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My 1st Lispector is unlike any novel I‘ve read. The whole book is the interior monologue of the main character, who seems to be on existential crisis as she muses on identity, death, religion,etc. Her complex philosophical ideas on life are perplexing to me; her thoughts are often contradictory & hard to follow, yet hypnotic. Not a book for everyone. For it being hypnotic & provocative merely from an encounter with a cockroach, it‘s not a ‘pan‘.

G.H. a wealthy sculptress living on the top floor of an apartment building in Rio has an unpleasant surprise in the form of a large roach while cleaning her former maid's vacant room. She kills it with the door of a wardrobe. We subsequently learn of her lifelong fear of the insects due to a traumatic incident in her childhood. In her terrific essay on the book Veronica Esposito writes, “Many regard this as the most bizarre and infamous book👇

I just read the first half of this. Like Kafka's Metamorphosis, turned up to 11. Not sure where it's heading but I'm equally intrigued & dreading it...

This is a hard book to read. G.H. is a Brazilian artist who is experiencing a breakdown after discovering a big cockroach in the otherwise extremely clean room of her maid. What follows is a monologue about this mystical crisis. @Liz_M already warned me for the ending and I felt sorry I was just having breakfast when I came to it. This book will linger in the back of my mind forever I think and I‘m not exactly happy with that. #1001books

This is quite the foreword!

#WeeklyForecast 11/20

I am reading and almost finished with the heartbreaking The Absolutist. John Boyne is such a great writer. Next will be Fair Play, an informal #buddyread with @vivastory and @Suet624 The tagged one is another #1001books which I ordered for #FoodAndLit #Brazil but only received just now. And again I hope to make a start with The Morbids this week.

This book didn‘t do anything for me personally, though I can see why some love it. A woman walks into her maid‘s room, encounters and kills a roach, an act which triggers an existential crisis. The next 160-ish pages are her internal musings on the nature of being, purpose, God, self-identity and more. It‘s pure navel gazing of a member of the privileged class. That said, the structure propelled me forward and the language was lush. But...meh.

Clarice is the master, there‘s just nothing else to say. This was like the spirit of a medieval mystic in a twentieth century existentialist‘s body and I loved every second of it. Beautiful, original, occasionally shocking (if you‘ve read it you KNOW which bit I‘m talking about 😱🦗), this book was like absolutely nothing else. I plan to buy a paper copy to refer to again, which I‘ve never actually done with a book before

What a book! I've gotta a headache but it was worthy. A unique narrative by one of the best Brazilian writers. "The mystery of human destiny is that we are fated, but that we have the freedom to fulfill or not fulfill our fate: realization of our fated destiny depends on us. While inhuman beings like the cockroach realize the entire cycle without going astray because they make no choices." #Sha2017

📚 ❤

"Aficionados of South American fiction as well as literary critics will welcome this posthumous translation of a nearly plotless novel by one of Brazil's foremost writers. Availing herself of a single character, Lispector transforms a banal situation—a woman at home, alone—into an amphitheater for philosophical investigations."

#setinsouthernhemisphere #junebookbugs
@RealLifeReading

This book is going to take a couple of re-reads but...WOW. I love the epigram even if I didn't know if I qualified!

Reading this one from the short list of the 1965/2015 Daphne Awards. Been on my TBR list for a while...