One of the most unexpected reads of my life – not an exaggeration. I thought I was picking up a novel, felt very hard done by after the first couple of pages which felt like slippery, stream of consciousness poetry, and then got wrapped up in one of the most exciting literary journeys of my life. You should read Agua Viva, even though its going to ask a lot from you – it more than repays the effort.
The book is about being alive. It channels a raging hunger to connect honestly and completely with lived experience; an insatiable desire to hold and know the elusive moment of existing even as it passes us by. It is heartbreaking and vivid and empowering and as unique as the incredible mind it sprung from.
“My only salvation is joy. An atonal joy inside the essential ‘it’. Doesn’t that make sense? Well it has to. Because it’s too cruel to know that life is unique and that we don’t have, as a guarantee, more than faith in darkness; because it’s too cruel, I respond with the purity of indomitable joy.” Agua Viva
Clarice Lispector, born Chaya Pinkhasivna Lispector (Хая Пінкасівна Ліспектор), was a Ukrainian born novelist and short story writer. She moved to Rio de Janeiro in her teens, spent a decade living across Europe and The United States, and then returned to Brazil in 1959. Injured in an accident in 1966, she spent the last decade of her short life in frequent pain and it is during this period that she produced the lion’s share of her published work. She wrote Agua Viva in 1973 and died four years later, at the age of fifty-seven.
Her legacy is now wrapped in mythology; her writing frequently described as spell casting in which the effusive elegance of her prose possesses her readers, earning her a cult status among her fans. Whatever your take on this, Clarice Lispector’s potency is undeniable, and the experience of reading Agua Viva a profound one. So take a deep breath, and plunge in.
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Three sisters live an antiquated, disconnected existence on a remote island. Their lives are ruled over by their autocratic parents, who mete out medieval punishments and force them to compete in bizarre rituals of sufferance.