Near to the Wild Heart (Penguin Modern Classics)

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This became the book’s epigraph, which, together with the occasional use of the stream-of-consciousness method, led certain critics to describe the book as “ Joycean. Good-humoured, unpretentious and a bit eccentric, it's more like having a well-read friend than a subscription to a literary review.

By violent surprise, like a ray, of sweet surprise, like a rain of little lights… Now all of her time had been forfeited to him and she felt that the minutes that were hers had been ceded, split into tiny ice cubes that she had to swallow quickly, before they melted. Sometimes, however, perhaps due to the nature of what she said, no bridge was created between them, and on the contrary an interval was born. Several of her works have been turned into films, one being 'Hour of the Star' and she was the subject of a recent biography, Why This World, by Benjamin Moser. Happy and flat I wait for myself, I wait for myself to slowly rise up and truly appear before my eyes.

It is, though, deeply introspective and the movement of the story, such as it is, traces the psychic journey of Joana, a journey that has no ending other than death so that she's always in an open state of becoming. The novel is divided into two parts: the first section delves into key moments from Joana’s childhood while the second considers the nature of her marriage. While the first looks back at Joana’s childhood and introduces the novel’s main players, the second focuses on the disintegration of her marriage. I generally like books that incorporate these styles if only for the fact that it presents something different. Leaning her forehead against the cold and shiny windowpane she gazed at the neighbor’s yard, at the big world of the hens-that-didn’t-know-they-were-going-to-die.

However, as I have enjoyed recent novels with a great deal of introspection maybe I will be pleasantly surprised? I agree, there’s a real sense of energy in her writing, flashes of brilliance at times, but I just found the narrative itself hard to hold on to. Lispector is pushing language to its limits in striving to capture these ideas and internal thought processes. And Joana knows that, instinctively, rejecting the idea of one truth, one path to a happiness that symbolises a stasis she can’t embrace.There is a naturalness and spontaneity about the writing that makes the many impossibilities in the text possible. Funnily enough, I have the Penguin edition of Lispector’s The Hour of the Star, which includes an introduction by Toibin.

From the beginning of her marriage, Joana feels that her role as a wife causes her to abdicate her freedom and her identity.Or perhaps she is the one kept at a distance because her state is so tenuous and so a reader (who cannot help have some form of sympathy from the main character) is also kept at a distance. The focus of Near to the Wild Heart is Joana, a young woman who finds herself in a loveless marriage with her husband, Otávio. He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life , it is Joycean Stephen Dedalus in his quest of own identity. She published her first novel, Near to the Wildheart in 1943 when she was just twenty-three, and the next year was awarded the Graca Aranha Prize for the best first novel.

Reviews of the book were really positive and reviews insisted she was influenced by Virginia Woolf but Lispector had never read Woolf and didn’t read her for another year of so afterwards out of curiosity over why everyone said she wrote like Woolf. She published her first novel, Near to the Wildheart in 1943 when she was just twenty-three, and the next year was awarded the Graça Aranha Prize for the best first novel. In this scene, she enters a bathtub in one location and then, when she comes out of the tub she has changed location, changed time period, gone from being a child at home to being a teenager away at school. 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. Il tempo, fatto di attimi che si susseguono, distillati, scanditi o anche dilatati in immagini, il segreto dell’eternità in quella successione.I’ve tried to be fair and honest here as I don’t think this book (and possibly Lispector in general) will be to everyone’s taste.