Backlisted - Água Viva by Clarice Lispector

Episode Date: April 12, 2021

Clarice Lispector's Água Viva is the subject of this episode of Backlisted. Like several of Lispector's remarkable novels, this slim book caused a sensation when first published in her native Brazil in 1973. Exquisitely written and daringly abstract, it stands as one of its author's masterpieces with Near to the Wild Heart (1943), Family Ties(1960), The Passion According to G.H. (1964) and The Hour of the Star (1977). Joining John and Andy to explore this truly iconic author's life and work are writers Wendy Erskine and David Keenan. Also in this episode, John has been reading Peter Blegvad's recent book Imagine, Observe, Remember, "a way to look at different ways of looking and seeing"; Andy, meanwhile, digs Excavate! The Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall, a new anthology of essays, artwork and ephemera edited by Tessa Norton and Bob Stanley.Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)06:04 - Imagine, Observe, Remember by Peter Blegvad10:25 - Excavate! The Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall by Tessa Norton. 16:29 - Agua Viva by Clarice Lispector* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Make your nights unforgettable with American Express. Unmissable show coming up? Good news. We've got access to pre-sale tickets so you don't miss it. Meeting with friends before the show? We can book your reservation. And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance.

Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by car and other conditions apply. When you're working out at Planet Fitness, it's a judgment-free zone, so you can really step up your workout. That's why we've got treadmills. And our team members are here to help, so you can be carefree with the free weights.

There are also balance balls, bikes, cables, kettlebells, and TRX equipment. But, like, no pressure. Get started for $1 enrollment and then only $15 a month. Hurry this $1 enrollment sale of Planet Fitness and July 18th. $49 annual fee applies. See Home Club for details. Wendy where are you? I am in Belfast.

I am in East Belfast, sitting in my house. Nice sunny day outside. And how long is it since you last left your house? Oh, it's a long time. Let me think. It's probably a couple of days since I last left my house. Went for a walk in probably probably a couple of days since i since i last left my house um went went for a walk in the park a couple of days ago it was very nice but i don't feel the need to go out again for another couple of days that did me that was fine how refreshing to hear somebody who uh is is quite happy staying indoors several of our listeners keep telling me they

they can't wait to go outside i think well, well, how have you become backlisted listeners? It doesn't seem... LAUGHTER Strange people. When do you get all your reading done? David Keenan, I know where you are, but tell everyone else where you are. I'm in Glasgow, kind of in the west end of Glasgow, and I'm in my writing room,

which is a nice little view over to Glasgow University. Your writing room is very impressive. Yeah it is my dream writing room I mean it's taking a long time to put together I mean it's wall it's shelved on all sides and so it has books on all the walls which is always my dream situation. I mean my father actually made all the bookshelves we had no idea what we were doing so they're all squinty and they all go like really weird zigzags and angles but it's so amazing i mean you could never get a bookcase quite as beautiful as that so yeah i love this room when we had val mcdermid on a couple of weeks ago we did nearly 20 minutes on bookshelves with her easy i just tweeted a photo of clarice lispector

in her study at home she's significantly more glamorous than i am in front of my bookshelves i don't feel she went out much though did you get i get that strong vibe that she kind of she invented lockdown yeah um Shall we get going? Why don't we? Let's kick off. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. Today, you find us in Rio de Janeiro in the early 70s, in a flat overlooking the sea. It's very early in the morning and a cool breeze brings us the musky scent of the night jessamine flowers as we watch a woman seated at her desk writing. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound,

the platform where readers crowdfund the books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. And today we're joined by two guests. Hello, Wendy Erskine and David Keenan. Hi. Hi there. Excellent. Wendy Erskine's first short story collection,

Sweet Home, was published by Stinging Fly in 2018 and Picador in 2019. And her next one will be out in early 2022. Are you in a position to reveal the title

of your forthcoming book or would you prefer not to, Wendy? Dance Move. It's going to be called Dance Move. Dance Move. I like it. You like it? I don't like Dance Moves, but I do like the title.

Thank you very much. We thought about Dance Moves and then I thought it felt very Peter Kay or something or other, you know, Dance Moves Tour 2014 or whatever. So drop the S. s yeah but you're a connoisseur of dance moves i know this from your twitter feed particularly that 70s disco stuff it's just yeah but only in my kitchen because i never go out even even before lockdown i never went out it was just me just just me dancing dancing alone in my kitchen. Yeah, that's only a little bit of an exaggeration. Clarice would have been right with you.

I'm amazed you like the work of Clarice Lispector. We're also joined today by David Keenan. He's the author of four novels that we know of. The cult classic, This Is Memorial Device, For the Good Times, which won the Gordon Byrne Prize, The Towers, The Fields, The Transmitters, and I've never said this word out loud. Can you say it for me?

It's Extabeth. Extabeth, thank you so much. And his fifth novel, Monument Maker, which I am reliably informed is quite long. Yeah, it is a genuine monolith. It's about a quarter of a million words. Wow. Whoa.

