Staff Pick
A dazzling novel of surfaces — every sentence enchants. Lispector's protagonist, Lucrecia Neves, becomes a kind of vehicle for exploring the function of looking — the way that looking is not a passive act but a participatory one, an act in which we not only observe the world we live in, but create it. The Besieged City is one of Lispector's more experimental novels, and as far as I'm concerned, one of her best. Recommended By Darla M., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Perhaps written in flight from the "shipwreck of introspection," it is a book unlike any other in the Lispector canon, a novel about simply seeing the external world. Its heroine Lucr cia is utterly mute and unreflective. She may have no inner life Moreover, the plot itself is utterly unlike any other Lispector narrative: small town gal marries rich man, sees the world, and lives happily ever after That said, there are miraculous horses, linguistic ecstasies, catty remarks, minor characters' visions, music from unknown sources. But centrally, there is Lucr cia, the heroine free of the burden of thought, who "leaned over without any individuality, trying merely to look at things directly." And yet her "mere" looking leads, as Lispector's biographer Benjamin Moser notes, "paradoxically but inevitably, to Clarice's own metaphysical concerns. As it turns out, not being profound is simply another way of being profound."
Synopsis
Seven decades after its original publication, Clarice Lispector's third novel--the story of a girl and the city her gaze reveals--is in English at last. Lucr cia Neves is ready to marry. Her suitors--soldierly Felipe, pensive Perseu, dependable Mateus--are attracted to her tawdry not-quite-beauty, which is of a piece with Sao Geraldo, the rough-and-ready township she inhabits. Civilization is on its way to this place, where wild horses still roam. As Lucr cia is tamed by marriage, Sao Geraldo gradually expels its horses; and as the town strives for the highest attainment it can conceive--a viaduct--it takes on the progressively more metropolitan manners that Lucr cia, with her vulgar ambitions, desires too. Yet it is precisely through this woman's superficiality--her identification with the porcelain knickknacks in her mother's parlor--that Clarice Lispector creates a profound and enigmatic meditation on "the mystery of the thing." Written in Europe shortly after Clarice Lispector's own marriage, The Besieged City is a proving ground for the intricate language and the radical ideas that characterize one of her century's greatest writers--and an ironic ode to the magnetism of the material.