Brazilian-Jewish writer Clarice Lispector’s family immigrated from a Ukrainian shtetl to Recife, Brazil, when she was two months old, and she soon swapped out Yiddish, the language her family spoke at home, for Portuguese. In 1944, at the age of 24, she published her first novel, Near to the Wild Heart, which told the story of a middle-class woman’s sheltered upbringing and loveless marriage. The stunning, enigmatic writer, who rarely addressed Jewishness in her work (though she was fixated with Brazilianness), died of cancer in 1977, and is buried in the Jewish Cemetary of Caju, in Rio. Benjamin Moser, who wrote a biography on Lispector, spoke with Vox Tablet in 2009.

As Anderson Tepper wrote longingly in 2008,

And so I carried on, and was bewitched by the rest of her fiction as well—eerie, existential vignettes, savant-like parables and prophesies of modern angst seared by the Brazilian sun. Her work called to mind a tropical, female Kafka with sensory overload.

Read Dizzy With Life, by Anderson Tepper

Joanna Neborsky

We scoured Tablet Magazine’s and Nextbook.org’s archives to find books (and their writers) long forgotten. Each week we will feature one lost book and the story behind it. So blow the dust off the cover, and begin!

Hurst and Hurston: Seventy years after their road trip, the best-selling sentimental novelist has run out of gas, while Zora is still in the driver’s seat. By Kate Bolick

No Exit: Raised in the last golden days of the Hapsburgs, the Viennese writer Stefan Zweig found his world shattered by war. By Jennifer Weisberg

Restoration Project: Where have all Bernard Malamud’s readers gone? By Rachel Donadio

Back from the Shadows: Dovid Bergelson’s skepticism served him poorly in life but sublimely in art. By Boris Fishman

Third Look: On rereading Leonard Michaels’s I Would Have Saved Them If I Could. By Shalom Auslander

The Odd-Bod: In literary London, Elias Canetti was everybody’s favorite refugee. By Jonathan Wilson

School Ties: Jacques de Lacretelle won praise when he wrote in Dreyfus’ shadow, but today his portrait of a prep-school peer looks grotesque. By Paul LaFarge

Glamour and Peril: Tempestuous, cold, and intensely private, Elsa Morante considered herself a genius. Are others finally starting to agree? By Andrea Crawford

Melting Point: British playwright Israel Zangwill coined America’s most enduring metaphor as his reputation dissolved in controversy. By Chloe Veltman

Give ‘Em Hecht: A young Chicago newspaperman thought he was perfect for the part of his hero. By Neal Pollack

The Spy Who Loved Me: An Israeli thriller that captivated Graham Greene. By Paul LaFarge

King of the Forest: The Viennese pornographer turned critic who dreamed up Bambi. By David Rakoff

Funny Guys Finish Last: Philip Roth and Bruce Jay Friedman were rising stars in the 1960s. Roth became part of the canon. Friedman became “that guy who wrote Splash.” By Meg Wolitzer

Westward Expansion: Prostitutes, Christian Scientists, cross-dressing teachers. By Margy Rochlin

A Fine Mess: How a filmmaker turned his movie flop into a groundbreaking book. By Lawrence Levi

Asch’s Passion: A popular Yiddish novelist strove for immortality by taking on Jesus, but it cost him his core audience and made him a marked man. By Ellen Umansky

So Big: Human awkwardness was at the heart of Edna Ferber’s popular novels, but she shied away from writing about the outsiders she knew best. By Mollie Wilson

Fall From Grace: In 1843, British novelist Grace Aguilar was a household name on both sides of the Atlantic. So how come we’ve never heard of her? By Justin Taylor

A Woman Out of Time: In 1938, at the height of U.S. isolationism, Americans devoured Phyllis Bottome’s chronicle of a German-Jewish family’s struggle to survive under the Nazi regime. By Andrea Crawford

Regatta Land: Amid Harvard’s ivy-covered bricks, the hero of Myron Kaufmann’s Remember Me to God struggles to become part of the in crowd. By Josh Lambert

Great Pretenders: In Romain Gary’s family, invention was the necessity of mother and son. By Emma Garman

