In his biography, Benjamin Moser has done an amazing amount of research on Clarice Lispector’s life, so that the enigmatic writer emerges as a complete yet complex figure.

Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector by Benjamin Moser. Oxford University Press, 479 pages, $29.95.

Listen to World Books interview with Clarice Lispector biographer Benjamin Moser

Reviewed by Monica Szurmuk

The biographies of Jewish-Latin American authors often include a place of birth on the other side of the Atlantic. One of the merits of Benjamin Moser’s superb biography of Clarice Lispector is that it starts on the other side of the ocean, in pogrom-ridden Ukraine where in 1920 Brazilian writer Lispector was born in a dismal social and political situation. Lispector’s parents were encouraged to have a baby as a way to heal the first stages of Mania Lispector’s syphilis, contracted when she was gang-raped by Russian soldiers. Baby Chaya was born healthy, and the Lispector family, which also included two older daughters, was able to escape Ukraine and get to Brazil.

Chaya became Clarice, keeping in the ce a mark of difference even after she had been renamed using a Brazilian first name whose usual spelling in Portuguese is Clarisse. Brazil could not heal the wounds of the parents, but it was a fertile ground for the three Lispector girls, who flourished and succeeded. Moser traces the indelible marks of Lispector’s past in her life and writing. He shows how the author’s insistence on her Brazilianness was also peppered by a reliance to let go of her past marked by an attachment to a slight foreign accent, and to a complex set of readings that included Spinoza and the Jewish mystics.

Lispector grew up in Recife, in the northeast of Brazil, a medium-sized town with a small but vibrant Jewish population. When she was fifteen, the father moved the family to Rio de Janeiro in the hopes of finding Jewish husbands for his three daughters. Clarice finished high school in Rio and graduated from the most prestigious law school in the country. She also started working as a journalist, had her first heartbreak (she fell in love with gay writer Lúcio Cardoso), and published her first novel “Near to the Wild Heart” in 1942.

A year later she married diplomat Maury Gurgel Valente, and following her husband she lived away from Rio for almost two decades, an exile that proved to be very traumatic for a woman whose attachment to the city was remarkable. In 1959, Lispector returned to Brazil with her two sons after divorcing Maury, and she lived close to the beach in Rio until her death in 1977, a day before she turned fifty seven. She went on to author nine novels, eight collections of short stories, as well as several children’s books, and hundreds of pages of journalism.

Moser is clearly in love with Lispector, a condition that infuses the biography with an almost romantic spirit. As Clarice would have it, Moser learns from her, apprentices under her. While the level of research carried out is impressive, there is still a slight tentativeness about the biography that makes it more endearing. In these little uncertainties, Moser’s love for Lispector emerges, and the passion for certain knowledge of his idol — paixão for Clarice – shines through as always incomplete, as always in vain. This ambiguity mirrors the nebulous genius of the author. French writer Hélène Cixous circled around Lispector’s writing in much the same way: “if Rilke had been a Jewish Brazilian born in the Ukraine. If Rimbaud had been a mother, if he had reached the age of fifty. If Heidegger could have ceased being German.” Moser’s combination of biography and literary criticism nimbly questions the relationship between life and literature, and ultimately reveals the immense complexity of Lispector’s works.

Benjamin Moser: He may have fallen in love with the subject of his biography.

Moser has done an amazing amount of research on Lispector’s life, and the author emerges as a complete yet complex figure. A full two chapters are devoted to the undoing of the Lispector family in the Ukraine, including a series of pogroms in which the extended family was decimated, and their livelihood and possessions lost. The gang rape of Mania Lispector is a turning point for the family. The rape, and the ensuing debilitating illness supplies, for Moser, the key to understanding Clarice Lispector’s creative project. He traces in Lispector’s major writing the presence of the mother, her sexual violation, and a daughter’s desire to save her.

Mothering and motherhood were fundamental in Lispector’s life. Her mother died when she was eight, after years of suffering, a paralyzed figure in the family’s balcony in Recife. Lispector herself would become a doting mother to her two sons, and also a substitute mother for other children, including the daughter of her psychoanalyst. In order to support herself after her divorce and her return to Rio Clarice contributed several columns in newspapers, most of which required her to write from the persona of a housewife, and a mother. She was a terrible businesswoman, who until very late in her life managed her finances very badly, receiving almost no royalties for her work.

Lispector was a public figure, honored by monuments in the wretched town in Podolia where she was born, and in Recife where she grew up. She combined looks and intelligence; talking about meeting her in Texas, Latin American literature translator Gregory Rabassa claimed that he “was flabbergasted to meet that rare person who looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf.” For the millions of readers in Latin America who already know her, Lispector remains somewhat of a mystery. Moser’s biography fills in many factual blanks, but it does not render her completely knowable because it would be impossible to fully analyze the creative force behind Lispector’s stunningly diaphanous prose, a literary mystery that remains with us.

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Mónica Szurmuk is Professor of Literature and Cultural Studies at the Instituto Mora in Mexico City. She is the author of “Mujeres en viaje: escritos y testimonios,” “Women in Argentina, Early Travel Narratives,” “Memoria y ciudadanía,” and co-editor of the “Diccionario de estudios culturales latinoamericanos.”