The Passion According to G.H., by Clarice Lispector

This is the first book I’ve read by the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector (1920-1977). It is unlike any other novel I can recall. There is one character—G.H., the narrator—and one scene. One sultry afternoon, G.H., a wealthy socialite in Rio de Janeiro, enters an empty room, sees a cockroach, and instinctively smashes it. What begins as a universally relatable reflex then takes a major left turn. 

As G.H. watches the cockroach die, she enters a trance-like state. The rest of the story transpires almost entirely within her mind, shocked into a journey of epiphanies morphing one into the other. It’s like a treatise on pantheism, being realized in real-time and related to the reader with flowing lyricism. It is not unlike an acid trip. 

When I started this book last year, I gave up about halfway through. I’m wary of writers who rely on lyricism to avoid the inventive work of plot. After a while, all of G.H.’s epiphanies seemed to me like so much navel-gazing. 

I’m glad a friend encouraged me to give it another chance, because of course there is a story here, an extremely inventive one with a climax and a resolution. G.H.’s thoughts and feelings are the characters, wrestling to determine the outcome, as her consciousness passes through a kind of hell. The book is dense; the prose is clear and lucid but it regularly solicits you to pause, digest heady concepts, and marvel at Lispector’s articulation of strange feelings. 

Lispector takes a mundane occurrence and grows from it a diabolical, rapturous novel of ideas. in order for that or any novel of ideas to work, I think, the tone and the mood of the have to remain hypnotic. And if this book is anything, it’s hypnotic. I recommend trying to read as much of it in as few sittings as possible. Let yourself fall under its spell. 

Find this and other English translations of Lispector's work at the New Directions website.