The Chandelier

by Clarice Lispector, Magdalena Edwards (Translator), Benjamin Moser (Translator)

Overview

In paperback, Clarice Lispector’s explosive and surprising second novel

The Chandelier, written when Lispector was only twenty-three, reveals a very different author from the college student whose debut novel, Near to the Wild Heart, announced the landfall of “Hurricane Clarice.”
Virginia and her cruel, beautiful brother, Daniel, grow up in a decaying country mansion. They leave for the city, but the change of locale leaves Virginia's internal life unperturbed. In intensely poetic language, Lispector conducts a stratigraphic excavation of Virginia's thoughts, revealing the drama of Clarice’s lifelong quest to discover “the nucleus made of a single instant”—and displaying a new face of this great writer, blazing with the vitality of youth.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811228718
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	05/28/2019
Edition description:	Translatio
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	444,528
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.00(d)

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 “one of the twentieth century’s most mysterious writers” (Orhan Pamuk).

Magdalena Edwards is a writer, translator, and actor. Her work has appeared in the Boston Review, the Paris Review Daily, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Millions.

General editor of the new translations of Clarice Lispector’s complete works at New Directions, BENJAMIN MOSER is the author of Why This World: The Biography of Clarice Lispector, and Sontag: Her Life and Work, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. His new book, The Upside-Down World: Meetings with the Dutch Masters, will be published in October.

Editorial Reviews

"The revival of the hypnotic Clarice Lispector has been one of the true literary events of the 21st century."

Parul Sehgal

"Virginia’s memory of the chandelier as an adult is as strange and ambiguous as the rest of the moments in the novel, deeply introspective and without a clear meaning, but the energy and spiritual wonder of her descriptions make the cryptic writing all the more resonant and spiritually urgent for both her character and her reader."

The Refugee Woman Who Shaped Brazilian Literature - Electric Lit - Mike Broida

"Lispector’s signature narrative style, which borders on stream-of-consciousness, is the vehicle for Virginia’s existential dilemmas and her observations about a world from which she often seems removed. The Chandelier includes all the earmarks of Lispector’s other work, too: a deep anguish, a search for the heart of human existence, and the unbearable weight of a solitude that is imperative to ultimate freedom."

Book Review: The Chandelier - Americas Quarterly - Eric Becker

"[L]yrical, sensual, philosophical...gorgeous, unsettling prose..."

The Nation

"It's a shaggy stop-motion masterpiece, plotless and argument-less and obsessed with the nature of thought....Every page vibrates with feeling. It's not enough to say that Lispector bends language, or uses words in new ways. Plenty of modernists do that. No one else writes prose this rich."

NPR - Lily Meyer

"The Chandelier is an extraordinary book."

4Columns - Reinaldo Laddaga

"It is a lyrical outpouring of sensation and perception...Lispector is up to some extraordinary things."

Martin Riker

"The Chandelier is not a book to be read at a fast pace, but rather one to be slowly sipped and savored, a few pages at a time—one that forces us to find other modes of reading, of approaching literature, committed to finding the pleasures of the text."

Un-Reading Clarice Lispector’s “The Chandelier” - The Los Angeles Review of Books - Christina Soto van der Plas

"One of the twentieth century’s most mysterious writers. "

Orhan Pamuk

…this novel is charming…Punishing, yes, and maniacally overwritten, but a vulnerable and moving performance—with a heart-stopping payoff. I recall the British critic Christopher Ricks once saying that in every long book lies a short one evading its responsibilities. It's a literary prejudice I share, but in The Chandelier I sense something else: not a shorter, better book lurking, but Lispector's entire body of work, in miniature, biding its time. So many of the themes, philosophical inquiries and character types that appear here will return, honed as Lispector refines her style and hardens them into the diamond-like perfection of her final books…If the pages of The Chandelier are so thickly lacquered with description, streams of adjectives and looping repetition, it's because Lispector is flexing, coming into her power. She's playing, she's practicing. These pages are full of finger exercises, arpeggios of thought and perception…The Chandelier might best be understood as a bridge in Lispector's work. But even so, it conveys a special charge, an undeniable quantity of genius…

