The Passion According to G. H.

by Clarice Lispector, Caetano Veloso (Introduction), Idra Novey (Translator)

Overview

Lispector’s most shocking novel.

The Passion According to G.H., Clarice Lispector’s mystical novel of 1964, concerns a well-to-do Rio sculptress, G.H., who enters her maid’s room, sees a cockroach crawling out of the wardrobe, and, panicking, slams the door—crushing the cockroach—and then watches it die. At the end of the novel, at the height of a spiritual crisis, comes the most famous and most genuinely shocking scene in Brazilian literature…

Lispector wrote that of all her works this novel was the one that “best corresponded to her demands as a writer.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811219686
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	06/13/2012
Series:	New Directions Books
Pages:	220
Sales rank:	55,470
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.70(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).

Caetano Veloso is one of Brazil's foremost musicians.

Idra Novey is the award-winning author of the novels Those Who Knew and Ways to Disappear. She teaches fiction in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University.

Editorial Reviews

"Over time, I’ve come to admire and even love this novel. In fact, as soon as I slammed the book shut, my understanding of G.H.’s story began to take on an almost-corporeal reality. Trying to put this into words is a slippery thing. What I was beginning to appreciate was that I could not consider Lispector’s philosophical concerns for any length of time without losing my grasp on those concerns, yet I could somehow feel them, sense the substance of them in my own mind, in those deep pools of thought where language doesn’t quite reach, and which words can’t express."

Tin House - Emma Komlos-Hrobsky

"Lispector's prose is unforgettable... still startling by the end because of Lispector's unsettling forcefulness."

Boston Globe

"She is quite a thing to discover indeed."

The Los Angeles Times

"I had a sort of missionary urge with her... but I started thinking, even when I was 19: How can I help this person reach the prominence she deserves?"

San Francisco Chronicle

"Her images dazzle even when her meaning is most obscure, and when she is writing of what she despises she is lucidity itself."

The Times Literary Supplement

"A lyrical, stream of consciousness meditation on the nature of time, the unreliability of language, the divinity of God, and the threat of hell."

The Rumpus

"A penetrating genius."

Booklist - Donna Seaman

"One of 20th-century Brazil’s most intriguing and mystifying writers."

The L Magazine

"[Lispector] left behind an astounding body of work that has no real corollary inside literature or outside it."

Bookforum

"Reading G.H., you follow the narrator’s logic to its most physically and philosophically shocking conclusions. You, too, learn to “want the God in whatever comes out of the roach’s belly."

Electric Literature - Bennett Sims

A shattering encounter communicated to us in intense, at times tortured, prose... the quasi-mystical sequence from purgation to illumination to union.

Latin American Lit. & Arts

Aficionados of South American fiction as well as literary critics will welcome this posthumous translation of a nearly plotless novel by one of Brazil's foremost writers. Availing herself of a single character, Lispector transforms a banal situationa woman at home, aloneinto an amphitheater for philosophical investigations. The first-person narration jousts with language, playfully but forcefully examining the ambiguous nature of words, with results ranging from the profound to the pretentious: ``Prehuman divine life is a life of singeing nowness'' or ``The world interdepended with me, and I am not understanding what I say, never! never again shall I understand what I say. For how will I be able to speak without the word lying for me?'' These linguistic games frame existential and experiential crises that Lispector savors and overcomes. Although this idiosyncratic novel will not have wide appeal, those with academic or markedly erudite tastes should like it very much. (September)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This Ukranian-born Brazilian author is regarded in France as a philosopher rather than a storyteller. Here she offers a meditation on the human condition full of aphoristic declarations and merciless self-scrutiny. The narrator, whose identity is continually undone and remade, claims she doesn't have ``a word to say,'' then observes, ``But if I don't force myself to talk, silence will forever engulf me in waves.'' Plot is secondary; the aim is to push language to the limit. Part of the publisher's new ``Emergent Literatures'' series, which will make available in English authors whose ``works have been ignored . . . because of their difference from established models of literature,'' this is recommended for adventuresome readers. Jack Shreve, Allegany Community Coll., Cumberland, Md.

Library Journal