Well, that will be published in several volumes by White Rabbit Books in August this year. Amazing. David has been on that list before. He joined us on along with Bethan Roberts to talk about Peter Goralnik's two volumes of biography about Elvis Presley. And we had such a great time on that show. But we're so pleased to see you again, David. Thanks for coming in and doing this. Thank you. Yeah. And one of the reasons we're pleased is that the book that David and Wendy have chosen

to talk about is Agua Viva by the enigmatic Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector, first published in 1973 when it was immediately held as a masterpiece and released in a new English translation from the Portuguese by Stefan Tobler in 2012 and published first by New Directions and then in Penguin Modern Classics in 2014.

But before we enter the ripe garden of Lispector's prose, of her thoughts that stretch beyond thought, Andy, why don't you ask me the familiar question? John, what have you been reading this week? I have been reading this week a i think completely wonderful unclassifiable book um a kind of a meditation um on on um on looking seeing and drawing by the american uh musician and artist peter blegvad um peter blegvad you might know if you know his music he was a founder of the uh avant-garde pop band um snap happy it's fair to say that you know uh

would say that snap happy is a perhaps a yeah you've got to like you've got to like them to like them dagmar kraus's vocal style is uh idyncratic, to say the least. They're great. Slap happy. Henry Cowell. But we love them. All those early Virgin acts, right? Yeah. But he's also, for a long time, he did a comic strip called Leviathan, a sort of philosophical comic strip called Leviathan.

And I would say that this beautiful book, which is called Imagine, Observe, Remember, book which is called Imagine, Observe, Remember is I mean it's it's more closely connected I guess to the comic strip than to the to the music what it is is in in 1975 he was an illustrator looking for a story to illustrate something with a beginning middle and an end and imagine observe remember is what he came up with so it was a conceived as a way of thinking about illustration so he wanted to compare the way things actually appear with the way he pictured them in his memory so he writes i wanted to learn from my mistakes so that i might draw things with more confidence or with greater veracity thereafter. The first drawings I did for the project were of familiar objects depicted twice, first remembered, then observed.

There are basically lots of triplets of things observed and then remembered. But then he adds, as he says, I realised that there were things I'd previously neither looked at nor seen and so could not remember, but which I could nonetheless imagine and then he gives examples then I realized there were things I had seen and could therefore

remember which I could nonetheless imagine differently even a slight variation was enough to make the object new to me and make it somehow mine so there's then he shows a picture of some lightning observed that he's drawn and lightning imagined the lightning imagined is all in geometric shapes rather than uh kind of he goes on proust viewed memory as a form of stereoscopic consciousness in which an object remembered converges with the same object observed in the present to produce a single heightened reality in the mind i felt this reality could be heightened further by adding a third eye to the binocular stereoscopic model and including the object imagined in the mix. Thus, I began to triangulate my studies to compare and contrast the three modes we used to see,

imagine, observe, and remember. So this book is just full of triplets of objects, of meditations of objects, on meditations on memory, on meditations on how memory changes and develops things. There's a fantastic encyclopedia in the middle of it where he's illustrated all the L's from a particular encyclopedia in his tripartite structure. It's the most visually rich, beautifully produced book I've looked at in ages. You're going to have to take his word for it, everybody.

I know. I know. It's a visual. I'm trying to sell a visual gag. But it's published by Uniform Books, Peter Blegvad, Imagine, Observe, Remember. If you've ever tried to sketch anything, if you've ever been interested in the relationship between the eye and the mind, the imagination and reality, this book is a Christmas gift. I'm going to add some fun facts about Peter Blagvad because you told me we were doing Peter Blagvad. So Peter Blagvad is the president of the London Institute of Pataphysics, the genius branch of science founded by Alfred alfred jerry in the 19th century and uh did you know john that buenos aires was the first city in the western hemisphere to have a

pathophysical institute in the 1950s london didn't get one for many decades it doesn't surprise me but i have to ask andy what have you been reading this week? Well, I'm pleased you asked me. I'm going to take a securitist route into this one. So when I found out we were doing Clarice Lispector on this episode, I thought she is the first Brazilian author that we've done on Backlisted. I wonder if we've got any listeners in Brazil to whom this will particularly appeal. I wonder if we've got any listeners in Brazil to whom this will particularly appeal.

So what I did was I hopped onto Apple Podcasts in Brazil. And sure enough, there was one review from a listener to Backlisted in Brazil called Andy Allister. Hello, Andy, if you're listening. And this is what his review of Batlisted said in Brazil. Easily the best podcast around by men and women who loved books and The Fall. When they discussed Derek Raymond and brought up Gallon Drunk, I almost fainted. Highly

recommended. Five stars. Oh, we're there. We've done it. Now, putting aside the issue that it must be a lonely life being Brazil's own Gallon Drunk fan, Andy Alistair raises a very interesting point in his review, apart from the five stars. He uses the phrase men and women who love books and the fall.

