Near to the Wild Heart, published in Rio de Janeiro in 1943, introduced Brazil to what one writer called “Hurricane Clarice”: a twenty-three-year-old girl who wrote her first book in a tiny rented room and then baptized it with a title taken from Joyce: “He was alone, unheeded, near to the wild heart of life.”
The book was an unprecedented sensation — the discovery of genius. Narrative epiphanies and interior monologue frame the life of Joana, from her middle-class childhood through her unhappy marriage and its dissolution to transcendence, when she proclaims: “I shall arise as strong and comely as a young colt.”
We now finally have a translation worthy of Clarice Lispector’s inimitable style. Go out and buy it.
— The Guardian
After reading Near to the Wild Heart, one thing is easy to understand: Lispector wasn’t called ‘Hurricane Clarice’ because of her breakthrough into the literary scene, but because her words tear into your mind and leave a trail of devastation.
— The Coffin Factory
One of 20th-century Brazil’s most intriguing and mystifying writers.
— The L Magazine
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
Writing like this could only be the product of a sublime creative purge, an incomprehensible, compulsive flowing-out response to the raw intake of being human and everything that that is and means.
— The Brooklyn Rail
Lispector’s novels offer a stark counterpoint to much of modern life’s focus on individual fame.
— The Boston Globe
That Lispector could write such a complete and satisfying coming-of-age story at twenty-three is proof — were any needed — that she was always ahead of the game.
— Scott Esposito, Barnes & Noble Review
After reading Near to the Wild Heart, one thing is easy to understand: Lispector wasn’t called ‘Hurricane Clarice’ because of her breakthrough into the literary scene, but because her words tear into your mind and leave a trail of devastation.
— The Coffin Factory
A truly remarkable writer.
— Jonathan Franzen
You could breeze through it, you could let it marinate, or you could reread it twice in one sitting.
