The Passion According to G.H.

One must like to read, of course. And not just for information, not for the satisfactions of ownership, the thrill of a deal well made—a bargain. This novel takes place almost entirely in a single, nearly empty room. A chance confrontation between a woman and a cockroach. We're in this woman's heart and mind and body for a hundred and ninety-three pages. But given these limited physical boundaries, Lispector plumbs the depths of Hell and gravitates up to Heaven somehow—confounding the distinctions between them. It's a meditation on all the big issues that we, mostly, don't have words to describe and which the busy world at large has no time for. The right kind of reader can spend a whole afternoon returning again and again to one passage or another. There is this, though: it is an infinitely rereadable book. Buy it once, live with it for life.

I had to read this twice to say I might have read it once, but it will be a 'forever' read on my shelf! Lispector moves from the death of a cockroach, to being the cockroach, to sacrifice of self, of being, of existence of 'I' as everything which starts and ends with the cockroach, the desertion of the primal, to not only go over the precipice, but through it into the non, the nameless...before the nucleus.. Here are some quotes:"It is exactly through the failure of the voice that one comes to hear for the first time one's own muteness and that of others and of things, and accepts it as the possible language. Only then is my nature accepted, accepted with its frightening torture, where pain is not something that happens to us, but what we are.""I lived inside a system. It was as if I had organized myself inside the face of having a stomachache because, if I no longer had it, I would also lose the marvelous hope of freeing myself one day from the stomachache: my old life was necessary to me because it was exactly its badness that made me delight in imagining a hope that, without that life I led, I would not have known.""And it is no use to try to take a shortcut and want to start, already knowing that the voice says so little, starting straightaway with being depersonal. For the journey exists, and the journey is not simply a manner of going. We ourselves are the journey. In the matter of the living, one can never arrive beforehand. The via crucis is not a detour, it is the only way, one cannot arrive except along it and with it. Persistence is our effort, giving up is the reward. One only reaches it having experienced the power of building, and, despite the taste of power, preferring to give up.""Giving up is a revelation." Holy blow me away, Lispector!!! And you do again and again and again!Lispector is a philosopher, a mystery. In an interview she said she still didn't quite understand her story, 'the egg and the chicken'. She has been called a mystic. All I know is that her novels, her stories are absolutely mesmerizing and I never tire of reading them over and over.

We read this for my book group. Most of us agreed that it was a lot of rumination on GH's part with almost no story or plot. About half of us couldn’t make themselves finish reading it—I did, and though it was extremely tedious, there was something about it that kept me going; maybe it was simply the deadline of our next meeting.

On page 168 of this 189-page New Directions edition, the author remarks, "I have temporarily taken leave of my senses, rather than having the courage to think that all of this is a truth." And this may well be the truest statement in a book that, for the most part, reads as if its author indeed suffered from some order of psychological and emotional derangement. Not that such derangement necessarily disqualifies an artist from producing work of a certain worth--Rimbaud, for one, famously espoused just such derangement--but it does help place that work in its proper context for the benefit of those who may come to it expecting something a bit more....conventional. Which is to say, less deranged. (And this from a reader, myself, who typically is unapologetically partial to the innovatively highbrow.)Aside from its being mistitled--by rights, the work ought be called "Meditation on a Cockroach"--fully 2/3s of the author's musings (mystagogic ravings?), written in a style that might best be described as faux-lyrical, are so subjectively, hermitically interior (this is a work in which we as readers are subjected to interminably relentless descriptions of disconnected thought thinking itself into connected being, a process less profound than profoundly tedious), so deliberately untethered from any shared, earthbound human reality, as to be but intermittently accessible--and, I'd wager, about as meaning-bereft--save, perhaps to those commensurately deranged.The remaining third, on the other hand, that which speaks specifically to and about that cockroach, while no less the work of a mad woman, is also the work of a genius. Had the author chosen to confine her acutely observed, arrestingly penetrating remarks to matters strictly, metaphorically cockroach-y, and left all those not so on the cutting room floor, while the result may have been a book significantly shorter, it also would have been a book significantly more approachable--and powerful.Regrettably, the reader is compelled to wade through so much rarified muck, so much abstract and abstracted Lispector-style b.s., that the very material meriting closest attention either is lost to the adjacent quicksand, or to the exasperation of the much abused and exasperated reader.

