The World's Literature in Europe discussion

Usually I prefer to read a book in hardcover or in kindle because the larger format or the perfect lighting aid the physical act of reading. This biography of Clarice Lispector Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector by Benjamin Moser fits into that preference--perfectly readable, as well as clear, captivating content, something I'd forgotten to mention above. What better way to begin a biography than with two large maps--set around the time of her Ukrainian birth, 1920, and the time of her resettling in Brazil, probably 1922--and a Lispector family tree of three or four generations. Clarice's full name was Chaya Pinkhasovna Lispector and she was born in Chechelnik, Ukraine.

An Introduction before Chapter 1 mentions the early death of Clarice's mother, a similarity with Macabea, the main character in The Hour of the Star

As mentioned in the prior post, Lispector leaves some autobiographical details in her novels. Besides the detail of her being deprived of a mother in childhood, which this biography explains, another detail is word games with her name. I'll mention others as they evince.

If Lispector was born in 1920 Russian Ukraine, her family was part of the diaspora of refugees in flight from that conflicted madhouse, lucky not to have perished there. Moser presents the entire episode of the Lispectors' and other Jewish Ukranians experiences in their homeland after WW1. This tragedy brought them to relatives in northeastern Brazil after a series of difficulties.

Having survived racial persecution, civil war, rape, disease and exile, they now faced the tyranny of petty relatives.(45)

Her father did what many new emigrants did as a first step, peddling, then turned to soapmaking. Clarice and her eldest sister Elisa both became writers.