Passion According to G.H – Lispector Clarice (2014)

G.H., a wealthy sculptor from Rio, enters her maid’s room, which is clear and white “as in an insane asylum from which dangerous objects have been removed.” There she sees a black, dusty, prehistoric cockroach crawling out of the wardrobe and, panicking, slams the door on it. Her irresistible fascination with the dying insect provokes a spiritual crisis in which she questions her place in the universe and her very identity, propelling her towards an act of shocking transgression. Clarice Lispector’s spare, deeply disturbing yet luminous novel transforms language into something otherworldly and is one of her most unsettling and compelling works. Clarice Lispector was a Brazilian novelist and short story writer whose innovations in fiction brought her international renown. She was born in Ukraine in 1920, but after the First World War and the Russian Civil War, her family fled to Romania and eventually sailed to Brazil. She published her first novel, Near to the Wildheart, in 1943 at the age of twenty-three, and the following year received the Graca Aranha Prize for the best first novel. Many felt that she had given Brazilian literature a unique voice within the wider context of Portuguese literature. After living in Italy, the United Kingdom, Switzerland and the United States, Lispector returned to Brazil with her children in 1959, where she wrote her most influential novels, including The Passion According to G.H. She died in 1977, shortly after the publication of her final novel, The Hour of the Star.