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Clarice Lispector Biography & Facts

Clarice Lispector (born Chaya Pinkhasivna Lispector (Ukrainian: Хая Пінкасівна Ліспектор; Yiddish: חיה פּינקאַסיװנאַ ליספּעקטאָר) December 10, 1920 – December 9, 1977) was a Ukrainian-born Brazilian novelist and short story writer. Her innovative, idiosyncratic works explore a variety of narrative styles with themes of intimacy and introspection, and have subsequently been internationally acclaimed. Born to a Jewish family in Podolia in Western Ukraine, as an infant she moved to Brazil with her family, amidst the disasters engulfing her native land following the First World War. She grew up in Recife, the capital of the northeastern state of Pernambuco, where her mother died when she was nine. The family moved to Rio de Janeiro when she was in her teens. While in law school in Rio, she began publishing her first journalistic work and short stories, catapulting to fame at the age of 23 with the publication of her first novel, Near to the Wild Heart (Perto do Coração Selvagem), written as an interior monologue in a style and language that was considered revolutionary in Brazil. She left Brazil in 1944 following her marriage to a Brazilian diplomat, and spent the next decade and a half in Europe and the United States. After returning to Rio de Janeiro in 1959, she published the stories of Family Ties (Laços de Família) and the novel The Passion According to G.H. (A Paixão Segundo G.H.). Injured in an accident in 1966, she spent the last decade of her life in frequent pain, steadily writing and publishing novels and stories, including Água Viva, until her premature death in 1977. She has been the subject of numerous books, and references to her and her work are common in Brazilian literature and music. Several of her works have been turned into films. In 2009, the American writer Benjamin Moser published Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector. Since that publication, her works have been the object of an extensive project of retranslation, published by New Directions Publishing and Penguin Modern Classics, the first Brazilian to enter that prestigious series. Moser, who is also the editor of her anthology The Complete Stories (2015), describes Lispector as the most important Jewish writer in the world since Kafka. Early life, emigration and Recife Clarice Lispector was born Chaya Lispector in Chechelnyk, Podolia, a shtetl in what is today Ukraine. She was the youngest of three daughters of Pinkhas Lispector and Mania Krimgold Lispector. Her family suffered terribly in the pogroms that followed the dissolution of the Russian Empire, circumstances later dramatized in her older sister Elisa Lispector's autobiographical novel No exílio (In Exile, 1948). They eventually managed to flee to Romania, from where they emigrated to Brazil, where her mother Mania had relatives. They sailed from Hamburg and arrived in Brazil in the early months of 1922, when Chaya (Clarice) was little more than one year old. The Lispectors changed their names upon arrival. Pinkhas became Pedro; Mania became Marieta; Leah became Elisa, and Chaya became Clarice. Only the middle daughter, Tania (April 19, 1915 – November 15, 2007), kept her name. They first settled in the northeastern city of Maceió, Alagoas. After three years, during which Marieta's health deteriorated rapidly, they moved to the city of Recife, Pernambuco, settling in the neighbourhood of Boa Vista, where they lived at number 367 in the Praça Maciel Pinheiro and later in the Rua da Imperatriz. In Recife, where her father continued to struggle economically, her mother – who was paralysed (although some speculate she had been raped in the Ukraine pogroms, there is no confirmation on this by relatives and close friends ) – finally died on September 21, 1930, aged 42, when Clarice was nine. Clarice attended the Colégio Hebreo-Idisch-Brasileiro, which taught Hebrew and Yiddish in addition to the usual subjects. In 1932, she gained admission to the Ginásio Pernambucano, then the most prestigious secondary school in the state. A year later, strongly influenced by Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf, she "consciously claimed the desire to write". In 1935, Pedro Lispector decided to move with his daughters to the then-capital, Rio de Janeiro, where he hoped to find more economic opportunity and also to find Jewish husbands for his daughters. The family lived in the neighborhood of São Cristóvão, north of downtown Rio, before moving to Tijuca. In 1937, she entered the Law School of the University of Brazil, then one of the most prestigious institutions of higher learning in the country. Her first known story, "Triunfo", was published in the magazine Pan on May 25, 1940. Soon afterwards, on August 26, 1940, as a result of a botched gallbladder operation, her beloved father died, aged 55. While still in law school, Clarice began working as a journalist, first at the official government press service the Agência Nacional and then at the important newspaper A Noite. Lispector would come into contact with the younger generation of Brazilian writers, including Lúcio Cardoso, with whom she fell in love. Cardoso was gay, however, and she soon began seeing a law school colleague named Maury Gurgel Valente, who had entered the Brazilian Foreign Service, known as Itamaraty. In order to marry a diplomat, she had to be naturalized, which she did as soon as she came of age. On January 12, 1943, she was granted Brazilian citizenship. Eleven days later she married Gurgel. Near to the Wild Heart In December 1943, she published her first novel, Perto do coração selvagem (Near to the Wild Heart). The novel, which tells of the inner life of a young woman named Joana, caused a sensation. In October 1944, the book won the prestigious Graça Aranha Prize for the best debut novel of 1943. One critic, the poet Lêdo Ivo, called it "the greatest novel a woman has ever written in the Portuguese language." Another wrote that Clarice had "shifted the center of gravity around which the Brazilian novel had been revolving for about twenty years". "Clarice Lispector's work appears in our literary world as the most serious attempt at the introspective novel," wrote the São Paulo critic Sérgio Milliet. "For the first time, a Brazilian author goes beyond simple approximation in this almost virgin field of our literature; for the first time, an author penetrates the depths of the psychological complexity of the modern soul." This novel, like all of her subsequent works, was marked by an intense focus on interior emotional states. When the novel was published, many claimed that her stream-of-consciousness writing style was heavily influenced by Virginia Woolf or James Joyce, but she only read these authors after the book was ready. The epigraph from Joyce and the title, which is taken from Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, were both suggested by Lúcio Cardoso. Shortly afterwards, Clarice and Maury Gurgel left Rio for the northern city of Belém, in the state of .... Discover the Clarice Lispector popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Clarice Lispector books.