Too Much Of Life (complete Chronicles)

By (author) Lispector Clarice; Translated by Jull Costa, Margaret; Translated by Patterson Robin
Description:

A TLS Book of the Year

This exhilarating collection of non-fiction sees one of the greatest twentieth-century writers meditating on the moments that make up a life

''How did I so unwittingly transform the joy of living into the great luxury of being alive?''

Between 1967 and 1977, the internationally renowned author Clarice Lispector wrote weekly dispatches from her desk in Rio for the Jornal do Brasil. Already famous for her revolutionary, interior, metaphysical novels and short stories, in her Chronicles she turned her attention to the everyday, reshaping the material of her life into profound, touching and funny, tiny revelations.

Observing the world around her, small encounters like hearing tales of the lost loves of a taxi driver, or the bitterness lurking beneath the prettiness of an old friend, become an exposition of the currents and foibles that define our lives. Everything from the meaning of cosmonauts to the new ideas, writers and artists that populate the sparkling international world of the sixties and seventies are considered and transformed into jewels of insight, delight and devastation.

Sincere and playful, exhilarating and contemplative, Too Much of Life: Complete Chronicles opens up a new way of seeing the world.

Review quote:
No two columns are alike: strands of dialogue, observed scenes, diaristic entries, life advice, even the author admiring herself in the mirror . . . Too Much of Life is a huge addition to an already impressive collection of evidence that Lispector could transcribe a guestbook and make it interesting
Review quote:
In 1967, Brazil''s leading newspaper asked the avant-garde writer Lispector to write a weekly column on any topic she wished. For almost seven years, Lispector showed Brazilian readers just how vast and passionate her interests were . . . Indeed, these columns should establish her as being among the era''s most brilliant essayists. She is masterful, even reminiscent of Montaigne, in her ability to spin the mundane events of life into moments of clarity that reveal greater truths. Superb, wonderfully obsessed with exuberance and what it unlocks and reveals
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This is Clarice Lispector as one-woman chorus and psychic weather forecaster, and the charm, wit and engagement that she brings to her columns transcends barriers
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The closest thing we have to an autobiography by Lispector and contain many rewarding reflections on her own work . . . thrillingly unpredictable . . . singular visitations from a brilliant entity
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Lispector writes and thinks like nobody else, sending her readers off to look at the world through strange new lispectacles
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An emblematic twentieth-century artist who belongs in the same pantheon as Kafka and Joyce
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Plenty of writers inspire fierce devotion in their readers... but no one converts the uninitiated into devout believers as suddenly and as vertiginously as Clarice Lispector, the Latin American visionary, Ukrainian-Jewish mystic, and middle-class housewife and mother so revered by her Brazilian fans that she''s known by a single name: "Clarice"
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She writes with sensuous verve, bringing her earliest passions into adult life intact, along with a child''s undiminished capacity for wonder
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For those unfamiliar with her, this book opens a door into her uniquely challenging and rewarding body of work . . . the pieces, some amounting to a few sentences, some many pages long, make up a self-portrait in bits and pieces. The result is, like Lispector herself, witty, mystical, surreal and