Because what I've been reading this week is a new book by men and women who love books and the fall. For me and those who love books and the fall. That is the Venn diagram I want to talk about, books and the fall. And so this is being published by Faber and Faber. It's called Excavate, the wonderful and frightening word of the fall it's been uh it's like 400 pages it's like an insane hardback fanzine of found items from one of mark e sm Smith's carrier bags and essays by a really fascinating variety of people, many of whom are women, edited by Bob Stanley and Tessa Norton, and contributions from Adele Stripe, Sian Patton and Elaine Harwood,

plus people like Ian Penman and Mark Fisher. The Fall, of course, a group who have a bloke-ish reputation, which is almost entirely unfair, given the number of women who have played an important role in that group, from Una Baines at the beginning, through Kay Carroll, their manager, through to Bricks in the 80s, Julian Nagel, Eleni Poulou, towards the end of the group. There is also an all-female full karaoke band called The Fallen Women,

which I don't know if any of you have seen, but you can put your name in to take the MES role while backed up by The Fallen Women. So, you know, the group's fan base, characterised by Mark in one of his songs as the League of Bald-Headed Men, actually does accommodate many women. And one of the things that Tessa writes in this book, which I think is really, really brilliant, she talks about the role that Mark played

in relation to the group's reputation over very many years. And she says this. What we're describing when we talk about The Fall is a universe, a web of reference points that creates its own popular culture. Mark E. Smith was his own classroom. He led its curriculum less as a formal teacher than as a paperback shaman whose teachings you might stumble upon. The intellectual energy that cohered around him was like an electrical storm, unmarshalled by the educational establishment. He became a transmitter.

Unlike the establishment's classrooms and structures, the web of knowledge that cohered around the fool was the entire point smith's knowledge was characterized by his relentless curiosity and pursuit of intellectual and creative freedom and it's under these conditions that the fall became a school this secret school concealed within post-punk rock orthodoxy like a battered Arthur Macken or MR James or HP Lovecraft paperback inside a manila folder from an office stationary cupboard taught a lot of us and for everyone who was hypnotized in that pre-dream state in a darkened room under the blankets via this transmitter transmitting the teachings will continue to underpin a lot of what we will have to say long after the

school has burnt down. And this whole book is like the most wonderful, unashamedly intellectual, pretentious, ridiculous, exciting hymn to this incredible group that is more than a group, it's a thing. And like on backlisted, all the best backlisted things we ever talk about, like today's subject, Clarice Lispector, you either get it or you don't. And it's not for everyone.

Not everything is for everyone, but if you can tune in, there's a universe in it. And somebody replied to me on twitter when i retweeted that uh brazil review for for men and women who love books in the fall but what if i like books but i don't like the fall and i just said you're out in the cold. Do all members of Pete the panel gather around this table like the full? Yes.

Yes. Well, you don't have to ask me, do you? Well, that's lucky because there's a quiz coming up later. Oh, God. We'll be back in just a sec. We've arrived. We touched down in Brazil. And I'm going to ask Mitchinson before I turn to our guests. Had you ever read Clarice Lispector before?

I had not read Clarice Lispector before. I'd always wanted to um like most people who are interested even remotely in world literature she was somebody who was there her i mean she's one of the most physically memorable kind of iconic writer women writers of the 20th century um and i guess this will come out in the podcast quite difficult to quite difficult to find a an easy way of of saying you know what her work is is about or like um but i i guess it's you know i was always she was one of those one of those writers who i always thought at some point I would get to. And I'd heard her talked about in hushed, impassioned tones

by other people I admired. So it's been a fantastic excuse to read quite a lot in the last two weeks. I've done nothing for the last fortnight but read books by Clarice Lispector and my head will never be the same again. So thank you, Wendy and David. I think this is probably the most abstract, superficially abstract book that we've ever talked about on Backlisted. And I, you know, there's method to my madness about talking

about The Fall and comparing them to Clarice Lispector. There is a degree to which initially I found this pretty tough. But the more I read and the more I let it flow over me, the more I began to feel the shape of it, its uniqueness. uniqueness. There's very little precedent for her. And I can't think of many people who followed in her wake. So it's a very particular psychedelic experience, I think. So Wendy, can I ask you first, when did you first read Clarice Lispector? And what is it about her work that you find so interesting? I first came into contact with Clarice Lispector, it would be because I actually work in a school. You were saying there, Andy, about Markie Smith sort of educating beyond the sort of established classroom structures. In a sense, I'm working within those established classroom structures, In a sense, I'm working within those established classroom structures, trying to subvert from within, I suppose you would say a little. And I thought, how am I going to get people interested in reading? And one of the things I thought, what will attract these people is if they see pictures of deeply attractive riders up around the place, that might well make them want to uh want to read and so obviously um

number one on my list was mr david keenan so i i printed many pictures of david um from yeah you know the internet stuck stuck them up on you know corridors and so on but But what I did was I had pictures of various different people, Chekhov, Michael Chabon, Albert Camus, they all thought was absolutely gorgeous. And obviously, Therese Lispector, that beautiful photograph of her in front of a typewriter when she looks absolutely magnificent and she's smoking. And that was one of the pictures that I put up.

So it was initially this deep deeply shallow deeply superficial um but that was my um initial um meeting with with with her after that I read um some of the short stories which I adored and I've actually I read the I read the first novel I read the last novel but to be honest, I only read Agua Viva after I'd heard David talk about it and he'd said it was almost like a biblical text to him. Yeah, and I thought it was absolutely the most wonderful thing and, as you say, possibly not something that is for everyone.

David, you were very keen that we do Aguaaviva on this podcast rather than any of the specters other books what is it about when we'll get into her her life story uh and her career uh in a minute but i want to i want to get into what it is about this particular book that means so much to you? It's the absolute apex of what Clarice is attempting to do across all of her books. And I would argue that it is the least difficult of her books in a way because, and it may even be due to this translation, which is something we can get to, but Agua Viva, it has the most incredible flow.

