Yeah but he's not here now. [I may have made a free association to some ghost of PRSI].
What I am reading now are three books connected only by the fact that "the princess of the Portuguese language" (the Brazilian modernist writer Clarice Lispector, 1920-1977) was born in the southwest of what is now Ukraine while her mother, fleeing a pogrom further east, was en route to northeastern Brazil, and the fact that Benjamin Moser's extensive and multilingual bibliography of Lispector referenced a history of Ukraine that happened to pique my interest.
So one book is
Borderland, a history of Ukraine by Anne Reid.
Another is
Why This World, a bio of Lispector by Benjamin Moser who has also translated many works of Lispector from the Portuguese. His translation of Lispector's
Chandelier has just come out; it is the first English translation of that work. Moser has been responsible for renewed interest in Lispector and for encouraging some re-translations of her works that were well known enough to have been translated to English early on.
The third book open on my desktop now is
Água Viva, one of Clarice Lispector's works, translated by Stefan Tobler and edited by Moser. It is not my favorite of Lispector's writings, since that would be
The Hour of the Star unless someone raises the author from the dead and she resumes writing. Still, some of the aphorisms in Água Viva are stunning, and a good thing too as otherwise there'd be no place to stop for a moment: one gets aboard her train of thought in that thing and there seems no sensible reason or place to exit. Still when you hit something like this it can give pause:
And when I am born, I become free.
That is the foundation of my tragedy.
-- Clarice Lispector, in Água Viva
A caution: while the main point of Lispector's novels may hardly be plot, the bio is certainly full of spoilers if you can't read any novel while knowing in advance how things "turn out". On the other hand she may not have been who categorized any of her work as to genre, at least while she was constructing its scaffolding (or letting it happen). Someone compared her works to the ever unfinished if towering structures and spires of the basilica and World Heritage site in Barcelona, the Sagrada Família) and there's at least one admirer of Lispector who read a single one of her books 111 times, so... spoilers are maybe not such a big deal in this case.
Another caution: Lispector's not an easy read. I recommend this review of
Chandelier not for its take on that novel but for its preview for unfamiliar readers of the obstacles they may encounter.
There could be a reason why someone reads one of Lispector's books 111 times, and it might not be that it's just memorable prose. Perhaps sometimes less unforgettable than ungettable? Or... so intimately every human's experience that we don't want to discover or acknowledge that it's ours too.
