Clarice Lispector

Brazilian novelist (1920–1977), author of The Hour of the Star, The Passion According to G.H., and Near to the Wild Heart — a national and international icon of Brazilian letters whose English-language biography, Why This World, was written by Benjamin Moser.

Asked by Tyler Cowen how he would sell a newcomer on Lispector, Moser declined to make a case at all: read The Hour of the Star — her last novel, eighty pages, an hour’s reading, and the first Lispector book Moser himself read as a student — and let the reaction be whatever it is. His illustrative comparison is a notorious, extremely powerful Canadian sex toy that either produces overwhelming ecstasy or, mistuned by a fraction, nothing at all: some art, in his account, operates on a ‘frequency’ that transforms one reader and leaves another completely cold, and no amount of argument changes which reader a given person turns out to be. Moser notes that many Brazilians feel genuinely troubled by their own failure to connect with Lispector, given her status as a national and international icon — an anxiety he likens to not ‘getting’ Shakespeare.

In the wiki

• Benjamin Moser on the Dutch Masters, Brazil, and Cultural Icons — Moser, her English-language biographer, discusses how to introduce a newcomer to her work, the ‘frequency’ effect that divides readers sharply, and the anxiety many Brazilians feel over failing to connect with a writer treated as a national icon.

See also

• Benjamin Moser — her biographer, who discussed her with Tyler Cowen
• Benjamin Moser on the Dutch Masters, Brazil, and Cultural Icons — the episode