This book is in the style of Agua Viva, but with a narrative. We see the narrator's interior life, and her dilemmas and reflections. The bent is spiritual. It is a reflection on thinking, like Agua Viva, but more overtly spiritual. There is some reference to Christianity. Overall, Agua Viva was better.

In this book, the unnamed narrator, an artist, discovers a roach in the closet of her former maid's room, and for the next 200 pages writes about what is happening to her in this experience. Beautiful writing and very mystical. There is really no one who writes like Clarice Lispector. But if you're looking for a book with a nice plot and a happy ending, look elsewhere.

I'm in something of a Lispector reading phase right now - read 'The Hour of the Star' decades ago, and although it made a lasting impression on me, I wasn't sure why, and with hindsight I somehow don't feel I was wholly 'ready' for now. Recently, I've read Agua Viva as well as The Passion, have The Besieged City on my 'bought and to read' list and am working my way through the Complete Stories.The Passion barely has a conventional plot, it's about - if anything - a transformative experience whose specific circumstances I'm not sure I am able to fully buy into. But this doesn't really matter - I feel Lispector is very explicitly inviting us to step into our own experience in old or (new-very-old) ways and what happens in G.H's maid's bedroom is by any stretch a good enough vehicle for what is essentially intended as a universalist 'message' or lure. At this stage in my life, personally I feel ripe for her work, and unhesitatingly ready to accompany her, or to acknowledge an appeal repeatedly made by the narrator of 'The Passion' to reach out my hand to her. Any comment on the quality of the translation is limited by my lack of knowledge of Portuguese, alas, yet with that massive caveat in place, I can say that nothing jars, and all my intuition is the adverb 'lovingly' would not be inapt.

A remarkable - and difficult - exploration of a breakdown. A highly introspective woman ('G.H.') enters her maid's bedroom and sees a cockroach which triggers an existential crisis.Everything is in the writing. Life proceeds at a snail's pace with plenty of retrospection, reminiscent of Kafka and Henry James. The highly intelligent, alert and spoilt G.H. 'lived well, really well ... on the top floor of a superstructure ... [where] at least nothing spoke and nobody spoke'. Her days are devoid of virtually any activity, on top of which she is a control freak, obsessed with 'rules and laws', but this is counteracted by her micro-focused imagination.‘Buried beneath the sentimental and utilitarian construction ... the thing part ... was too powerful and was waiting to reclaim me.’ It is hard to tell how unbalanced G.H. is, because of the lucidity of her musings. She experiences emptiness and joy, talking intimately to the reader, 'my love', before confronting her absolute, girlish horror of the cockroach, and then plunging into its ancient being.It is hard going, reading such intense intellectualising of a very particular and - on the surface - minor sensory experience: 'its existence was existing [as an] acute calibration of the minutest sensation of me'. But the labour pays off, giving an unflinching sense of the frailty of life, which can as easily turn to horror as to joy.The work is a bit like a Nordic drama in which the sole actor is stripped so naked that all you can see is the blood coursing through her veins, while her eyes hold you in an intense searchlight.

Seemed written by a very depressed, self-absorbed person. That may have been the point - an early feminist perspective, "I matter"? Regardless, I did not enjoy it.

É uma ótima tradução de "A Paixão Segundo GH" da Clarice Lispector, fica a recomendação. A tradutora realmente se preocupou em trazer todos os elementos do livro original, os simbolismos que surgem no correr da obra, para o equivalente da lingua inglesa, tarefa não muito fácil neste tipo de livro, que usa da técnica do fluxo de consciência como narrativa. O ebook manteve todos os detalhes estruturais da obra original, os elementos estéticos que a autora fez questão de ali colocar. Vale a pena.

No cliches, pure work of art! If you are in search of real creative talent, Clarice Lispector will amaze you.