Like dangerous talismans, Clarice Lispector’s novels stage unholy communions—between human and cockroach, reason and madness—that plunge readers further and further into “the incommunicable kingdoms of spirit.” Born in Ukraine, but forced to flee with her family to Brazil at age 12, Lispector—born Chaya Pinkhasivna Lispector—is now a beacon of global modernism. Yet more than a decade into the revival of her work, which comprises nearly 20 novels, short stories, and even children’s books, she continues to defy interpretation. What makes her work sui generis—incomprehensible, inscrutable, and compulsively rereadable—is its chief contradiction: Instead of exalting the inner life, like most works of modernism, her work evacuates it.
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