully introduce Lispector to a broader readership.