An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures

by Clarice Lispector, Stefan Tobler (Translator), Sheila Heti (Afterword), Benjamin Moser (Editor)

Overview

A love story by the great Clarice Lispector that asks: Just how might two people be joined?

Lóri, a primary school teacher, is isolated and nervous, comfortable with children but unable to connect to adults. When she meets Ulisses, a professor of philosophy, an opportunity opens: a chance to escape the shipwreck of introspection and embrace the love, including the sexual love, of a man. Her attempt, as Sheila Heti writes in her afterword, is not only “to love and to be loved,” but also “to be worthy of life itself.”

Published in 1968, An Apprenticeship is Clarice Lispector’s attempt to reinvent herself following the exhausting effort of her metaphysical masterpiece The Passion According to G. H. Here, in this unconventional love story, she explores the ways in which people try to bridge the gaps between them, and the result, unusual in her work, surprised many readers and became a bestseller.

Some appreciated its accessibility; others denounced it as sexist or superficial. To both admirers and critics, the olympian Clarice gave a typically elliptical answer: “I humanized myself,” she said. “The book reflects that.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811230612
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	04/13/2021
Pages:	176
Sales rank:	569,508
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Clarice Lispector (1920–1977), the greatest Brazilian writer of the twentieth century, has been called “astounding” (Rachel Kushner), “a penetrating genius” (Donna Seaman, Booklist), and “one of the twentieth century’s most mysterious writers” (Orhan Pamuk).

Born in Belém, Brazil, Stefan Tobler is the publisher of And Other Stories and, whenever time permits, a translator from Portuguese and German. His translation of Arno Geiger’s The Old King in His Exile was shortlisted for both the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize and Schlegel-Tieck Prize, and his other translations include the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize-shortlisted Água Viva by Clarice Lispector and the Man Booker International Prize finalist A Cup of Rage by Raduan Nassar.

Sheila Heti is the author of several books of fiction and nonfiction, including How Should a Person Be?, which New York Magazine deemed one of the “New Classics of the 21st century." She was named one of "The New Vanguard" by The New York Times book critics, who, along with a dozen other magazines and newspapers, chose Motherhood as a top book of 2018. Her books have been translated into twenty-one languages.

General editor of the new translations of Clarice Lispector’s complete works at New Directions, BENJAMIN MOSER is the author of Why This World: The Biography of Clarice Lispector, and Sontag: Her Life and Work, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. His new book, The Upside-Down World: Meetings with the Dutch Masters, will be published in October.

Editorial Reviews

02/01/2021

Lispector’s dense and singular romance (after The Besieged City), first published in Brazil in 1969, arrives in a rich new translation from Tobler and illuminating afterword by Sheila Heti. Lóri, a primary school teacher leading a solitary existence in Rio de Janeiro and unable to stomach her “bourgeois middle class” milieu, becomes captivated by the elusive Ulisses, a philosophy professor and self-described excellent teacher (“basically I like to hear myself talk about things that interest me,” he explains). The two speak on the phone, meet for drinks, and visit a local swimming pool, but Ulisses tells Lóri she’s not ready for the relationship he wants, a claim that drives the bulk of Lori’s stream-of-consciousness analysis (“she was bound to him because she wanted to be desired”). Ulisses speaks often of his “apprenticeship” to something only aspired to—he’s “in the middle” of it, he says, but Lóri feels he’s “infinitely further along” than she is. The purpose of their apprenticeship is never expressed, though one of Lóri’s goals is to feel “alive through pleasure” instead of pain, and Heti’s revealing afterword leaves the reader with much to chew on. This deep immersion into the vicissitudes of love will delight Lispector devotees. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

"A passionate, tender work, An Apprenticeship is also perhaps Lispector’s most accessible. She herself admitted as much; in it, she remarked 'I humanized myself.'"

Lit Hub

"A genius on the level of Nabokov."

Slate - Jeff Vandermeer

"Lispector had an ability to write as though no one had ever written before. One of the hidden geniuses of the twentieth century, in the same league as Flann O'Brien, Borges, and Pessoa—utterly original and brilliant, haunting and disturbing."

Colm Tóibín

"In An Apprenticeship, Lóri performs a sort of gonzo-philosophy, putting her body in service of an internal monologue in which she struggles to understand herself, her writing, and sexual desire as a whole."

Los Angeles Review of Books

"The revival of the hypnotic Clarice Lispector has been one of the true literary events of the 21st century."

The New York Times - Parul Sehgal

"Her writing is hypnotic and evocative, drawing out deep emotional truths, while playing with form. An Apprenticeship is an attempt to understand human connection and its limits, following a woman on her earnest journey out of solitude and in search of love."

Buzzfeed

"Every translation of her writing is belated and urgent. We’re playing catch-up. Don’t hesitate... Lispector’s writing is like glass: granular detail turned to liquid under impossible heat, and then hardened and crystallized into a wet, new thing. Its fragility requires a certain patience to handle; it always feels on the edge of shattering. It turns the sky into a kind of object. It welcomes the light."

The New York Times - Audrey Wollen

"Spellbinding and endlessly fascinating."

The Spectator

2021-02-10
A love story—of sorts—by one of Brazil’s finest writers.

This slim but intense volume is known as one of Lispector’s most accessible, or straightforward. If you’re new to her oeuvre, that might strike you as something of a joke: There is very little—if anything—in this novel that is actually “straightforward.” The plot, such as it is, involves a man and a woman—Lóri and the aptly named Ulisses—who love each other but can’t be together. Anyway, not yet. First, Lóri has a journey of sorts to complete: “The way I want you to be mine,” Ulisses tells her, “will only happen when you also want it the same way. And that will take time because you haven’t discovered whatever you need to discover.” So what does Lóri need to discover? The existentialists might have described it as a way to live authentically. Lispector writes: “The thing the human being aspires to most is to become a human being.” The novel, then, traces the story of Lóri’s becoming, which—with only a few exceptions—is an entirely inner journey. Those exceptions—an early morning swim, a few nights out for drinks with Ulisses, a cocktail party—don’t give the reader all that much to go on. By far the greatest portion of the book is taken up with long, lyrical, philosophical passages, intermittently punctuated, that describe the subtle shifts in Lóri’s thinking. These passages can feel overblown: “Had moments gone by or three thousand years? Moments according to the clock by which time is divided, three thousand years according to what Lóri felt when with heavy anguish, all dressed and made up, she reached the window.” No doubt the novel is a crucial addition to Lispector’s English-language body of work; still, it’ll likely leave more than one reader yearning for something more earth-bound.

Lyrical, ponderous, and dense, Lispector’s latest also feels overblown.

Kirkus Reviews