G.H., a well-to-do Rio sculptress, enters her maid’s room, sees a cockroach crawling out of the wardrobe, and, panicking, slams the door on it. The sight of the dying insect provokes a mystical crisis, at the height which comes one of the most famous and most genuinely shocking scenes in Latin American literature. Clarice Lispector wrote that of all her works this novel was the one that “best corresponded to her demands as a writer.”
[Lispector] left behind an astounding body of work that has no real corollary inside literature or outside it.
— Rachel Kushner, Bookforum
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
Lispector’s prose is unforgettable… still startling by the end because of Lispector’s unsettling forcefulness.
— The Boston Globe
It is Lispector’s attempt — successful, I would say — to sacralize one of the vilest quantities in the Western world.
— Scott Esposito, Barnes & Noble Review
Her novels, and G.H. in particular, are filled with a sense of longing and desperation – a yawning desire for meaning itself.
— Sarah Gerard, BOMB
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.
