Bhaskar Thakuria's Reviews > Covert Joy: Selected Stories

This latest collection of stories from New Directions by the iconic Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector contains twenty stories. From the afterword by the translator: Most of the stories in this unique edition come from Clarice Lispector’s two most famous collections, Family Ties (1960) and The Foreign Legion (1964), which mark the period considered her golden era, when critical acclaim converged with popular success, after she’d struggled to publish her books during the prior decade............... The first eight of these selected stories, from “Love” to “The Buffalo,” comprise over half of Family Ties, a bestseller that won Brazil’s top literary prize. The writer Erico Verissimo called it “the most important story collection published in this country since Machado de Assis,” and one critic hailed Clarice as “one of the best Brazilian writers of all time.”..............The next seven selections, from “Monkeys” to “Mineirinho,” come from The Foreign Legion, much of which was published in magazines and newspapers in the 1960s, though the earliest, “Journey to Petrópolis,” first appeared in 1949. It also includes the two stories that Clarice singled out as her favorites: “The Egg and the Chicken” and “Mineirinho,”...............The last five stories feature in collections published during Clarice’s final decade. The classics “Covert Joy” and “Remnants of Carnival” conjure her childhood in Brazil’s northeastern city of Recife and appeared in Covert Joy (1971) alongside the hypnotic reverie, “The Waters of the World.”

So once we are through the contents of this book, we should go into the particulars of her writing style. But firstly, I must mention here that I am not a fan or follower of her style. Indeed, the first Lispector book I had read The Passion According to G.H. fell flat on me and left me frankly bemused. Not that I hated the book in its entirety- there was enough brilliant writing in it to seduce me to finish it. But certainly there are elements in her style that are too introspective to be compulsively readable. Yet there were instances when she had been named a Brazilian Virginia Woolf, a female Kafka, as well as a Chekhov on the beach. Well, to speak the truth, she had the quality enough to be ranked among such a hallowed category, more so especially when you confine yourselves to the constraints of the short story. She was definitely an innovator, but the one drawback I have witnessed with her style, in both the novel and the short story form, is the lack of a convincing plot- a lacuna in her style that leads to the lack of a convincing denouement. In this and elsewhere, she has a little in common with the late, great Roberto Bolano. But while the Chilean master was far from introspective and always had an engaging idea for a plot, Lispector fails to engage her readers with an eventful storyline, but instead goes ahead into an introspective soliloquy of her main character. And to speak the truth, she was never interested in many characters, but the sole character that she tries to build up a story with indulges in deeply introspective monologues, more particularly on the causes and consequences of their every act in the narrative. This becomes so much like a sort of creative confession in extreme cases.

Finally in utter defense of her creative style here is a fragment from one of her last stories That’s Where I’m Going (“É para lá que eu vou”)- one which comes from her April 1974 collection,Where Were You at Night- and which, according to the translator Katrina Dodson "the closest thing to a prose poem that Clarice wrote, and a fitting farewell".

Beyond the ear there is a sound, at the far end of sight a view, at the tips of the fingers an object—that’s where I’m going.
At the tip of the pencil the line.
Where a thought expires is an idea, at the final breath of joy another joy, at the point of the sword magic—that’s where I’m going.
At the tips of the toes the leap.
It’s like the story of someone who went and didn’t return—that’s where I’m going.
Or am I? Yes, I’m going. And I’ll return to see how things are. Whether they’re still magic. Reality? I await you all. That’s where I’m going.

Yes, she gave the feeling of poetry shadowed by introspective prose that will frankly bemuse some readers. "In it, she leaves us, as always, with a question—What am I saying?—and at the edge of love."

My favorite picks from this collection are the stories 'The Smallest Woman in the World', 'The Egg and the Chicken', and one of her final stories, 'He Drank Me Up'. The story 'The Egg and the Chicken' is something really unusual and left me even more bemused than her novel 'The Passion According to G.H.' While reading it, I was under the spell that she was trying to decode the eternal mystery: 'What came first? The Egg or the Chicken?' In a sense, I was correct, for her most elusive story is "a meditation on the impossibility of truly perceiving and conceiving a thing (the egg)".
From the translator's afterword: Clarice called the story “a mystery to me” and would put herself on the side of the chicken. But I can’t help thinking of this relationship of translator to author, or translation to original, in these terms: the chicken as unlikely keeper of the egg.

Clarice Lispector challenged the most familiar trends in storywriting because she was, like Woolf, an explorer of inner worlds; but she was, quite unlike Woolf, not one who championed the 'stream of consciousness' technique in literature, nor does she delve into more complex psychological themes like a Dostoyevsky or a Henry James. Hers is introspective poetry of a rather fanciful sort, that can be either an eulogy or an elegy...

The writer Rachel Kushner, in her foreword, writes:

The fruits of her project—both an art and a philosophy (ontological, but also chosen, deliberate, developed)—are strangely restorative. While reading itself is not passive, you can relax, while she is hard at work, asking questions that are inside you, too, so that you yourself don’t have to frame them. Her aspiration is nothing less than to uncover the bizarre mystery of consciousness, to contemplate being while being, to apprehend life while living it.

And certainly, this collection is not a celebration of wanton storytelling, it is about people and their epiphanies with an aura of mystery that eludes even the most supreme exponents of human psyche. I think there will be time enough for me to delve deeper into her Complete Stories. Maybe it is not about her novels, but I will be still be engaged with her stories.