Now, what does she want to do with Agua Viva? One of the things that's an easy way to orientate yourself is it was sort of cannibalized from two other texts called Beyond Thought and Loud Object, which are two of the greatest book titles I've ever heard. And we're back into the fall almost. Loud Object. Loud Object.

Best book title. But what she's trying to do, at one point in the book, she says this. She says, the word is, is the only word you can trust. So then you start to realize that what Clarissa is trying to do with Agua Viva is she is trying to dig so deeply into the moment, into the experience of the moment with language till you actually come to a precipice and you gasp

because you realise you're standing on the very precipice of language itself and that somehow Clarice has used language to present the unsayable, to make you unknow rather than know. And it is an ecstatic experience to me it is no longer you're not dealing with a cerebral difficult book you're dealing with an experience I know you're a big fan as as we are here of uh Malcolm Lowry and of Under the Volcano and certainly with Agua Viva though it, it's a much shorter book, there is a sense that each reading, as with Under the Volcano, each reading is prep for the next reading, right?

So the first, I mean, I've read it twice, and the second reading was extremely useful because you can see all these shapes and structures which aren't visible the first time you go through it, right? Yes. There is no bottom to it. It is fathomless. It is not a text that can be solved,

which is why I think it's a magical text that sort of stays alive. But another way is very simple. The person who narrates it is a painter, and I think that is really, really key. Exactly. At one point, I can't remember what she talks about in the painting, but it's something very simple. She says something like a painting of an egg,

or perhaps a painting of an orange. She says a painting of an egg presents an egg. And in a way, this is what she's trying to do with her book and her language, to present an egg as an egg. So it may seem esoteric when you first get involved in it, but actually it's a very, it's an episode just to sort of present things as they are with almost no comment, if that's possible,

to let things arise and then disappear, which mirrors how consciousness works, but also how books are written. Because another thing about Agua Viva is you're with Clarissa as she writes the book, because you feel like you're in no time except the present time of Clarissa's own experience, which seems to run back to prehistoric times, to caves and to thonic sort of realities, and to potential futures as well.

But you're in this no time, and it's the time of the creation of the novel. And Clarice is alternatively ecstatic about that feeling and terrified. Yeah. There's something vertiginous about it, isn't there? Something recurringly vertiginous, that every sentence is potentially peeking over, falling over into oblivion and pulling back and leaning out and pulling back.

That's the precipice. You're on the precipice of language and you feel that. You feel that sort of, yeah, vertigo. Absolutely. I've just had a message from our producer saying, what is book about? I will read the blurb. Well, John, have you got the blurb there? about? I will read the blurb. Well, John, have you got the blurb there?

Do you want to read the blurb? I'll read the blurb. It's the one from the Penguin Classics edition, and it's quite amusing. Rarely has it been more of a challenge, I would say, than to say what a book is about. But I also am totally with David when he says, I think in some ways it's the most simple, lucid book I've ever read. In Agua Viva, Clarice Lispector aims to capture the present. Her direct, confessional, and unfiltered

meditations on everything from life and time to perfume and sleep are strange and hypnotic in their emotional power and have been a huge influence on many artists and writers, including one Brazilian musician who read it 111 times. Despite its apparent spontaneity, this is a masterly work of art which rearranges language and plays in the gaps between reality and fiction. All clear now, Nicky? That good? She's reading it now. She's actually picked. She's started reading it.

She's grabbed. One Irish writer said it's bloody awful. I mean, which I don't think it is. But, you know, it's one of those books you mean which i don't think it is but uh you know it's one of those books you could pick it up and say what on earth for goodness sake and therein but therein is the is the thing most things are like other things this is why i was talking about that at the beginning most stuff is like other stuff this isn't like anything else and it challenges your ability to to rise to meet it think. That's how I felt about it anyway.

Clarissa Respector was, by the end of her life, tremendously important to Brazilian culture. She was very famous, very popular. And after she died in 1977, there was a television show made, there was a television show made, a tribute to her, on which the very famous Brazilian singer Maria Batanha, sister of Caetano Veloso, read to a musical backing some of the prose from Agua Viva. You can find this on YouTube. The sound is a bit scuzzy, but because of the just the cultural resonance of it, I really wanted us to be able to hear some of it in the original Portuguese.

So here is Maria Batania reading from Aquaviva. minha verdade espantada é que eu sempre estive só de ti e não sabia eu agora sei, eu sou só eu e minha liberdade que não sei usar mas eu assumo a minha solidão sou só e tenho que viver uma certa glória

íntima e silenciosa guardo seu nome em segredo preciso de segredo para

viver now obviously that's there for feel rather than meaning unless you're portuguese well Now, obviously, that's there for feel rather than meaning.

