The Besieged City - Hardcover

Lispector, Clarice; Moser, Benjamin; Lorenz, Johnny

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0811226719 ISBN 13: 9780811226714

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019

Synopsis

Seven decades after its original publication, Clarice Lispector's third novel--the story of a girl and the city her gaze reveals--is in English at last. Lucrécia Neves is ready to marry. Her suitors--soldierly Felipe, pensive Perseu, dependable Mateus--are attracted to her tawdry not-quite-beauty, which is of a piece with Sao Geraldo, the rough-and-ready township she inhabits. Civilization is on its way to this place, where wild horses still roam. As Lucrécia is tamed by marriage, Sao Geraldo gradually expels its horses; and as the town strives for the highest attainment it can conceive--a viaduct--it takes on the progressively more metropolitan manners that Lucrécia, with her vulgar ambitions, desires too. Yet it is precisely through this woman's superficiality--her identification with the porcelain knickknacks in her mother's parlor--that Clarice Lispector creates a profound and enigmatic meditation on "the mystery of the thing." Written in Europe shortly after Clarice Lispector's own marriage, The Besieged City is a proving ground for the intricate language and the radical ideas that characterize one of her century's greatest writers--and an ironic ode to the magnetism of the material.

About this title

Review

Lispector should be on the shelf with Kafka and Joyce.

Utterly original and brilliant, haunting and disturbing.--Colm Tóibín

Better than Borges.--Elizabeth Bishop

Dreamlike, dense, original, this challenging novel has a cumulative power. Highly recommended-- (01/21/2019)

Lispector's novel offers a pristine view of an ordinary life, told in her forceful, one-of-a-kind voice that captures isolated moments with poetic intensity.-- (02/06/2019)

Lispector's prose lilts and sways, its rhythm shakes at once with closeness and distance. The sensory power Lispector is able to draw from her sentences is here given free rein and the descriptive character of the text is wild with excess, seeking to imbue everything simultaneously with solidity, material presence, and transience, fluidity.--Daniel Fraser

Underneath Lispector's inventive, modernist style is a poignant and radical depiction of a young woman navigating a patriarchal society.-- (05/30/2019)

I'm really obsessed by this writer from Brazil, Clarice Lispector. I love her because she writes whole novels where not one thing happens--she describes the air. I think she's such a great, great novelist.-- (05/20/2019)

Lispector made her own rules, free of the world's constraints, and here, in her third novel, an ordinary story and apparently shallow protagonist are no impediments to formidable experiment...Having read her, one feels different, elated.

Beautiful.--Carolyn Kellogg

About the Author

Clarice Lispector (1920-1977), the greatest Brazilian writer of the twentieth century, has been called "astounding" (Rachel Kushner), "a penetrating genius" (Donna Seaman, Booklist), and "a truly remarkable writer" (Jonathan Franzen). "Her images dazzle even when her meaning is most obscure," noted the Times Literary Supplement, "and when she is writing of what she despises, she is lucidity itself."

Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 0811226719
• ISBN 13: 9780811226714
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 240