Clairvoyant: Selected Cronicas
About this ebook
I am convinced that during the Stone Age, I must have been wounded by the love of some man, because a certain secret fear of mine dates from that time.
The crônica, a literary genre peculiar to Brazilian newspapers, allows writers (or even soccer stars) to address a wide readership on any theme they like. Chatty, mystical, intimate, flirtatious, and revelatory, Lispector’s Saturday columns from 1967 to 1973 in Rio’s leading newspaper, the Jornal do Brasil, were extraordinarily free-ranging, taking the form variously of memories, essays, aphorisms, serialized stories, and interior monologues. In every mode, her insights make one sit up and think, whether about love or children or social ills or pets or society women or writing or the nature of reality: We have accumulated things and certainties because we have neither the one nor the other.
The things I’ve learned from taxi drivers would be enough to fill a book. They know a lot: they really do get around. I may know a lot about Antonioni that they don’t know. Or maybe they do even when they don’t. There are various ways of knowing by not-knowing. I know: it happens to me too.
About the author
Clarice Lispector was born in 1920 to a Jewish family in western Ukraine. As a result of the anti-Semitic violence they endured, the family fled to Brazil in 1922, and Clarice Lispector grew up in Recife. Following the death of her mother when Clarice was nine, she moved to Rio de Janeiro with her father and two sisters, and she went on to study law. With her husband, who worked for the foreign service, she lived in Italy, Switzerland, England, and the United States, until they separated and she returned to Rio in 1959; she died there in 1977. Since her death, Clarice Lispector has earned universal recognition as Brazil’s greatest modern writer. New Directions publishes eighteen of her books.
The peerless translator MARGARET JULL COSTA has won countless prizes for her translations from Portuguese and Spanish.
Robin Patterson has translated works by José Luandino Vieira and José Luís Peixoto. With Margaret Jull Costa, he has also co-translated works by Machado de Assis and Fernando Pessoa.
