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Lúcio suggested a title, borrowed from James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “He was alone. He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life.”
In October 1944 the book won the prestigious Graça Aranha Prize for the best debut novel of 1943.
Another critic went further: “Near to the Wild Heart is the greatest novel a woman has ever written in the Portuguese language.”
It is remarkable how rarely critics compared the work to that of any other Brazilian writer. Instead, they mentioned Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Dostoevsky, Proust, Gide, and Charles Morgan.
