An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures by Clarice Lispector

How does Brazil’s most important writer, Clarice Lispector, find her way to Canada? Sheila Heti’s “Afterword” to Lispector’s recently translated novel, An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures, is one way. Another is through her Nova Scotian-American-Brazilian friend, Elizabeth Bishop, who declared that she was a better writer than Borges. Yet another is Marilia Librandi’s absorbing study, Writing by Ear: Clarice Lispector and the Aural Novel, published by the University of Toronto Press. Last, but certainly not least, is Québec writer Claire Varin’s Langue de feu: Essai sur Clarice Lispector.

Heti responds to her fellow novelist: “Before I start reading a book by Clarice Lispector, I always go off somewhere I can be alone, and I don’t check my phone or do anything else until the final page. I prefer to read her from start to finish, without interruption. Her novels are something I want to undergo, like a spiritual exercise.” How has Heti’s own writing been influenced by Lispector’s? “In reading Lispector’s books, I learn about the structure of the relationship between a human and God, between a human and herself, and between a human and the other.” Bishop, Librandi, and Varin share Heti’s enthusiasm for her forms of otherness.

“An Apprenticeship is one of Lispector’s most accessible works of fiction since it focuses on the love affair between between Lóri, a primary school teacher, and Ulisses, a professor of philosophy.”

On the surface, An Apprenticeship is one of Lispector’s most accessible works of fiction since it focuses on the love affair between between Lóri, a primary school teacher, and Ulisses, a professor of philosophy. Although their love is finally consummated by the end of the novel, the narrative concerns their metaphysical questioning of the physical realm and the deferment of sexual fulfillment. Waiting is a central theme of the protagonists’ apprenticeship and pleasures. The Book of Pleasures also contains a number of experimental techniques that characterize Lispector’s avant-garde reputation.

The novel begins with a comma and ends with a colon: these punctuation marks imply that something precedes the opening page, while something else follows after the book’s ending. An earlier novel precedes the comma; a later one follows the colon, so that An Apprenticeship is a pause in Lispector’s oeuvre of experimental modernism. Even more unusual in her experimentation and punctuation are dots or periods scattered in the margins of several pages, but these alien marginalia also appear randomly within the text. Like spots on an optical field test, these typographical markers serve as objective correlatives for Lóri’s introspection, especially when they appear in the margin while she examines herself in her mirror, not just for her physical attributes for also for her state of mind.

Her typographical tics may be attributed to a number of factors. Lispector was fascinated by the sound of the typewriter, as well as its marking the blank page, and in one of her novels, the protagonist is a typist. In addition to being a typist and a writer, she turned to abstract painting late in life as a counterpart to her fiction. A chain smoker, she often refers to smoking within her novels: inhaling punctuated pauses in the narrative flow; smoke rings would create a haze for her words; and smoking ultimately led to her being burned in a fire, one of a series of traumatic events that began even before her birth.

Her biographer, Benjamin Moser, refers to her as the Sphinx of Rio de Janeiro because of her enigmatic writing, her accent in speech, her physical appearance, and her mysterious origins. Born in Ukraine in 1920, Clarice emigrated with her family shortly after because her mother had been raped during a pogrom. This trauma marked the family when they left for the northeast of Brazil where she received her early education. Most of her writing suppresses her Jewish origins, but occasionally between the lines one finds a faint hint of her past. Literally and figuratively these scars make their way onto the page.

Not only do the book’s titles offer a choice, but so too do the titles of the opening section, “The Origin of Spring or the Necessary Death in the Middle of the Day.” This polarity between origins and seasonal renewal on the one hand, and death in the middle, on the other, is prepared for in the novel’s epigraphs. The first epigraph is from Revelation 4:1: “After this I looked, and, behold, a door was opened in heaven: and the first voice which I heard was as it were of a trumpet talking with me; which said, Come up hither, and I will shew thee things which must be hereafter.” Lispector’s revelations are both sudden and delayed over time. The second epigraph is paradoxical: “I prove / That the highest expression of pain / Consists in its essence of happiness.”

After these epigraphs she offers a confusing “Note”: “This book demanded a greater liberty that I was afraid to give. It is far above me. Humbly I tried to write it. I am stronger than I.” An Apprenticeship is a liberating work, giving strength to the self in the mirror, in metaphysics, and in the arms of Ulisses. Lóri’s name is already contained within Clarice Lispector’s and connected further to Loreley, as Ulisses explains: “Loreley is the name of the legendary character in German folklore, sung about in a lovely poem by Heine.” Her connection to Heine is one of her remote connections to Jewish identity.

Just as Lóri relates to Heine, so Ulisses refers to James Joyce’s Ulysses, for both Joyce and Virginia Woolf influenced Lispector. Whereas Homer’s hero wanders around the Mediterranean and Joyce’s Leopold Bloom wanders through Dublin, Lispector’s Ulisses wanders through Lóri’s mind and body. The first paragraph is a run-on sentence beginning with Lóri’s mundane household activities before shifting to Ulisses hinting about making the fruit bowl look pretty. The paragraph ends with Ulisses telling her not to answer her name as “Lóri,” but instead say “my name is I.” This form of name dropping evolves into existential identities and metaphysics. One page consists of “LUMINESCENCE…”. Like Rothko’s rectangles, Lispector’s luminescence is as brilliant as it is obscure: both artists came from similar backgrounds, chain smoked, and exhibited masks of modernism to cover their backgrounds.

To prepare for her meeting with Ulisses, she has to decide if she should wear earrings: “an Egyptian queen? no, all adorned like the women of the Bible.” If the first chapter invokes biblical women, then the final chapter refers to Chagall: “She felt herself losing all the weight of her body like a figure from Chagall.” After the painterly simile and sexual consummation, she is now able to call herself “I.” Part of her apprenticeship involves uncovering her suppressed past in northeastern Brazil and before that in Ukraine: “she was now a big-city woman but the danger was the strong rural heritage in her blood from way back.” She wants “her ancestors’ earth”: “And she knew that this heritage could make her suddenly want more.” Indeed, there is much more among Lispector’s repetitions, original typography, and smokescreens of the self. Claire Varin and Sheila Heti convey the mixed heritage and pleasures of this Brazilian sphinx to Canada.

Clarice Lispector (1920-1977), the greatest Brazilian writer of the twentieth century, has been called astounding” (Rachel Kushner), “a penetrating genius” (Donna Seaman, Booklist ), and “one of the twentieth century’s most mysterious writers” (Orhan Pamuk). Born in Belem, Brazil,Stefan Tobler is the publisher of And Other Stories and, whenever time permits, a translator from Portuguese and German. His translation of Arno Geiger’s The Old King in His Exile was shortlisted for both the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize and Schlegel-Tieck Prize, and his other translations include the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize-shortlisted Agua Viva by Clarice Lispector and the Man Booker International Prize finalist A Cup of Rage by Raduan Nassar. Sheila Heti is the author of several books of fiction and nonfiction, including How Should a Person Be?, which New York Magazine deemed one of the “New Classics of the 21st century.” She was named one of “The New Vanguard” by The New York Times book critics, who, along with a dozen other magazines and newspapers, chose Motherhood as a top book of 2018. Her books have been translated into twenty-one languages.

Publisher ‏ : ‎ New Directions (May 3 2022)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 160 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0811232212
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0811232210

Michael Greenstein

Poetry Editor

Michael Greenstein is a retired professor of English at the Université de Sherbrooke. He is the author of Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature and has published widely on Victorian, Canadian, and American-Jewish literature.