Clarice Lispector

Clarice Lispector (December 10 1920 - December 9 1977) was a Brazilian writer.

Related Topics:
December 10 - 1920 - December 9 - 1977 - Brazilian

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Considered perhaps the greatest Brazilian prose writer of the twentieth century, Clarice Lispector was born in Chechelnyk, a village in Ukraine and moved to Brazil when she was two years old. Her family first settled in Maceió, Alagoas, where her mother had family, and later moved to Recife, Pernambuco. After her mother's death, the family moved again, to Rio de Janeiro, where she studied law and married her classmate Maury Gurgel Valente. After he entered the diplomatic corps she moved to Europe, living in Naples, Berne, Torquay (England), and Washington. She returned to Brazil in 1959.

Related Topics:
Chechelnyk - Ukraine - Brazil - Maceió - Alagoas - Recife - Pernambuco - Rio de Janeiro

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Her family was Jewish, and some scholars who have studied her books have found a great influence of the Jewish thought in some of her stories. In 1944 she published her first novel Perto do Coração Selvagem (Close to the Wild Heart). When the novel was published, many claimed that her stream-of-consciousness writing style was under heavy influence of Virginia Woolf or James Joyce, but she had read neither of these authors. This novel, like all of her subsequent works, was marked by an intense focus on interior emotional states.

Related Topics:
1944 - Virginia Woolf - James Joyce

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She died of cancer in 1977 just one day before her 57th birthday and she was buried in the Jewish Cemetery of Cajú, in Rio de Janeiro.

Related Topics:
1977 - Rio de Janeiro

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Her last famous novel is A Hora da Estrela, or The Hour of the Star, where the life of Macabéa, a poor woman living in Rio de Janeiro, is described by a narrator called Rodrigo S.M, a fictional writer. Written near the end of her life, A Hora da Estrela diverged from the themes and style of most of her work, instead directly and explicitly focusing on poverty and marginality in Brazil.

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Her sister Elisa Lispector was also a respected Brazilian novelist.

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