Clarice Lispector’s 98th Birthday

“I write very simply,” said the Brazilian author Clarice Lispector. “I don’t dress things up.” Her intensely personal short stories and novels about the innermost feelings of characters searching for meaning in life made her one of the most celebrated literary figures of the 20th century.

Born on this day in 1920, Clarice Lispector fled the Ukraine with her family, who had been persecuted for being Jewish, to the city of Recife in northern Brazil. At age nine she and her two sisters moved to Rio, where they were raised by her father following her mother’s passing.

Lispector began writing stories at age seven. While studying law she cultivated her passion by writing for newspapers and magazines—both fiction and journalism—before publishing her first novel at age 23. Perto do coração selvagem (Near to the Wild Heart) was hailed for its innovative interior monologue style, revealing the thoughts and emotions of an adolescent woman. It earned her the Graça Aranha Prize for the best debut novel of 1943. The same year her book was published she married a diplomat and left Brazil to live nearly two decades in Italy, Switzerland, England, and America. She visited Brazil regularly but did would not move back until 1959.

Collections of stories like Family Ties and The Foreign Legion explore the alienation of modern life by revealing their character’s private reflections on the mundane details of daily existence. Taken as a whole, her 85-story body of work can be read an autobiography: the inner thoughts of a woman’s entire life from adolescence to old age.

In recent years many of her works—including her 1973 masterpiece Água Viva (The Stream of Life)—have been translated into English, allowing a new generation of readers to discover this enchanting individual author.

Happy Birthday, Clarice Lispector!
 

Today's Doodle was created by Clarice's granddaughter, Mariana Valente. She writes:

It is very stimulating to work with collage and to be able to make a tribute to my grandmother Clarice, because I feel that I learned from her the redefinition of the meaning of the words in the word itself and to reframe images in the collage. For this celebration Doodle, I decided to tell a little bit about her path, the escape from dangerous Ukraine as a refugee, leaving Europe by ship to arrival at a new, strange and warm Brazilian Northeast harbor to finally witness her ascension as an internationally praised writer.

The mark of the Rio de Janeiro's Botanical Garden, one of her favorite sanctuaries, a hidden cockroach and the building where she started her first job downtown Rio, represent her epiphanies coming from everyday scenes.

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