Unless you're Portuguese. Well, I hope Andy in Brazil is digging this whole thing because it's happening for him exclusively, really. Wendy, could you read us a bit from Stefan Tobler's translation of the book that we just heard a little bit from there so that people can get a sense of. Sure, that's no problem. I'll read you a couple of I'll read a couple of paragraphs here. What I write to you is not comfortable. I don't impart confidences. Instead, I met allies myself and I'm not comfortable for you and for me. My word bursts into the space of the day. What you will know of me is the shadow of the arrow that has hit its

target. I shall only vainly grasp a shadow that takes up its room in space. And what matters is the dart. I construct something free of me and of you. This is my freedom that leads to death. In this instant now I am enveloped by a wandering, diffused desire for marvelling and millions of reflections of the sun and the water that runs from the faucet onto the lawn of a garden all ripe with perfumes, gardens and shadows that I invent right here and now, and that are the concrete means of speaking in this my instant of life. My state is that of a garden with running water. In describing it, I try to mix words that time can make itself. What I tell you should be read quickly, like when you look. One of the reasons i picked this this passage is because it's actually

it's almost bossy in the sense of the direction it's given the reader about how um it should be it should be read um and i i kind of love that it kind of reminds me of like sheet music that you would see like andante or something or other where it's actually giving the person a steer as to how something should actually be played so in terms of this being a difficult book yeah i can see how it is but i can also see how she is giving you instructions about how you should actually um approach this um so what i tell you should be read quickly like when you look. So this is how you do this. This is how you process this.

This is not something that you need to deliberate over for absolutely, absolutely ages. And if I can just jump to another place, I think even more so somewhere else. We have this description of this text that I give you is not to be seen close up. It gains its secret previously invisible brightness when seen from a high-flying plane there you can divine the play of islands and see the channels and seas right and it's all imperative the whole way through she's saying this is the way to approach this you don't need to go in you don't need to be doing sort of like micro criticism of particular lines necessarily. Take this and

read this as a whole. It's like a vibe. It's like an experience. That's what comes across for us to me here. In this passage that I read, there's a sense that it's not necessarily a pleasant past time. Writing is hard. It's grafting and the results are almost always sort of approximate and kind of contingent. She uses this metaphor here that she metallises herself. It's almost as if she's becoming the typewriter, that she's almost like some sort of conduit here. And then you've got the metaphor of hitting the target,

but again, she's the shadow. The whole way through this book, I was reminded again and again of the poem Ariel by by sylvia plath you know that whole idea of animals lions horses you know the the sort of very the physicality of it you know black sweet blood mouthfuls um so you've got that whole sense of things being really sort of contingent and so on and then you've got this total change of tone you've got this really effusive run-on sentence pace picks up it's super immediate you know let's imagine this amazing garden and again it's really paradoxical because she's saying

they're um gardens and so on and shadows and the rightness the perfumes that i invent right here and now and out of the concrete means of speaking well sort of a paradox because they're actually not concrete because she's inventing them but it's it's through that that she's able to convey her um to convey her meaning and then you return to that little bit of bossiness at the end that i talked about at the beginning which i love that she's trying to give you direction in terms of how you read this just read this in all of a rush experience it she's got that amazing thing where she talks about listening to music. Yeah. Where what she says is she places her hand on the edge of the record player

and she feels the vibration. And in a sense, the prose is the vibration here, right? And David, you were talking about her relationship to the reader. Her novels or stories are often addressed to God or the devil or herself. You know, the sense of in that constant evolving process of creation is a big part of any Lispector book. What is her relationship to the reader? Wendy was there saying that she's sort of saying to the reader,

you know, she's there, she's helping the reader. Is she helping the reader or does she not care about the reader? Does she want to create this thing and hope the reader comes on board? I feel that it's absolute radical honesty. And I feel that it's almost like Blake and what she reveals in Agua Viva is pure process. And I almost think that if we're honest with ourselves as creators, as writers, even as talkers right now, there is no sort of lake of experience behind what's going on where these things are being formulated. Words arise. What we're about to say, we say. There is not a lot of preconception. And when you get into the flow, when you're writing a a novel you realize the novel tends to write itself and speaks so what Clarice does in Agua Viva is she

opens up the career process and she invites you to be as amazed at it as she is but she says some key things to make you yeah to sort of orientate you to what she's sort of doing and the musical thing is key but one point i think she says music is not understood it is heard heard yeah you know so she so but sort of a weird contradiction in a way there's a sort of real transparency to this sort of prose in the one sense and that she's exposing what she's doing but yet as i've said before she's pointing you to somewhere where language can't really go and i think that's why i think of it as a religious text because it is language that aspires to silence i mean that sounds like

a bad thing but it's language that aspires to the end of language which is pure experience which is again why i'm going back to i don't think the book is difficult because it is not cerebral what's happened there is quite interesting you You talk about language. We've passed effortlessly from avant-garde to abstract to challenging to difficult, but they all mean different things. I don't think the book, I'm not saying the book is difficult. I'm saying the book is relatively abstract in terms of its relationship to a more traditional novelistic structure that would be built around narrative. Narrative, I mean, there is some narrative in here.

