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Fiction

Clarice Lispector’s Lessons in Being Human

Credit...Sol Cotti

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AN APPRENTICESHIP
Or The Book of Pleasures
By Clarice Lispector
Translated by Stefan Tobler

The first word of Clarice Lispector’s newly translated 1969 novel, “An Apprenticeship, or The Book of Pleasures,” is not a word at all, but a mark: a comma. The story hurtles into view, like a glistening car coming around a curve, already at full speed. An invisible, eternal sentence streams from both ends of the work, more meaning that precedes and follows what we are reading. The entire book is only a fragment. (This is less abstract than it sounds: Aren’t we all born into the middle of someone else’s life?) Lispector is legendary in her adopted country, Brazil, for her genius and her glamour, and every translation of her writing is belated and urgent. We’re playing catch-up. Don’t hesitate.

As always, Lispector’s plot bows to her form. This shard of language — reflective, serrated — is about a woman finding endlessness in the early morning, a warm body, the empty sea. She realizes that “whatever she was, was only a small part of herself.” On the surface, “An Apprenticeship,” elegantly translated here by Stefan Tobler, is an acute romance, between Lóri, a suicidal elementary schoolteacher, and her withholding, esoteric crush, a philosophy professor named Ulisses. But it is also a spiritual treatise, a didactic dialogue between not-yet lovers. With curiosity and kink, the couple embraces the power play of teacher-student, guru-acolyte relationships, but without solidifying who is who. He refuses to sleep with her until she is “ready,” and she undertakes this project with the devotion of a mystic — loving as a search for enlightenment. If you’re wondering, “Ready for what?” then you’re already on your way.

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As Lóri moves between despair, yearning and bliss, Lispector unravels existential knots within the daily tangles of femininity. Here’s Simone Weil — if she had to pick out the perfect dress to meet a cold man at a bar, sit by the edge of a pool with him and say the right thing. In this apprenticeship, Lóri is learning joy, “the hardest thing to understand,” which sometimes crests into a supernatural grace. Other times it settles, soft and heady, as lust. Both are transformative.

Lóri learns how to pray, to “ask the maximum of yourself,” and refuse “a petty life because it wouldn’t match the absoluteness of death.” Worship is in “the light hallelujah” of peeled potatoes, buying matching red sweaters for herself and all her students, and “living off coincidences, living by lines that kept meeting and crossing and, where they crossed, would form a light and instantaneous point, so light and instantaneous that it was mostly made of secret.” She puts every leaf that lands on her during the windy season in her handbag, carrying the dead crackle of small synchronicities: “One day a falling leaf landed on her eyelashes. Right then she saw God as immensely tactful.” She wakes up before dawn, to be herself, and lets the phone ring a few times before answering, in case it’s him.

These are all small lessons in being human. In the end, pleasure is her graduation, death turned inside out: “She didn’t want anything except just what was happening to her: to be a woman in the dark beside a man who was sleeping.” Lispector’s writing is like glass: granular detail turned to liquid under impossible heat, and then hardened and crystallized into a wet, new thing. Its fragility requires a certain patience to handle; it always feels on the edge of shattering. It turns the sky into a kind of object. It welcomes the light.

Audrey Wollen is a regular contributor to Bookforum, The Nation and other publications.

AN APPRENTICESHIP
Or The Book of Pleasures
By Clarice Lispector
Translated by Stefan Tobler
155 pp. New Directions. $22.95.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 14 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Love’s Labors. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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