Lispector said of the novel, ‘I was chasing after something and there was nobody to tell me what it was’… The Besieged City arrives to us today as an artifact and a time capsule, a bittersweet revelation.
— The Paris Review
Now in paperback, The Besieged City—Clarice Lispector’s electrifying third novel—tells of a shallow girl becoming a desirable but highly materialistic woman in a rough-and-ready town
Rich with visions, miraculous horses, and linguistic ecstasy, The Besieged City stars Lucrécia. Clarice Lispector’s heroine is a materialistic girl free of the burden of thought: “Behold, behold, all of her, terribly physical, one of the objects.”
“The object—the thing,” Lispector once remarked, “always fascinated me and in a certain sense destroyed me. In my book The Besieged City I speak indirectly about the mystery of the thing. The thing is a specialized and immobilized animal.
Lispector said of the novel, ‘I was chasing after something and there was nobody to tell me what it was’… The Besieged City arrives to us today as an artifact and a time capsule, a bittersweet revelation.
— The Paris Review
In her third novel, acclaimed Brazilian luminary Lispector merges the personal with the mythopoetic in the story of a town transforming into a city and a girl observing it. Lucrécia Neves lives with her widowed mother in São Geraldo, a place ‘already mingling some progress with the smell of the stable.’ Dazzling [with] unexpected flashes of humor (‘Something without interest to anyone was happening, surely “real life”’). But what matters most is Lucrécia’s way of seeing, which she continues even in sleep, ‘rubbing, forging, polishing, lathing, sculpting, the demented master-carpenter—preparing palely every night the material of the city.’ Her visionary function is essential and timeless. Dreamlike, dense, original, [and with] a cumulative power. Highly recommended.