It's about consciousness, isn't it? Exactly. It's about the transubstantiation process where it is becomes it. That's what seems to me that the whole thing is is that through the process of writing through the kind of summoning of words um out of somewhere out of imagination or wherever it is onto the page something that isn't real becomes real and i there's a lovely thing she says this is not a story because i don't know any stories like this but all i know how to do is go along saying and doing it is the story of instance that flee like fugitive tracks seen

from the window of a train which is this beautiful idea of it's the other thing is it's in time that she's literally taking you into her inner time in this book. Two writers it reminds me of, that kind of intense quality you get in the book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa, another Portuguese writer, which again is very, very internal. But also, I have to say, Lake Beckett, you know, when language almost, it's, you know, there's almost no body, there's almost, body there's almost i mean there is actually this is incredibly sensual book but it's that defining what what what's left if you take everything away other than language and there are times when you really feel that that's that's

what she's doing about 25 years ago i met bagpuss creator oliver postgate hero and he was talking about writing his autobiography, which he did publish. It's called Seeing Things. It's a very good book. And I said to him, well, how are you, Oliver? I'd never met him before. And he said, things have been much better

since I stopped thinking of myself as a noun and realized I was a verb. Which is sort of close to what David was just saying, right? Lispector and post-gate. Well, I mean, we're back. What I think is interesting with Lispector is, although it's seen as part of a modernist tradition, but we're back with the very basic fact of the magic of words yeah the

transform of magic of language and i keep thinking that there's almost something archaic about it and this is why it's another book that actually it works really well to be read out aloud you know what i mean because there's something about there's there's a sort of transformative ritual to it as well and it's like engaging with something that you're back, realizing, wow, language can point you to something that isn't language. And that seems like a contradiction in terms. But when you read Clarice, you realize you can.

You can point beyond language using language. And, you know, I mean, Clarice herself compares it to an orgasm, the book to a climax. I think several times she describes it like a climax. And I experienced that book probably more like an orgasm than like reading a story. And that seems to be a much less complicated way of engaging with a book than even a narrative.

That's a selling line if ever I heard one. I don't get that from Lee from lee child i've got to say you know i was thinking yeah you know you can see all the sort of modernist aspect of this and and so on but what i was reminded of again and again when i was reading it was actually john keats and i was thinking of keats's letters and I was thinking about that whole idea of, you know, negative capability, you know, capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reason, you know, reaching after fact and reason.

And she specifically says that. She says, I struggle to conquer more deeply my freedom of sensations and thought without any utilitarian meaning. I proceed in an intuitive way and and without seeking an idea it in me it seems it maps onto it absolutely perfectly and you know also as well the dimension of that that whole idea of sensations rather than thoughts you know i scarcely remember counting upon any happiness i look not for it and if it be not in the present hour. And that's Kate's. Nothing startles me beyond the moment.

Brilliant. So Clarice Lispector's career and reputation in the 20th century in Brazil, and I'll suggest this to David because this is not a whimsical suggestion. There is a sort of Elvis Presley-like trajectory. She is a young, self-taught prodigy defining her own vocabulary who has a huge hit very young with her first novel,

Near to the Wild Heart, which is written when she's 22 or 23, is published when she's 24, wins all sorts of prizes, is a sensation. And then she finds it hard to find her way from that point on. Like Elvis, she dies in 1977 and she's developed an addiction to medication and she's lost her stunning, and she's lost her stunning, amazing looks, which was built into her mythos. But I wonder why, Dave, she has that remarkable fame. You know, she writes these brave books and at the same time she she has this spiraling of celebrity in her homeland and yet she's she's barely known in the uk and the us until the last decade or so

it's funny because the elvis comparison is quite interesting because I actually think that Near to the Wild Heart is kind of like a rock and roll novel. And some of the lines are like the best lyrics ever. Like, what does a wardrobe say? Clothes, clothes, clothes. And that sounds like a brilliant rockabilly hit. You know what I mean? I like that kind of style.

I think we can't underestimate the sort of vision quest that Clarissa went on. And perhaps the real cost of that, which is the same as what Elvis went on in a way I mean Clarissa didn't quite achieve the worldwide fame that Elvis did but she was huge at the time and she seems quite quite unadapted to that as well I would say some of the books are frightening as i said before you corisa accompanies you through it and i think that um often she is also terrified and it's sort of revelations of consciousness or whatever is being sort of dragged up archetypally i think the book the passion according to gh is a very good example of that amazing amazing book yeah it is a terrifying book absolutely terrifying and the basic idea is uh she basically crushes a a bug and a cupboard and it sets off this

spiritual psychological crisis which ends in her partaking of eating part of the bug and and it seemed like well everything was a sacrament every sort of experience was a way of her getting closer to this thing that she couldn't speak. She didn't really like to talk about her books because I suspect she was almost like Dylan in a way. 65, 66, where Dylan is doing these press conferences where

he refuses to discuss the meaning of any of his songs because he is literally perplexed by his own creation and has gone beyond meaning at the same time. But there's an appendix on one of the short story collections and it's included in the complete stories on penguin and it's an appendix where she talks about some of her stories and it's called the useless explanation yeah which is perfect she had the accident too a bit like dylan didn't she that

accident really really i mean she set fire to herself in bed when she was on painkillers and really damaged her hand, which is a thing for a writer, right? And damaged her leg and her looks, yeah. The truth is it's unlikely we would be talking about Clarice the Spectre were it not for the efforts of the writer and Clarice's biographer, Benjamin Moser, who is not single in terms of translation and her reputation at home and how you communicate those things. how you communicate those things. People actually are in love with Clarice Lispector, and I was one of those people.

