Her great friend Lúcio Cardoso, a slightly older novelist, assured her that the fragments were a book in themselves. At length the book took shape, but she feared it was more a pile of notes than a full-fledged novel. To concentrate, she quit the tiny maid’s room in the apartment she shared with her sisters and brother-in-law and spent a month in a nearby boardinghouse, where she worked intensely. She pieced the book together by jotting down her ideas in a notebook whenever they occurred to her. She had published some stories and journalism, and turned to one of her colleagues, Francisco de Assis Barbosa, for help with the novel she had begun writing. In February, she had transferred to the newspaper A Noite ( The Night), once one of the glories of Brazilian journalism but by then under the direction of the dictatorial Getúlio Vargas government. When Lispector began writing, in March 1942, she was still a law student at the Faculdade Nacional de Direito ( National Law School), and was also working as a journalist. It has been translated into English twice, the first by Giovanni Pontiero in 1990, and again by Alison Entrekin in 2012. The book, particularly its revolutionary language, brought its young, unknown creator to great prominence in Brazilian letters and earned her the prestigious Graça Aranha Prize. The novel, written in a stream-of-consciousness style reminiscent of the English-language Modernists, centers on the childhood and early adulthood of a character named Joana, who bears strong resemblance to her author: " Madame Bovary, c'est moi", Lispector said, quoting Flaubert, when asked about the similarities. Near to the Wild Heart ( Perto do coração selvagem) is Clarice Lispector's first novel, written from March to November 1942 and published around her twenty-third birthday in December 1943.
0 kommentar(er)
