Near to the Wild Heart

Two friends, upon learning that I wanted to get into Clarice Lispector, advised me not to start with Near to the Wild Heart. Having now finished the book, I think I understand why. The two parallels that come to mind — less in terms of style and message than in terms of how one situates the prose — are Murakami and Woolf. Murakami is, to be clear, the much less stylistically successful of the two. But like Murakami, Lispector's work has been treated with a sense of otherness — not as a method of denigrating it, but to suggest that it sits outside its country's literary tradition. And while you can make a compelling argument that Murakami taps into a distinctly Japanese sense of alienation and ennui in the modern era — and, moreover, that much of his earlier writing is explicitly political — Lispector here is ethereal, barely attempting to give any hint or indication of where and how her protagonists live. Part of this otherness — the sense of the story being completely untethered to…