Awards
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2012 Powell's Staff Top 5s
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Staff Pick
Fans of Gertrude Stein, Franz Kafka, and John Waters, get ready to take a dive into Lispector’s avant-garde world. The titular narrator reflects on the cockroach she has discovered and killed in her former maid’s room, culminating in a crisis of personality. Rich with metaphor and social analysis, The Passion According to G. H. is a beautiful meditation that demands to be read. Keep your pencil close at hand; there are sure to be lines, passages, whole pages you’ll want to remember. Recommended By Kyan F., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
The Passion According to G.H., Clarice Lispector's mystical novel of 1964, concerns a well-to-do Rio sculptress, G.H., who enters her maid's room, sees a cockroach crawling out of the wardrobe, and, panicking, slams the door — crushing the cockroach — and then watches it die. At the end of the novel, at the height of a spiritual crisis, comes the most famous and most genuinely shocking scene in Brazilian literature...
Lispector wrote that of all her works this novel was the one that "best corresponded to her demands as a writer."
Review
"Lispector's prose is unforgettable...still startling by the end because of Lispector's unsettling forcefulness. "
The Boston Globe
Review
"Her novels, and G.H. in particular, are filled with a sense of longing and desperation — a yawning desire for meaning itself."
Sarah Gerard, BOMB
Synopsis
Lispector's most shocking novel.
About the Author
Clarice Lispector (1925-1977), the author of such works as
Near to the Wild Heart, The Hour of the Star, and T
he Passion According to G. H., is the internationally acclaimed novelist and short-story writer from Brazil and the subject of Benjamin Moser's magisterial biography
Why This World.
Idra Novey is a poet and translator. She is a lecturer at the Creative Writing Program at Columbia University. Her work has appeared in the Paris Review, The Believer, and Ploughshares, and her collection The Next Country appeared in 2008.
Series editor Benjamin Moser, who contributes afterwords for all four of these new translations, is the author of Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, due out in paperback from Oxford University Press in May 2012. He also just completed a new translation of Lispector's The Hour of the Star.