Description
Now in paperback, The Besieged City—Clarice Lispector’s electrifying third novel—tells of a shallow girl becoming a desirable but highly materialistic woman in a rough-and-ready town
Rich with visions, miraculous horses, and linguistic ecstasy, The Besieged City stars Lucrécia. Clarice Lispector’s heroine is a materialistic girl free of the burden of thought: “Behold, behold, all of her, terribly physical, one of the objects.”
“The object—the thing,” Lispector once remarked, “always fascinated me and in a certain sense destroyed me. In my book The Besieged City I speak indirectly about the mystery of the thing. The thing is a specialized and immobilized animal.”
Reviews
"Lispector made her own rules, free of the world’s constraints, and here, in her third novel, an ordinary story and apparently shallow protagonist are no impediments to formidable experiment...Having read her, one feels different, elated." — Booklist Online
"In her third novel, acclaimed Brazilian luminary Lispector merges the personal with the mythopoetic in the story of a town transforming into a city and a girl observing it. Lucrécia Neves lives with her widowed mother in São Geraldo, a place ‘already mingling some progress with the smell of the stable.’ Dazzling [with] unexpected flashes of humor (‘Something without interest to anyone was happening, surely “real life”’). But what matters most is Lucrécia’s way of seeing, which she continues even in sleep, ‘rubbing, forging, polishing, lathing, sculpting, the demented master-carpenter—preparing palely every night the material of the city.’ Her visionary function is essential and timeless. Dream-like, dense, original, [and with] a cumulative power. Highly recommended." — Kirkus (starred)
"Lispector should be on the shelf with Kafka and Joyce." — Los Angeles Times
"Beautiful." — Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times
"Lispector’s prose lilts and sways, its rhythm shakes at once with closeness and distance. The sensory power Lispector is able to draw from her sentences is here given free rein and the descriptive character of the text is wild with excess, seeking to imbue everything simultaneously with solidity, material presence, and transience, fluidity." — Daniel Fraser, Music & Literature
"Lispector’s novel offers a pristine view of an ordinary life, told in her forceful, one-of-a-kind voice that captures isolated moments with poetic intensity." — Publishers Weekly
"Underneath Lispector’s inventive, modernist style is a poignant and radical depiction of a young woman navigating a patriarchal society." — The Paris Review
"I’m really obsessed by this writer from Brazil, Clarice Lispector. I love her because she writes whole novels where not one thing happens—she describes the air. I think she’s such a great, great novelist." — W Magazine
"Utterly original and brilliant, haunting and disturbing." — Colm Tóibín
"Better than Borges." — Elizabeth Bishop
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9780811226721
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