Wartime Truths: In 1945, Jerzy Andrzejewski’s novel of the Warsaw ghetto enraged Poles and Jews alike. How will it read to audiences today? By Andrea Crawford

Dizzy with Life: Clarice Lispector’s gorgeous, vibrant writings made one writer’s head—and heart—spin. By Anderson Tepper

Storm Warning: The surprising alliance at the heart of John Oliver Killens. By Josh Lambert

In Bloom: Pearl Buck breathes life into a disappearing Chinese community. By Jennifer Cody Epstein

Toward the Abyss: The final work of a doomed Yiddish novelist. By Elizabeth Mitchell

The Student Who Wouldn’t Go Away: How a bumbling immigrant from Kiev became a literary sensation. By Jennifer Weisberg

What Happened to Mary Berg? A young girl’s account of the Warsaw Ghetto was a big success. Then the diary—and its author—disappeared. By Amy Rosenberg

The Good of ‘A Bad Man:’ How Stanley Elkin hit his stride. By Sarah Almond

The Hermit of Oliphant: After the literary pioneer Dvora Baron immigrated to Palestine, she never again ventured out. By Haim Watzman

The Road Not Taken: Decades before Herzl, Benjamin Disraeli wrote a novel that grappled with Zionism. By Adam Kirsch

Third Life: For Jakov Lind, reinvention was the heart of fiction. By Sasha Weiss

The Paragraph That Changed My Life: On Yaakov Shabtai’s Past Continuous. By Todd Hask-Lowy

Baruch Obama: How a black president was imagined as a Jewish one, more or less. By Ben Greenman

Comeback Kid: Having failed to assimilate, Ludwig Lewisohn went on to write the great American Jewish novel. By Josh Lambert

Beginning of the End: Decadence and anti-Semitism in Arthur Schnitzler’s Vienna. By Wesley Yang

Touchy Subject: Frederick Busch feared his novel Invisible Mending would upset readers. He didn’t anticipate his own discomfort. By Andrea Crawford

Child’s Play: Seventy years ago, a contentious novel scrutinized Judaism through the eyes of a young boy. By Sasha Weiss

Where the Heart Is: A 1951 novel parses the meaning of home. By Elizabeth Gumport

Swallowed Whole: Réjean Ducharme’s mysterious 1966 novel. By Benjamin Nugent

Big Bang: With Lionel Trilling and Robert Giroux cheerleading, Sam Astrachan had a stellar future. Then the glimmer faded. By Josh Lambert

A Wanderer in the Desert: How a tubercular shoemaker became a great Yiddish poet. By Jacqueline Osherow

Of a Feather: Communing with Bernard Malamud’s Jewbird. By Joe Hill

Related: Dizzy With Life [Tablet]

Benjamin Moser will be in conversation with Tablet Magazine’s Gabriel Sanders at New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage on November 8.

Clarice Lispector

Had I been preparing myself for Lispector? Had I been waiting for her, inventing her? Whatever the answers, there she was, staring out from the book jacket of her first novel, Near to the Wild Heart, published in 1944 when she was just 24 (or thereabouts), her gaze looking right through me. As the translator Gregory Rabassa famously put it: “I was flabbergasted to meet that rare person who looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf.” My infatuation was total: the name—Clarice Lispector—the pure, icy alliteration of it; the eyes, with their magnetic, almost clairvoyant intensity; the title itself, which echoed my own mood, my reckless longing.

But it was the writing that froze me in my tracks. The story of a middle-class girl’s cloistered childhood and loveless marriage, Near to the Wild Heart shimmers with a rich interior life, a bursting, exuberant explosion of language and imagery. With each new passage in Joana’s life, each inch of self-realization she achieves, it thrums, it levitates. “She fell silent once more, peering into herself,” Lispector writes. “She remembered: I am the tiny wave that has no other region except the sea, I tussle with myself, I glide, I fly, laughing, giving, sleeping, but alas, always within myself, always within myself.” Her writing struck a chord in me. The language she spoke—stripped-down, breathless, soul-baring, poised at the brink of breakdown or revelation—was mine. Was I projecting? Was I reaching for her books with the desperation, the hunger, of a lover? Of course I was.

