During the last winter holiday, instead of making a long list of New Year’s resolutions, I decided to set a short-term reading goal for the Christmas and New Year break. I wanted something immersive, something a little challenging, but also deeply rewarding. That’s how I ended up setting a goal to read all of Clarice Lispector’s books during the holiday, starting with The Complete Stories.

This book brings together 85 short stories, spanning Lispector’s entire career, from her earliest writings to pieces she completed late in her life. I’m genuinely glad I included this book in my holiday reading plans. Reading it slowly over the break kept things fresh, and boredom never once crept in. Then again, Lispector has yet to bore my mind.

Every time I turned the page, my mind was blown. Lispector’s multidimensional storytelling constantly shifts themes and perspectives, provoking a wide range of emotions. Many of the stories unfold in a surreal, dreamy atmosphere, quietly revealing the horror of what she describes as a “silent, slow, persistent life.” Throughout the collection, a subtle thread of disappointment runs beneath the surface. Her women exist in a fragile space, balancing between contentment and suffocation.

The stories are often confusing, sometimes tongue-in-cheek, and more than once left me shaking my head after finishing a page. But that confusion never felt meaningless. Instead, it felt intentional that let me sit with discomfort, uncertainty, and reflection a little longer.

My Favorite Bits

• I was born of simple creatures, steeped in that wisdom one acquires through experience and figures out with common sense.

• I realize now that it was a certain apathy, rather than peace , that turned my acts and my desires to ash.

• “Achievements kill desire,” said Daniel.

• “What interest me above all is feeling, accumulating desires, filling me up with myself. Achievements open me up, leave me empty and sated.”

• Whenever he turned toward the world, now groping and spent, he realized he was helpless and, bitter, bewildered, he discovered that all he knew was how to think.

• To make the most of oneself, he’d repeat, is the highest and noblest human objective. To make the most of oneself would mean abandoning the possession and achievement of things in order to possess oneself, to develop one’s own elements, to grow within one’s own form. To make one’s own music and hear it oneself . . .

• Because when everything melted away, only in his memory was there any trace.

• Because of his past—obscure, filled with frustrated dreams—he hadn’t managed to find a place in the conventional world, more or less happy, average. As for the future, he feared it too much because he was well aware of his own limits. And because, despite knowing them, he hadn’t resigned himself to abandoning that enormous, undefined ambition, which, when later it had already become inhuman, was directed beyond earthly things. Failing to achieve the things right in front of him, he’d turned toward something that no one, he guessed, could ever achieve.

• “You must know how to feel, but also how to stop feeling, because if an experience is sublime it can equally become dangerous. Learn how to cast the spell and then break it. Pay attention, I’m teaching you something valuable: the magic that is the opposite of, ‘open, Sesame.’ The best way for a feeling to lose its perfume and stop intoxicating us is to expose it to the sun.”

• I didn’t want to cool down: what I desired was to live the moment until I wore it out. I just needed to figure out a face that was less fiery. I sat down to a long stretch of sewing. Calm returned little by little. And with it, a deep and thrilling certainty of love. But, I thought, there’s nothing, really, nothing, for which I’d trade these coming moments! You only have a feeling like that two or three times in your life and the words hope, happiness, longing are connected to it, I discovered.

• Now that she’d decided to leave, everything was being reborn.

• And that’s the reason why there will never be any reforms. Because, instead of shouting, complaining, all I feel like is crying very softly and staying still, silent.

• I would like to tell you that having passions does not mean living beautifully, but rather suffering pointlessly. That the soul was made to be guided by reason and that no one can be happy when at the mercy of the instincts.

• Perhaps because one must save something. Perhaps through the belated consciousness that we are the sole presence that will not leave us until death. And that is why we love and seek ourselves. And why, so long as we exist, the world shall exist and humanity shall exist. This is how, in the end, we are connected to them.

• “Liberate” was an immense word, full of mysteries and pain. Since she’d been agreeable for days, when was she destined for that other role? Which other? Everything was mixed up and could only really be expressed by the word “liberty” and by her heavy and determined tread, in the stoic expression she adopted.

• But greatness was impossible in surroundings such as hers. They’d interrupt her with the most banal observations.

• She realized it, got irritated and took out her irritation on Tuda: “So many people dying, so many ‘homeless children,’ so many unsolvable problems (her problems) and here was this little girl, with a family, a nice bourgeois life, inflating her own importance.” (..) “Each person is a world, each person possesses his or her own key and other people’s keys don’t work; you can only look at someone else’s world for amusement, for some personal gain, for some other surface feeling floating by that isn’t the vital one; just knowing that others feel as you do is a consolation, but not a solution.”

• “(..) Aren’t you scared? The helplessness that comes from nature. That moonlight, think about it, that moonlight, paler than a corpse’s face, so silent and far away, that moonlight witnessed the cries of the first monsters to walk the earth, surveyed the peaceful waters after the deluges and the floods, illuminated centuries of nights and went out at dawns throughout centuries. (..)”

• “(..) I’d like to die while still alive, descending into my own tomb and shutting it myself, with a dull thud. And then go mad from pain in the earth’s darkness. But not unconsciousness.”

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Author: Clarice Lispector
Publication date: 1 January 2015
Number of pages: 650 pages

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