The New York Times - Parul Sehgal

01/22/2018
Never before translated into English, Lispector’s mysterious second novel tells the story of two siblings and the secrets that bind them together. As children, sensitive Daniel and precocious Virginia live at the parochial Quiet Farm in the principality of Upper Marsh; Daniel keeps a collection of spiders, and Virginia spends her time making clay figurines. They witness a drowning and form the Society of Shadows to explore the forest around their home and spy on their sister Esmeralda. As a young adult, Virginia leaves the farm and attempts to fit in with a ravishing crew of aesthetes led by the vain Vicente, who becomes her lover—but her thoughts are always turning back to Daniel, whose engagement breaks Virginia’s heart, leading her to question her identity; she wonders if she isn’t like the family’s chandelier, above everything and swinging first one way, then the other. Told mainly through Virginia’s associative, stream-of-consciousness thoughts, which are occasionally interrupted by dialogue and plot developments, the novel clearly precedes Lispector’s artistic breakthrough with books like 1964’s The Passion According to G.H. This is a haunting family fable, and will fascinate those seeking a glimpse at Lispector’s genius in development. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

"The Chandelier will reward those who enjoy challenging works about the power of the mind and about how we might grow up—without destroying who we have been, without fearing who we might come to be."

Music & Literature

"Lispector’s second novel is a breathless, dizzying and multi­sensory dive into the mind...The first English translation of The Chandelier is a major event, offering the anglophone world an insight into Lispector’s early grappling with the shapes and rhythms of thought."

The Times Literary Supplement

"Better than Borges."

Elizabeth Bishop

"Utterly original and brilliant, haunting and disturbing."

Colm Tóibín

★ 2017-12-24
Brazilian literary titan Lispector (Complete Stories, 2015, etc.) expands on themes familiar to fans of her dense, rich, inimitable style in this, her second novel, originally published in 1946 and now translated into English for the first time.Told almost entirely in a third-person stream-of-consciousness style, the story follows Virginia, the youngest of three siblings growing up on Quiet Farm in Upper Marsh in a sparsely furnished family mansion with velvet-lined floors. She is slavishly attached to her brooding brother, Daniel. "She didn't even know what she was thinking, all she had was ardor, nothing more, not even a point. And he—all he had was fury." Sometimes she molds little sculptures from river clay, "a task that would never end, that was the most beautiful and careful thing she had ever known." Secretive, philosophical, intense, the siblings create the Society of Shadows, the two of them its only members: "They had foreseen the charmed and dangerous beginning of the unknown, the momentum that came from fear." As elsewhere in her work, Lispector is fascinated by moments, often fleeting and barely articulated, of dawning self-awareness. "Yes, yes, little by little, softly, from her ignorance the idea was being born that she possessed a life." Virginia and Daniel eventually leave Upper Marsh for the city. Virginia sees the sea, rents her own apartment, takes a lover. The novel follows her from moment to closely noted moment, as for example, taking a walk before a dreaded dinner party: "What she was feeling was without depth....Quick thick circles were moving away from her heart—the sound of a bell unheard but heavily felt in the body in waves—the white circles were blocking her throat in a big hard bubble of air—there was not even so much as a smile, her heart was withering, withering, moving off through the distance hesitating intangible, already lost in an empty and clean body whose contours were widening, moving away, moving away and all that existed was the air, thus all that existed was the air, the air without knowing that it existed and in silence, in silence high as the air." Passages like this comprise the bulk of the book. Of Virginia later, dozing on the train: "her lucidity was the raw brightness of the moonlight itself; but she didn't know what she was thinking; she was thinking...like a bird that just flies." Readers already acquainted with The Hour of the Star will note a number of parallels. In some ways, this is a bigger, larger-hearted version, more intimate and more generous, though similarly dense.While she compellingly evokes the journey out of childhood, as well as loneliness, self-determination, and the magnetic pull of family, Lispector's signature brilliance lies in the minutely observed gradations of her characters' feelings and of their elusive, half-formed thoughts.

Kirkus Review