And so I carried on, and was bewitched by the rest of her fiction as well—eerie, existential vignettes, savant-like parables and prophesies of modern angst seared by the Brazilian sun. Her work called to mind a tropical, female Kafka with sensory overload. As the French literary critic and philosopher Hélène Cixous put it: “I discovered an immense writer, the equivalent for me of Kafka, with something more: This was a woman, writing as a woman. I discovered Kafka and it was a woman.” Unlike Kafka’s however, Lispector’s work—though obsessed with Brazilianness and a sense of belonging—had little to say about its own Jewishness. As Grace Paley writes in the introduction to Lispector’s book of stories, Soulstorm: “I thought at one point in my reading that there was some longing for Europe, the Old World; but decided I was wrong. It was simply longing.” And according to Moacyr Scliar, Brazil’s foremost Jewish writer, Lispector “didn’t deny her Jewishness, but she didn’t push it. The reason why this happened is still the subject of discussion here in Brazil.” Perhaps this, too, fueled my fascination with Lispector: What traces of my own Jewishness did I find there, reflected by the dazzling surfaces of her work?

I was hooked; I sought out all of her works in translation. And yet, the more I read and learned of her, the more the mystery of her grew. Who exactly was Clarice Lispector, this strange, iconoclastic figure of Brazilian letters, this woman who wrote as if in a trance, her words burning off the page? Here is where I should delve into her biography, I know, and describe it for you—her immigration, when she was just two months old, from a Ukrainian shtetl to Recife, in the northeast of Brazil; her teenage years in Rio de Janeiro; her marriage to a diplomat, with postings around Europe in the 1940s and 1950s; her divorce and solitary writing life, again in Rio; her death from cancer in 1977.

But, the truth is, each time I read of it, it’s different. Was it in 1920, or 1924, that the family made their voyage to Brazil? Was their home village called Tchechelnik, Checkelnik, or something else? Was her first language Yiddish, which the Lispectors (Pedro and Marietta and their three daughters, Clarice, Elisa, and Tanya) spoke at home—or Portuguese, as Clarice insisted? (“It was the Portuguese language which influenced my spiritual life and innermost thoughts, and this was the language I used to utter words of love,” she wrote.) “She told different people different things about what town she lived in and when she was born,” the scholar Earl Fritz has said. “She wore a lot of masks, and when she would take one off you’d think she was revealing something, but all she was revealing was another mask.”

And so I formed a hazy picture of her from her books and their varying prefaces and afterwords. There were the collections of stories, Soulstorm and Family Ties: short, precise character studies—of daughters, wives, lonely and rebellious women—pierced with fleeting epiphanies, glimpses of life caught askew, unhinged, refracted as if in shards of glass and mirrors. The novels, full of rambling metaphysics and streams and streams of consciousness, ranged from the slim and whispery, like An Apprenticeship or The Book of Delights and The Hour of the Star, to the dense and unwieldy, like The Apple in the Dark (her magnum opus). And then there were the unclassifiable, the pastiches of fiction and reverie: The Stream of Life, The Passion According to G.H. “This is not simply a narrative,” Lispector writes in The Hour of the Star, “but above all primary life that breathes, breathes, breathes.”

The Hour of the Star, in fact, manages to compress most of Lispector’s obsessions into one tiny thumbnail of a book. Macabéa, a driftless immigrant from the northeast, shuttles to and from her job as a typist, her boarding house, and a soulless love affair in Rio, while slowly gaining inklings of her own freedom and ultimately finding redemption. In Macabéa, too, one can find perhaps a touch of Jewish symbolism: Does the name refer to the Maccabees, the Jewish warriors who recaptured Jerusalem from the Greeks in 164 BCE? There are few overt references to Judaism in her work—rather, she gives us priests, cathedrals, angels, and the almost divine powers of writing and “the word” itself. In the hallucinatory story “Where Were You at Night,” however, Lispector writes of a “poor Jew” who lives in a “dirt-cheap boarding house” surrounded by prostitutes and cockroaches. But he is just one of the collection’s many characters—teachers, seamstresses, architects, transvestites, erotic dancers—searching for salvation in cities real and imagined.

