Clarice Lispector

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Clarice Lispector (December 10, 1920 - December 9, 1977) was a Brazilian writer.

Considered one of the greatest Brazilian prose writers of the twentieth century, Clarice Lispector was born in Chechelnyk, a shtetl in Ukraine, during the trip to Brazil, where the family were immigrating to. By the time of their arrival in Brazil, she was two months old. Her family first settled in Maceió, Alagoas, where her mother had family relations, and later moved to Recife, Pernambuco, where she went to elementary and high school, and wrote her first essays. After her mother's death, the family moved again, to Rio de Janeiro, when Clarisse was already 14 years old. There, she studied law and married her classmate Maury Gurgel Valente. After he entered the diplomatic corps she moved to Europe, living in Naples, Berne, Torquay (England), and Washington. She returned to Brazil in 1959.

Lispector was fluent in Yiddish, English, French and also had various levels of ability and knowledge in other languages, particularly Italian and German. In later life, she supported herself by translating books from English and French. She never said that she spoke Yiddish at home, but always said that her native Portuguese was the language of her heart. She never wrote in any other foreign language.

Her family was Jewish and spoke Yiddish at home. Some scholars who have studied her books have found a great influence of the Jewish thought in some of her stories. In 1944 she published her first novel Perto do Coração Selvagem, translated into English as "Near to the Wild Heart." When the novel was published, many claimed that her stream-of-consciousness writing style was heavily influenced by Virginia Woolf or James Joyce, but she had read neither of these authors. This novel, like all of her subsequent works, was marked by an intense focus on interior emotional states.

Lispector died of cancer in 1977, just one day before her 57th birthday, and was buried in the Jewish Cemetery of Caju, in Rio de Janeiro.

Her last novel is A Hora da Estrela, translated as The Hour of The Star, where the life of Macabéa, a poor woman living in Rio de Janeiro, is described by a narrator called Rodrigo S.M., a fictional writer. Written near the end of her life, A Hora da Estrela diverged from the themes and style of most of her work, instead directly and explicitly focusing on poverty and marginality in Brazil.

Her sister Elisa Lispector (born Savran, Ukraine, July 24, 1911--died Rio de Janeiro, January 6, 1989) was also a respected Brazilian novelist.