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A review by casparb
Água Viva by Clarice Lispector
5.0
I think Clarice is the only artist to me that matches Sydney Graham. This is the-and-yes-I-really-mean-it-Sublime.
//the word is my fourth dimension//
I am in the fullest awe - I do wish 6 stars were available. I think this may be my favourite of her novels. What on earth. I want to memorise this book. I didn't mention WSG without reason- he is to be found all over this.
//I found my counterpoint in the landscape without picturesqueness and without beauty. Ugliness is my banner of war. I love the ugly with the love of equals. And I defy death. I-I am my own death//
She is exquisite: radiant. There is a sense, in the last third of this novel, of the artist riding the dark comet we see at times shining, in the eyes of Artaud or Bruegel's Mad Meg. Clarice dares to tinge becoming-madness into art in such a way that I am almost certain is entirely her own: let us not forget that Foucalt describes madness as the opposite of art. She is at the peak of what it means to express here.
//Listen to me, listen to the silence. What I say to you is never what I say to you but something else instead. It captures a thing that escapes me and yet I live from it and am above a shining darkness//
A text that kept returning to my thoughts here was Bataille's Theory of Religion, surprisingly as I didn't really love that book. I think she does it better. Perhaps I'm obsessed. We have Heidegger, we have effervescent temporality, we have more it is unending.
//Mirror? That crystallised void that has in itself enough space to go ever ceaselessly forward: for mirror is the deepest space that exists. And it is a magic thing: whoever has a broken piece can go with it to meditate in the desert. Seeing oneself is extraordinary. Like a cat whose fur bristles, I bristle when faced with myself. From the desert I would also return empty, illuminated and translucent, and with the same vibrating silence of a mirror//
I think this is also the most sexual of her novels. Hour of the Star has its adolescent frictions between characters, but here I think she approaches more of what sexuality can mean in itself. Related to that, she encounters childbirth, as self-destruction and more. Clarice declares her own becoming-animal in this text in such a way that did cause my head to explode please wish my remains well.
//the word is my fourth dimension//
I am in the fullest awe - I do wish 6 stars were available. I think this may be my favourite of her novels. What on earth. I want to memorise this book. I didn't mention WSG without reason- he is to be found all over this.
//I found my counterpoint in the landscape without picturesqueness and without beauty. Ugliness is my banner of war. I love the ugly with the love of equals. And I defy death. I-I am my own death//
She is exquisite: radiant. There is a sense, in the last third of this novel, of the artist riding the dark comet we see at times shining, in the eyes of Artaud or Bruegel's Mad Meg. Clarice dares to tinge becoming-madness into art in such a way that I am almost certain is entirely her own: let us not forget that Foucalt describes madness as the opposite of art. She is at the peak of what it means to express here.
//Listen to me, listen to the silence. What I say to you is never what I say to you but something else instead. It captures a thing that escapes me and yet I live from it and am above a shining darkness//
A text that kept returning to my thoughts here was Bataille's Theory of Religion, surprisingly as I didn't really love that book. I think she does it better. Perhaps I'm obsessed. We have Heidegger, we have effervescent temporality, we have more it is unending.
//Mirror? That crystallised void that has in itself enough space to go ever ceaselessly forward: for mirror is the deepest space that exists. And it is a magic thing: whoever has a broken piece can go with it to meditate in the desert. Seeing oneself is extraordinary. Like a cat whose fur bristles, I bristle when faced with myself. From the desert I would also return empty, illuminated and translucent, and with the same vibrating silence of a mirror//
I think this is also the most sexual of her novels. Hour of the Star has its adolescent frictions between characters, but here I think she approaches more of what sexuality can mean in itself. Related to that, she encounters childbirth, as self-destruction and more. Clarice declares her own becoming-animal in this text in such a way that did cause my head to explode please wish my remains well.