Near to the Wild Heart
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Average rating3.8
Near to the Wild Heart, published in Rio de Janeiro in 1943, introduced Brazil to what one writer called “Hurricane Clarice”: a twenty-three-year-old woman who wrote her first book in a tiny rented room and then baptized it with a title taken from Joyce: “He was alone, unheeded, near to the wild heart of life.”
The book was an unprecedented sensation — the discovery of a genius. Narrative epiphanies and interior monologue frame the life of Joana, from her middle-class childhood through her unhappy marriage and its dissolution to transcendence, when she proclaims: “I shall arise as strong and comely as a young colt.”
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There are parts in this book that really made me gasp. Given the author's young age at the time of Wild Heart's publication (23) it really is an astonishing achievement, and it's unlike anything I'd ever read.
And yet, reading it often felt like a chore. The protagonist, Joana, was exhausting in a way that a severe alexithymic is exhausting. It was like observing and interpreting a person constantly observing and interpreting herself.
Still though, it really made me want to read Lispector's later works. For a debut work this is amazingly good.
Bad is not living, and that's all. Dying is something else. Dying is different to good and bad.”