And Clarice Lispector is a very strange writer, and she doesn't write proper Portuguese at all. Her whole syntax, her vocabulary, it's all very weird. When I published my biography in Brazil, five different Brazilian copy editors went through the book, and they all tried to change her prose, because it just doesn't sound right to Brazilians. And a lot of Brazilians actually find her difficult to read. The way she rearranges her sentences is so odd, and it's really surprising, and it's, you know, it's what makes her a poetic writer. Clarice has a very, very distinctive voice in in portuguese i mean there's no one that

sounds anything remotely like her you know i mean she she wrote she was a famous short story writer a lot of her novels are very difficult though they're very mystical and they're they're um kind of either you think it's the greatest thing you've ever read which is my case of course um or you don't understand any of it. She's a very difficult writer sometimes. I think one of the things that Clarissa Spector perhaps suffers from is not one single committed translator on the scale of, say, a Natasha Wimmer who Roberto Bolaño has or whatever. If you look at her books, almost every single book has been translated by someone else.

I think Benjamin Moser has maybe done two, but every single one of them has been translated by someone else. And I think that also adds the sort of fractured feel of her back catalogue. It was already fractured because we know she wrote a lot of these books through notes, obsessive notes on different things. They were compiled with the help of editors or friends sometimes as well. So they were already fractured. The reason that I also go back to Agua Viva is there is feel. The language has feel. Some of

the other translations feel overly fractured to me. And it feels like Clarissa isn't perhaps quite coming through. So I don't think we're getting that full view of her apart. And this is a totally instant and true thing because I don't know any of getting that full view of her apart. And this is a totally intuitive thing because I don't know any of the translation. Agua Viva feels like the closest and the truest of all of her books in terms of translation. I think Moser has tried to keep an editorial eye across all these recent translations,

but he does talk about, I've heard him talk about the challenge of doing that. When you're, you know, if you have a French translator, three different English translators, an Australian translator, all drawing on their own particular syntaxes and, you know, trying to get her to speak with one voice when she's an author, as you, as you suggest, who doesn't speak with one voice, because why would you? Because if you write a book when you're, you know, 22 and you don't know what you're doing, and then you write one when you're 52, when you know too much about what you're doing. And then you write one when you're 52,

when you know too much about what you're doing. That's not going to be the same book. I think that's that thing, though, that Wendy, brilliant comparison to Keats. She feels to me, I don't feel that she comes from anywhere. She feels like her own invention. You know, as you say, you can make comparisons to other writers, whether it's Kafka or any of those modernist writers, I suppose. That's brilliant, that connection. The sensuality is much closer to 19th century romanticism. It's really interesting. Wendy, does that feel consistent to you when you read Lispector? Do you always know you're reading Lispector regardless of what era the book might be from right well I would have to I would have to be totally honest

and say I haven't read absolutely everything but what I have read is near to the wild heart and to me it is so similar in some respects you've got that central figure who is wondering about whether the word never is male or female, is thinking about, you know, does the, you know, a dot, does a dot feel its own loneliness? And there's discussion as well of the self and, you know, the self tastes grey and red and blue and that sort of synesthesia that i think runs the whole way through aguaviva you know you see that in that in that in that in that first in that first novel trying to photograph yeah trying to yeah exactly trying to photograph perfume and you know the failure of language to express itself i think it's all there in that first novel and um it just it just seems that it's kind of, that characterisation and narrative and all of these things are basically just cut away then

to the kind of pure core or whatever, whenever it comes to Aquaviva. And I also think, you know, there's a bit in Aquaviva as well where strangeness is talked about. And the narrator says, you know, when I think a painting is strange, that's when it's a painting. When I a painting is strange, that's when it's a painting.

When I think life is strange, that's when it begins. And, you know, when I think writing's strange, that's when it's writing. So it's, again, that idea of the strangeness and the alien or whatever is something to be, you know, sort of celebrated, I suppose. So you were talking about endings there wendy clarice the specter gave one tv interview several months before she died and um we're just gonna hear the end of that interview and i have i presented it in a way that i'm i you, the listeners, what she's saying while we're going along. Please go and find this interview on YouTube. It's subtitled.

It's one of the most moving things I've seen for a very long time, certainly in relation for authors talking on Backlisted. So I very humbly hope I haven't spoiled it here in what I've done. But here is the end of Clarice the Spectre's only television interview.

Do you ever write something only to tear it up again? I put it aside or tear... No. e rasgar? Eu deixo de lado ou rasgo? Não, eu rasgo. É produto de reflexão ou uma emoção? Raiva, um pouco de raiva. É essa reação puramente racional ou mais de uma emoção de repente?

Angra, um pouco de angra. Com quem? Comigo mesmo. Por que, Clarice? Sei lá, estou meio cansada. Com quem? Com mim mesmo. Por que, Clarice? Quem sabe? Estou um pouco cansado. Do que? De mim mesmo.

Mas você não renasce e se renova a cada trabalho novo? Bom, agora eu morri. Vamos ver se eu renasço de novo. Por enquanto eu estou morto. Estou falando de meu túmulo. Sim. Uau. Sim. Uau.

