Literature saves -- master of the craft, Clarice Lispector from Brazil

This recently published collection translated from the Portuguese by Katrina Dodson of all eighty-six Clarice Lispector short stories is a treasure. Inventive in both style and content, a number of these masterful stories will haunt a reader, but, for me, none more haunting than the following piece I have chosen to make the focus of my review:

THE FIFTH STORY
The Attack: One of the acknowledged kings of fiction editing, Gordon Lish, termed the first lines of a short story “the attack.” No better example of a literary attack than: “This story could be called “The Statues.” Another possible name is “The Murder.” And also “How to Kill Cockroaches.” So I will tell at least three stories, all true because they don’t contradict each other. Through a single story they would be a thousand and one, were I given a thousand and one nights.” Oh, Clarice! Fantastic way to build dramatic tension – your first-person narrator has such a story to tell, a veritable weaving Shahrazad, she will tell her story several different ways, and, given the chance, she could tell the same story in a thousand and one diverse ways.

How to Kill Cockroaches: Cockroach problem? Our narrator (let’s call her Livia) employs an effective solution. From one vantage point this sounds so cut and dry but for the person sensitive to the entire web of life, killing is never cut and dry. There are a good number of spiritual traditions, Buddhism for example, that emphasize compassion for all living beings, including insects. The Jain religion of India is even more extreme, a religion founded upon the tradition of nonviolence to all living creatures where many devotees even go so far as to wear masks so as not to breathe in microorganisms.

The Murderess, One: Livia lets us know this story, although told second, is actually the first, a story starting out where she is overheard complaining about cockroaches, a complaint lodged in the abstract, that is, not her actual problem but rather a general complaint about the insects, since the cockroaches were on the ground floor and would crawl up the pipes to her home. But, she says, once she prepared the mixture, the cockroaches became, in fact, her cockroaches. Very true. When we actively engage with others, even animals or insects, at that exact point we enter into a personal relationship.

The Murderess, Two: At this juncture in the story, we read: “In our name, then, I began to measure and weigh the ingredients with a slightly more intense concentration. A vague resentment had overtaken me, a sense of outrage. By day the cockroaches were invisible and no one would believe in the secret curse that gnawed at such a peaceful home.” My goodness, the narrator’s emotions are fully engaged. This version of the story kicks into high gear with language touching on the sacred and religious.

The Murderess, Three: Oh, yes, Livia measures out the deadly elixir for those cockroaches’ drawn-out death, an excited apprehension and her own clandestine curse providing the direction. She has reached that dramatic climax where, icily, she desires but one thing: death to all cockroaches. Is this story beginning to sound a bit sinister, as if our narrator has crossing over to the dark side?

The Murderess, Four: Livia reflects how cockroaches will crawl up the pipes while we, exhausted, dream. But now she’s ready: she has spread the powder expertly, making it look like something from the natural world. She wakes the next morning and inspects: there they all are on the laundry room floor, hard and huge. Not only is there is something eerie and unsettling about what she sees, those many petrified cockroaches, dark, still bodies on a white floor, but also the manner in which she uses language to frame her seeing.

Statues: In this third version of the story, Livia waxes poetic, eulogizing in many exquisite, excruciating details how the cockroaches have hardened from the inside out. She likens herself to the first witness at daybreak in ancient Pompeii. Here’s a snip from her panegyric: “Others—suddenly assaulted by their own core, without even the slightest inkling that some internal mold was being petrified!—these suddenly crystallize the way a word is cut off in the mouth: it’s you I . . ."

The Fourth Story: As she tells us, this forth version initiates a new era in her home. She looks over at the pipe where the cockroaches enter and knows she will prepare the lethal mixture each night as if performing a rite. Then eagerly anticipating bearing witness to the mass death toll the next morning, Livia trembles at the double life she is now living as a sorceress. Think of how many thousands of novels and stories have been written in the genres of dark fantasy and horror. To my mind, Clarice Lispector’s brief tale powerfully encapsulates much of the underlying psychology of these genres.

The Fifth Story: The narrator’s fifth version has an exotic title, a title including the name Leibniz, the German philosopher and co-inventor of calculus, as well as the transcendental nature of love. Thanks, Clarice! Number five can gyrate into at least a thousand and one tales, a gyration serving as a pronouncement: imagination rules! Very true - given the slightest bit of tension, even something seemingly minor, like the extermination of insects, for a fiction writer on fire, such tension opens wide into a world of near infinite possibilities. And to think this is but one of her eighty-six stories collected in this book. Happy reading.