Complete Stories
Page 57
What did I attempt with this type of report?
I think that I wanted to write an anti-story, an anti-literature. As if that way I might demystify fiction. It was a worthwhile experience for me. It doesn’t matter that I have failed. It is called: OBJECT.
The Via Crucis of the Body (“A via crucis do corpo”)
Published in 1974, this work was composed over the course of a single weekend, as Clarice states in her “Explanation.” The looseness of its style, as well as a certain fatigued defiance in its tone, reflect her frustration, as she neared the end of her life, with her own personal struggles. The reactions to the book reflected the increasingly conservative political mood in the most repressive years of the Brazilian dictatorship. At the time, it was considered pornographic and, as she indicates in the “Explanation,” “trash.”
The story she refers to as “Blue Danube” in the “Explanation” was ultimately published as “Day After Day.”
Though Clarice wrote most of this collection on a weekend in May, she included “Before the Rio-Niterói Bridge,” published the previous month in Where Were You at Night as “A Complicated Case.” We have grouped it with these stories to preserve the continuity of Clarice Lispector’s most deliberately arranged collection. In the “Explanation” she states, “This is a book of thirteen (13) stories. But it could have been fourteen.”
Vision of Splendor: Light Impressions (“Visão do esplendor: impressões leves”)
This collection from 1975, the second to be published by Francisco Alves, includes mainly older short pieces. The exception is “Brasília.” She wrote an initial version in 1962, after her first visit to the new capital, published in The Foreign Legion as “Brasília: Five Days” (“Brasília: cinco dias”). The version here is the expanded version she wrote following her return to Brasília in 1974.
Final Stories
These two stories, left incomplete at Clarice Lispector’s death on December 9, 1977, were published, with the manuscript of her earliest stories, in Beauty and the Beast, 1979. They were edited by the great friend of Clarice Lispector’s last years, Olga Borelli. The title for the collection was chosen by her son, Paulo Gurgel Valente. Their incomplete state is reflected by a few inconsistencies: Carla in “Beauty and the Beast,” for example, has three children early in the story, two toward the end; at the beginning she is from a rich family, whereas later she is described as her husband’s former secretary.
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Acknowledgments
Katrina Dodson thanks the Brazilian friends who answered endless questions like “Does this sound strange in Portuguese?”: Vanessa Barbara, Ricardo Ferreira, Marta Peixoto, Regina Ponce, Victoria Saramago, and especially Beatriz Bastos, Paulo Henriques Britto, and Brenno Kenji Kaneyasu. Much gratitude goes to those who commented on the English and who generally kept me alive and well: Corey Byrnes, Kathryn Crim, Andrea Gadberry, Hilary Kaplan, Erin Klenow, Adam Morris, Lucy Reynell, Yael Segalovitz, Zohar Weiman-Kelman, Tristram Wolff, and Steve Fiduccia, as well as my family, especially Thao Dodson. And a big, exhausted abraço to the demanding, hilarious, and deeply committed Benjamin Moser, without whose energies this would never have been completed in less than a lifetime.
Benjamin Moser thanks Carlos Alberto Asfora, Schneider Carpeggiani, José Geraldo Couto, Cassiano Elek Machado, Eduardo Heck de Sá, and Paulo Gurgel Valente. My introduction is the fruit of long conversations with Honor Moore, to whom it is dedicated; the book in your hands is the fruit of the dedication of Katrina Dodson, sine qua non.
Both are grateful to the publishers in New York and London for their unremitting support. At Penguin, to Alexis Kirschbaum and Sam Voulters. At New Directions, to Michael Barron, Laurie Callahan, Mieke Chew, Helen Graves, Clarissa Kerner, Tynan Kogane, Declan Spring, and especially our beloved friend Barbara Epler.
Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1960, 1965, 1978, 2010, 2015, 2018 by the Heirs of Clarice Lispector
Translation copyright © 2015, 2018 by Katrina Dodson
Introduction copyright © 2015, 2018 by Benjamin Moser
Published by arrangement with the Heirs of Clarice Lispector and Agencia Literaria Carmen Balcells, Barcelona.
New Directions gratefully acknowledges the support of
MINISTÉRIO DA CULTURA
Fundação BIBLIOTECA NACIONAL
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
First published in cloth by New Directions in 2015
Published in a revised and expanded paperback edition (ndp1409) in 2018
(ISBN 978-0-8112-2793-3)
Manufactured in the United States of America
New Directions Books are printed on acid-free paper
Design by Erik Rieselbach
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lispector, Clarice.
[Works. English]
Complete stories / Clarice Lispector ; translated by Katrina Dodson ; edited and with an introduction by Benjamin Moser.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-8112-1963-1 (alk. paper)
I. Dodson, Katrina, translator. II. Moser, Benjamin, editor. III. Title.
PQ9697.L585A2 2015
869.3'41—dc23 2015013285
eISBN: 9780811227940
New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin
by New Directions Publishing Corporation
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