“(…) a person can only succumb. That’s what I did crying at the movies and alleviating a confused grief. The beginning of all this was a letter from you that I put next to my heart to feel its warmth and so I slept and even now, sitting by the lake, I have the letter in the same position (…) for now, I go to the movies and Your lyrics go inside your bra (sorry), because that’s how I feel the warmth of your friendship… It’s very good (…)”
This fragment of an extraordinary letter that Clarice Lispector wrote to the sisters Tânia and Elisa, from Lake Léman, Switzerland, in 1946, in all her despair and loneliness, gives us the tone of what was the life of this woman who became in myth, enigma, the genius writer. A woman with a strong personality who constantly and urgently needed to feel loved and united with the family and friends she left behind in Brazil in 1944, when she left for Naples to meet Maury Gurgel Valente, her diplomatic husband, and to which she only returns forever. , in 1959, after the end of her marriage.
Clarice Lispector, All lyrics It has just been published by Relógio d’Água and brings together more than 600 letters written by the author between 1940 and 1977 (year of her death) to her sisters, writer and non-writer friends, literary critics, editors and even the President of Brazil. , Getulio Vargas. It’s a valuable document for scholars, but like any intimate writing, it’s a book we should approach with our hearts rather than a voyeuristic desire to see obscenely into the details of another person’s life.
There is in these letters the spontaneity —and even the ingenuity— of someone who did not write for posterity and did not have any type of filter, quite the opposite. Certainly, Clarice Lispector never imagined that the world would one day want to read her letters, so full of weaknesses, fears, brief joys, corrosive humor, marital crises, boredom with the social life of a diplomat’s wife, parties and social events. . which, in general, she hated. Certainly, knowing that she was so naked would horrify her, but how could she guess that the intimate lives of celebrities would be so profitable?
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Source: Observadora
