Mandy-Suzanne Wong's Blog: Book Spelunking, page 2
May 14, 2019
The Besieged City by Clarice Lispector
The Besieged City
Clarice Lispector
The Besieged City by Clarice Lispector
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
My favorite Lispector novel. She had already discovered that inscrutability is a form of resistance. In THE BESIEGED CITY, we see her struggling to tell us why, to make the point explicit. But making things perfectly explicit--"understanding" them by labeling or categorizing them--is precisely what things resist and prohibit. Even the smallest trinkets, the porcelain figure playing the flute, the field of corn, have sides to them, essential hidden faces, that evade categorization and prevent the things from being simply tools.
From her earliest days, Lucrecia sees this. So even when she devotes herself to becoming a tool of patriarchal society, a "gear" in the "superior order," assuming that she must do so for survival's sake: her unwitting inscrutability (inscrutable even to Lucrecia herself) is her shield against the men and "the system" that besiege her; and Lucrecia never permits herself to be conquered, harnessed, or used, pressed into service. She also evades becoming one of those cruel people who finds amusement in using others. And so, yes, Lucrecia triumphs. The shallowest, bluntest things, the chair, the house, the city, a man, even a doctor, a woman, even a housewife: "They're not even God's, they belong to themselves," Lucrecia cries.
A favorite bit (I have so many!): "...you'd trample ardent weeds and couldn't subjugate with a glance the dryness and the wind of the plateau--a wave of dust rising with the gallop of an imaginary horse."
And another favorite bit: "Behold the flower--showing its thick stem, the round corolla: the flower was showing off. But atop the stem it too was untouchable. When it started to wilt, you could look at it directly but by then it would be too late..."
View all my reviews
Clarice Lispector
The Besieged City by Clarice LispectorMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
My favorite Lispector novel. She had already discovered that inscrutability is a form of resistance. In THE BESIEGED CITY, we see her struggling to tell us why, to make the point explicit. But making things perfectly explicit--"understanding" them by labeling or categorizing them--is precisely what things resist and prohibit. Even the smallest trinkets, the porcelain figure playing the flute, the field of corn, have sides to them, essential hidden faces, that evade categorization and prevent the things from being simply tools.
From her earliest days, Lucrecia sees this. So even when she devotes herself to becoming a tool of patriarchal society, a "gear" in the "superior order," assuming that she must do so for survival's sake: her unwitting inscrutability (inscrutable even to Lucrecia herself) is her shield against the men and "the system" that besiege her; and Lucrecia never permits herself to be conquered, harnessed, or used, pressed into service. She also evades becoming one of those cruel people who finds amusement in using others. And so, yes, Lucrecia triumphs. The shallowest, bluntest things, the chair, the house, the city, a man, even a doctor, a woman, even a housewife: "They're not even God's, they belong to themselves," Lucrecia cries.
A favorite bit (I have so many!): "...you'd trample ardent weeds and couldn't subjugate with a glance the dryness and the wind of the plateau--a wave of dust rising with the gallop of an imaginary horse."
And another favorite bit: "Behold the flower--showing its thick stem, the round corolla: the flower was showing off. But atop the stem it too was untouchable. When it started to wilt, you could look at it directly but by then it would be too late..."
View all my reviews
Book Spelunking
Goodreads reviews by Mandy-Suzanne Wong, author of AWABI (Digging Press) and DRAFTS OF A SUICIDE NOTE (Regal House).
- Mandy-Suzanne Wong's profile
- 0 followers
