An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures by Clarice Lispector
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures is not a quick read try as I did to make it so (overdue at the library). Clarice Lispector is deeply thoughtful and concerned with identity and mysticism and love in ways that have never crossed my mind. Sheila Heti has written an afterward guiding the reader although I am still flailing. The book begins with a lone comma, and ends with a colon" and goes blank.
The story is about a woman named Lóri and her overwhelming obsession with and love for "the philosophy teacher Ulisses, who to a modern feminist reads as insufferably self-important."At one point, the narrator panics because she's unable to answer the question who am I and soothes herself by making a list of the things she can do:
"eat--look at fruit in the market--see people's faces--feel love--feel hate--have something not known and feel a unbearable suffering--wait impatiently for the beloved--sea--go into the sea--buy a new swimsuit--make coffee--look at objects--listen to music--holding hands--irritation--be right--not be right and give in to someone who is--be forgiven for the vanity of living--be a woman--do myself credit--laugh at the absurdity of my condition--have no choice--have a choice--fall asleep."
Lovely writing:
Her smile in springtime, "was a smile that had the idiocy of angels."
"Long before the arrival of the new season came its harbinger: unexpectedly a mildness in the wind, the first softness in the air. Impossible! Impossible that this softness in the air wouldn't bring more! says the heart, breaking."
On a memorable visit to a market, she sees the "pure purple blood running from a crushed beet root on the ground;" the potato...born inside the earth...whiter than a peeled apple; the fish smell was their souls after death; and the pears...so replete with themselves, almost at their peak; and the unwonted turnips. "
Maybe I've aged out of these love themes and the existential concerns that rack the narrator in physical anguish. Or a reread is in order. I also will go back to the author's fiction.
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