Near to the Wild Heart (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Wanted to record these here now before talking about the book with anyone else – and really looking forward to others’ thoughts. The sleeper lounge is old-fashioned British Rail, all tartan carpet, smeared tables and microwave cuisine. Il fibrillante, imprevedibile modernismo dell'autrice rifugge da un impiego sistematico del flusso di coscienza.

It sounds crazy, but it’s as if she were watching me… reading my thoughts… Sometimes I’ll be laughing and I stop short, cold. Why is it so hard to put into words the admiration I felt for the young woman Joana, who with seeming ease understands herself and her incompatibility with other people? The originality of Near to the Wild Heart lies in its technique and language: self-conscious, bleakly humorous, but poetic – "The sun burst through the clouds and the little sparkles scintillating on the waters were tiny fires flaring up and dying out. As with most good novels that invent a set of parameters to define the use of language, to say nothing of the dazzling images that flood the reader's consciousness, Near to the Wild Heart, too, cannot be stripped down to its plot and content.She published her first novel, Near to the Wildheart in 1943 when she was just twenty-three, and the next year was awarded the Graça Aranha Prize for the best first novel. Sometimes, however, perhaps due to the nature of what she said, no bridge was created between them, and on the contrary an interval was born.

Published when she was just 23, Lispector's debut novel created a sensation in her home country of Brazil. She is the author of nine novels and several collections of short stories, all written in Portuguese.

Soon, in my own home, where I raised my daughter, I’ll have to apologize to that girl for goodness-knows-what… She’s a viper.