But most revealing of Lispector herself were her crônicas, or chronicles, the short newspaper columns she wrote between 1967 and 1973 that followed her every whim and fancy—brief, intense meditations on a myriad of subjects, from her housemaid and dinner parties to race, marriage, Carnival, love, travel, motherhood, and the anxieties of her craft. Selected Crônicas and The Foreign Legion capture a Brazil refracted through the prism of Lispector’s heightened sensitivity, a combination of daydreams, confessions, sketches, and aphorisms. “One Final Clarification,” an entry from 1970, offers, for once, more than just an oblique, fragmentary self-portrait: “From time to time I receive letters asking me if I am Russian or Brazilian and people invent all sorts of myths about me,” she declares, before going on to dispute claims of her foreignness and insist upon her native Brazilian roots.

How many layers deep, then, is her Jewishness embedded, I wonder, and why? (Her sister Elisa, incidentally, went on to write several novels and stories focused on Jewish family life.) I don’t know the answer, yet I like to think that her Jewishness (like mine?) exists just beneath the surface, imprinted somehow in her words, her search for meaning, her ache, her soulstorm.

My discovery of Lispector, of course, was bound up in so many other discoveries. The books themselves were wonders: the small New Directions editions, with their abstract cover art by Paul Klee; the university presses that spoke of the hushed, hermetic world of academia; the British copies, doubly exotic in their foreignness. And the independent bookshops I found her in, now gone or fast-disappearing: Endicott Books on the Upper West Side; the university bookstore on 14th street; and Coliseum Books, then at Columbus Circle. (I distinctly remember reaching up for the spines of her New Directions paperbacks—a row or two above Henry Miller’s—as the first Gulf War was announced over the radio at Coliseum.)

But, in time, I lost track of Lispector, my passion for her overrun by other books, other adventures. I vaguely recall the growing frustration, too, of reading some of her more experimental, elliptical prose. As Cixous cautioned in the foreword to The Stream of Life: “Is this text readable? One may have to find other modes, other ways of approaching it: one can sing it. One is in another world.” I couldn’t sing, alas, and I had entered other worlds. I no longer lived in a heatless Harlem apartment; I had found a steady job with a magazine that seemed likely to stick around for a while. I now reviewed books as well, though without any of the freedom and abandon of Lispector’s classic crônicas.

In short, I’d moved on, and heard little further mention of Lispector, whom I assumed was heading towards an ever deeper obscurity in the U.S. When I did occasionally stumble onto her books, there was a tingle of recognition, a jolt from the past. I remember excitedly seeing new editions of her works popping up in the small Portuguese-language section at the Spanish bookstore on 14th street. Later, a Brazilian friend told me of her cultish following in Brazil, her bizarre reputation for sorcery and hysteria, and my picture of her deepened.

Then, slowly, I began to see signs of a coming revival. Or was I imagining that, too? The Spanish bookstore suddenly displayed books of hers I had never heard of (a second novel, La Araña, or The Lamp, as well as a posthumous work, Un Soplo de Vida, or A Breath of Life). And last year, the Center for Jewish History’s YIVO Institute, in New York, hosted an overflowing program entitled “The Cultural Powers of Dislocation: Clarice Lispector and Ways of Being Jewish in Brazil,” with reminiscences and lectures by Rabassa and Fritz, as well as a video of Lispector herself. Eerily, in February 1977, just ten months before her death, she tells a television interviewer: “When I am not writing, I am dead.” (She is buried, by the way, in the Jewish Cemetary of Caju, in Rio.)

As I recently reached again for her books on the shelves and slowly waded back into them, I felt that old familiar rush. I was surprised by how raw they were, how freshly they still struck me, how “dizzy with life” her work remained. Yes, Lispector’s writing still breathes, breathes, breathes. “In no sense an intellectual, I write with my body. And what I write is like a dank haze,” she declares in The Hour of the Star, published just before she died. I missed that dank haze—and, revisiting it, I was reminded how much she had meant to me and how much her work still survives. “Long live me! Still alive!” she exclaims at the end of the story “Day by Day.” Yes, still alive, still thrumming—and still so near to the wild heart!