On Clarice Lispector’s 'The Apple in the Dark'

Clarice Lispector called Washington a “vague and inorganic city.” Perhaps the contrived glory of America’s capital—with its clean, alphabet labeled streets, towering, marble-white obelisk, and mismatched neoclassical and modern government buildings—just didn’t sit right with her. “It’s beautiful, according to various laws of beauty that are not my own,” she wrote to a friend shortly after she arrived in September 1952. “There’s no mess here, and I don’t understand a city without a bit of confusion.”