Near to the Wild Heart
by Clarice Lispector (1943)
2023 reads, 11/12:
“One day she split into two, grew restless, started going out to look for herself.”
I was overjoyed to finally get back into the mystic prose of Clarice Lispector after ending last year with her final book, The Hour of the Star. Her first book, Near to the Wild Heart, written at only 23 years old, ‘follows’ the story of the amoral Joanna. From childhood to adulthood, we don't learn about her in a linear fashion, but in fleeting memories throughout her life. We know everything, yet nothing, about her; Lispector writes a minimal plot at best, opting instead for a spiritual and existential journey through the psyche of Joana through these vignettes of her life. As an example, my favorite chapter, ‘The Encounter with Otávio,’ takes place in the few minutes you are awake in the middle of the night, the ones you don’t even remember after you wake up.
“The dense, dark night was cut down the middle, split into two black blocks of sleep. Where was she? Between the two pieces, looking at them (the one she had already slept, and the one she had yet to sleep), isolated in the timeless and the spaceless, in an empty gap. This stretch would be subtracted from her years of life.”
Joana is an extremely complex character, as she is introspective yet wild, reserved yet disturbed, even violent at time; yet her actions and interactions with others (her aunt, her teacher, her husband Otávio, his old friend Lídia, etc.) take a back seat to her thoughts. Lispector even went as far as to include thoughts from the perspective of these other characters, which helped break apart all the material on Joana.
Towards the end, we are inundated with the phrase de profundis (Latin: “from the depths”), encapsulating all of Joana’s thoughts and decisions we’ve read thus far. Things start to make sense now. The remainder of the book then floods with these stream-of-consciousness monologues ‘from the depths’ of Joana, her visions and thoughts constantly bombarding the reader. In these sections, you must let the words flow through you; I even found myself having to reread passages. This style of writing is a hit or miss, but for me, I can’t wait to dive into other works of “Hurricane Clarice.”
“The two of them sank into a solitary, calm silence. Years passed perhaps. Everything was so limpid as an eternal star and they hovered so quietly that they could feel future time rolling lucid inside their bodies with the thickness of the long past which instant by instant they had just lived.”