ROOTS AND WINGS: Clarice Lispector

Clarice Lispector (10 December 1920 – 9 December 1977) / brazil.mfa.gov.ua

She was described as “a woman with the looks of Marlene Dietrich and the pen of Virginia Woolf”

And it was true: the famous Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector was so beautiful that artists drew inspiration from her, and a dozen portraits of her hung in Clarice’s home in Rio de Janeiro. She grew up in Brazil and spent many years living with her diplomat husband in the United States and Europe. But Clarice was born in the small town of Chechelnyk in Vinnytsia Region, where her parents happened to be passing through while fleeing anti-Jewish pogroms.

When their daughter was two months old, the family left Ukraine. After wandering through Europe, they crossed the ocean and began a new life with new names. The girl Chaya became Clarice, while the first syllable “Lis” was added to her surname, Spector. Life in Brazil, however, was not easy for them: the family moved from city to city several times to find ways to earn a living. The future writer’s parents died young.

Lispector wrote and published her first book, Near to the Wild Heart, when she was only 19. It caused such a sensation that one critic declared: “This is the greatest novel written by a woman in the Portuguese language”. During her relatively short life, Clarice wrote eight novels and eight short-story collections. Her best-known collection, Family Ties, explores how women live and what they feel.

Clarice was compared to Virginia Woolf for good reason: her works were equally poetic and revealed the inner worlds of their female protagonists with the same subtlety. According to critics, no Brazilian author before her had portrayed the psychology of their characters so fully.

Clarice also made her mark beyond literature. She spoke out against Brazil’s military dictatorship, worked as a journalist and editor for several newspapers, and translated into Portuguese works by Agatha Christie and Edgar Allan Poe, as well as Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray.

If you ever find yourself in the Brazilian city of Recife, seek out the modest monument to the renowned Brazilian-Ukrainian writer Clarice Lispector — a woman with the looks of Marlene Dietrich and the pen of Virginia Woolf.