As someone who adores Clarice Lispector’s books, especially Too Much of Life, I went into Água Viva with a lot of affection and sky-high expectations. And somehow, it still managed to exceed them. This one sits right near the top for me. If I had to rank my Lispector favorites, Água Viva would be my second after Too Much of Life. It has all the signature qualities of Lispector’s writing, but here the language feels even more luminous, like reading poetry in prose form.
What I always admire about Lispector is the way she sees. She describes thoughts as well as listens to consciousness as it happens, then somehow translates that inner movement into words. Reading her can feel like stepping into a poem, and at times it even feels like a spiritual awakening, wondering, and surrender to whatever life is trying to reveal.
And even though Água Viva is as short as under 90 pages, it’s dense in the best way. It’s the kind of book you read slowly, not because it consists of complicated words, but because the sentences keep inviting you to pause and take a step back ‘looking’ into your life. Lispector seems to be reaching for a language that can capture the fleeting instants that make up a life, the unnamed moments between thought and feeling, between being and becoming.
Every time I read Lispector, the same thing happens: my commonplace book ends up overflowing. I carry it with me whenever I read, and with her work, it becomes impossible not to copy lines down. Some sentences feel too beautiful to let slip past like ordinary time. I want to return to them later, to reread them the way you revisit a memory you don’t want to lose.
Below are a few lines I especially loved from Água Viva, the ones I know I’ll want to come back to in the future.
My Favorite Bits
- One day I childishly said: I can do everything. It was the pre-viewing of one day being able to cast myself off and fall into the abandon of every law. Elastic. The profound joy: the secret ecstasy. I know how to invent a thought. I feel the commotion of novelty. But I am well aware that what I write is only a tone.
In my core I have the strange impression that I don’t belong to the human species.
Clarice Lispector, Água Viva
- Is it a lot of work to look after the world? Yes. For example: it forces me to remember the inexpressive and therefore frightening face of the woman I saw on the street. With my eyes I look after the misery of the people who live on the hillsides.
- I’m tired. My tiredness comes often because I’m an extremely busy person: I look after the world.
- You will no doubt ask me why I look after the world. It’s because I was born charged with the task.
- I lose the identity of the world inside myself and exist without guarantees. I achieve whatever is achievable but I live the unachievable and the meaning of me and the world and you isn’t obvious.
- For each one of us and at some lost moment of life—is a mission announced that we must accomplish? I however refuse any mission. I won’t accomplish anything: I just live.
- But writing for me is frustrating: when writing I’m dealing with the impossible.
Author: Clarice Lispector
Publication date: 1 August 1973
Number of pages: 88 pages
Leave a Reply