Clarice Lispector

Born Chaya Pinkhasivna Lispector on December 10, 1920, in Chechelnyk, a small town in western Ukraine, Lispector arrived in Brazil before she was two, carried by parents fleeing the pogroms of the Russian Civil War. Her mother, Mania, had been raped by soldiers during the violence and contracted syphilis; the family believed that conceiving a child could cure the disease, and Clarice was that child. The cure did not work. Mania died when Clarice was nine, in Recife, where the family had settled. Lispector studied law in Rio de Janeiro and at twenty-three published her first novel, Near to the Wild Heart (1943), whose stream-of-consciousness prose stunned Brazilian critics, who compared her to Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, writers she claimed not to have read. She married the diplomat Maury Gurgel Valente and spent sixteen years abroad, writing in isolation. The Passion According to G.H. (1964), a hallucinatory interior monologue triggered by a woman's encounter with a cockroach, is considered her masterpiece. Agua Viva (1973) pushed narrative to the edge of abstraction. In 1966, she fell asleep with a lit cigarette and suffered severe burns over much of her body; her right hand was nearly destroyed. The Hour of the Star (1977), a spare, devastating novella about a poor northeastern girl adrift in Rio, was published shortly before her death from ovarian cancer on December 9, 1977, the eve of her fifty-seventh birthday.

In Bern, Switzerland, where her diplomat husband was posted for three years, Lispector found the city stifling: too orderly, she wrote to her sisters, and crowned with the strangest, tallest hats she had ever seen. She called it a cemetery of sensations. Writing The Besieged City there, she said, saved her from the city's appalling silence.