The Brazilian Kafka? Clarice Lispector

Her work called to mind a tropical, female Kafka with sensory overload. As the French literary critic and philosopher Hélène Cixous put it: “I discovered an immense writer, the equivalent for me of Kafka, with something more: This was a woman, writing as a woman. I discovered Kafka and it was a woman.” Unlike Kafka’s however, Lispector’s work—though obsessed with Brazilianness and a sense of belonging—had little to say about its own Jewishness. As Grace Paley writes in the introduction to Lispector’s book of stories, Soulstorm: “I thought at one point in my reading that there was some longing for Europe, the Old World; but decided I was wrong. It was simply longing.” And according to Moacyr Scliar, Brazil’s foremost Jewish writer, Lispector “didn’t deny her Jewishness, but she didn’t push it. The reason why this happened is still the subject of discussion here in Brazil.”