Near to the Wild Heart

Author

Clarice Lispector

Original Work

Near to the Wild Heart

Translator

Alison Entrekin

Foreword / Afterword

Benjamin Moser

Language

English

Year

2012

Publisher

New Directions

Country

United States

Pages

194

ISBN

0811220028

0000

This new translation of Clarice Lispector's sensational first book tells the story of a middle class woman's life from childhood through an unhappy marriage and its dissolution to transcendence. Near to the Wild Heart, published in Rio de Janeiro in 1943, introduced Brazil to what one writer called “Hurricane Clarice”: a twenty-three-year-old girl who wrote her first book in a tiny rented room and then baptized it with a title taken from Joyce: “He was alone, unheeded, near to the wild heart of life.” The book was an unprecedented sensation — the discovery of a genius. Narrative epiphanies and interior monologue frame the life of Joana, from her middle-class childhood through her unhappy marriage and its dissolution to transcendence, when she proclaims: “I shall arise as strong and comely as a young colt.”— Google Books