Uau. A coisa toda está no YouTube e é extremamente intensa e totalmente vale a pena assistir. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Wow. Wow. The whole thing is on YouTube and it's extremely intense and totally worth watching. So, David, do you have something that you want to read, which is a particular part of this book that that that has affected you? You know, it's a living book. Agua Viva. It's like living waters. You can't step in the same river twice blah blah blah you literally can't you pick this book up and something else pulls you according to what day you pull up what mood you're in it's a living book and that's why i brought up blake it's a book that continues to evolve and alive because clarice like william blake developed a living system i was enslaved by no one else's, which is what's profound, I think, about her whole system.

You can present a couple of directions for listening and then you can go in. So two lines I'll present and then I'll present a little paragraph which I think can manifest it. So first line, you don't understand music, you hear it. So hear me with your whole body. Second, the word is my fourth dimension.

And so, and so I realise that I want the vibrating substratum of the repeated word sung in Gregorian chant. I'm aware that I can't say everything I know. I only know when painting or pronouncing syllables blind of meaning. And if here I must use words, they must bear an almost merely bodily meaning. I'm struggling with the last vibration. To tell you of my substratum, I make a sentence of words made only from instance now. Read, therefore, my invention as pure vibration, with no meaning beyond each whistling syllable, read this. With the passing of the centuries, I lost the secret of Egypt, when I moved in longitudes, latitudes and altitudes,

with the energetic action of electrons, protons and neutrons, under the spell of the word and its shadow what I wrote you here is an electronic drawing without past or future it is simply now that is brilliant that is absolutely brilliant

thank you, amazing while we've been talking about Clarice, I've been thinking a lot about the similarities between her and Mark E. Smith. You know, a prodigy, an autodidact, someone who invented their own language, who stylized their delivery, who cultivated their own mythos and became a cult figure in turn, a hip priest.

And the same thing goes for Mark E. Smith. So I've prepared a short quiz for each of you, which we're calling Lispector versus Rector. And I'm going to give each of you a quote, and you have to tell me who said it, Clarice Lispector or Mark E. Smith? This is fucking great.

So, Wendy, first one to you. Who said this? Was this Clarice Lispector or was it Mark E. Smith? Dissonance is harmonious to me. Melody sometimes wears me out. I'm going to go with Clarice. It is Clarice. It's page 59 of Aqua Viva. Well done. Yes. Okay.

Next one, Sir John Mitchinson. Whenever I say anything, I often think that the opposite is true as well. Sometimes I think truth is too obvious for people to take. Marky Smith. It is Marky Smith. Very good. But it could be Clarice Could easily be

Easy One to David Keenan Ready Dave Is this Marky Smith Or is it Clarice Lispector The generals Have many enemies Why does it concern me

Good riddance to my native country It never did a thing for me Generals have many enemies. Why does it concern me? Good riddance to my native country. It never did a thing for me. Marquis Math. It is. It's the opening verse of Marquis Cha-Cha by the Four. Good. Trick question, though.

The generals are like that. Good one. And then finally to our producer, Nick birch who said this clarice lispector or mark e smith and i won't do it in the mark e smith voice although i want to the egg is the chicken's great sacrifice the egg is the cross the chicken bears in life the egg is the chicken's unattainable dream i'm gonna go for mark e smith because you've said it in his voice i hope it's not i'm afraid from the egg and the chicken her story from foreign legion and now fastest fingers to the buzzers please whoever shouts out the answer to this one wins the whole quiz right are you all ready is this the work of marky smith or clarice lispector i am eternally grateful to my past influences but they will not free me i am not diseased

all the people ask me how i wrote plastic man ridiculous Ridiculous. That's right. It's Clarice Respect is how I know. I'm a right elastic man. You had me with that delivery, though. Of course. Very good. Very, very good.

Last order's up past ten. That is a mash-up of Totale's Turns by the Fall and the Gregorian chant in Portuguese, as mentioned in Agua Viva. Marvellous. Yep, so now it's time for us to leave Clarice at her desk, thinking and writing. Huge thanks to Wendy and David for leading us through the caves and gardens of her inner world. To Nikki Birch for taking our separate electrical ises and transforming them into a single harmonious it.

And finally, to Unbound for squeezing the lemon on our oysters. You can download all 135 previous episodes plus follow links clips and suggestions for further reading by visiting our website backlisted.fm and we're always pleased if you contact us on twitter and facebook and now in sound and pictures on instagram too or you can show your love directly by supporting our patreon at patreon.com forward slash backlisted we aim to survive without paid for advertising your generosity helps us do that all patrons get to hear backlisted episodes early and for no more than the cost of a gently wilting rose they get two extra lot listed a month our apartment overlooking the sea where instead

of the scent of flowers we summon and celebrate the songs, films, TV shows and books which have seduced us in the previous week. Join us. The water's lovely. I would like to thank David and Wendy for just making this the most wonderful couple of weeks for me. And this has just turned my head upside down. It's been absolutely fantastic. Thank you both so much. Completely agree. absolutely fantastic. Thank you both so much. Completely agree.

Glorious. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. One of the most insane podcasts anyone has ever recorded. Yes! Oh, brilliant. If you prefer to listen to Backlisted without adverts, you can sign up to our Patreon.

It's www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted. As well as getting the show early, you get a whole two extra episodes of what we call Locklisted, which is Andy, me and Nicky talking about the books, music and films we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight.