Narrated by the cosmopolitan Rodrigo S.M., this brief, strange, and haunting tale is the story of Macabéa, one of life's unfortunates. Living in the slums of Rio and eking out a poor living as a typist, Macabéa loves movies, Coca-Colas, and her rat of a boyfriend; she would like to be like Marilyn Monroe, but she is ugly, underfed, sickly and unloved. Rodrigo recoils from her wretchedness, and yet he cannot avoid the realization that for all her outward misery, Macabéa is inwardly free. She doesn't seem to know how unhappy she should be.
Clarice Lispector employs her pathetic heroine against her urbane, empty narrator ― edge of despair to edge of despair ― and, working them like a pair of scissors, she cuts away the reader's preconceived notions about poverty, identity, love and the art of fiction. In her last book she takes readers close to the true mystery of life and leave us deep in Lispector territory indeed.
Clarice Lispector (December 10, 1920 – December 9, 1977) was a Ukrainian-born Brazilian novelist and short story writer. Her innovative, idiosyncratic works explore a variety of narrative styles with themes of intimacy and introspection, and have subsequently been internationally acclaimed. Born to a Jewish family in Podolia in Western Ukraine, as an infant she moved to Brazil with her family, amidst the disasters engulfing her native land following the First World War.
She grew up in Recife, the capital of the northeastern state of Pernambuco, where her mother died when she was nine. The family moved to Rio de Janeiro when she was in her teens. While in law school in Rio, she began publishing her first journalistic work and short stories, catapulting to fame at the age of 23 with the publication of her first novel, Near to the Wild Heart, written as an interior monologue in a style and language that was considered revolutionary in Brazil.
She left Brazil in 1944 following her marriage to a Brazilian diplomat, and spent the next decade and a half in Europe and the United States. After returning to Rio de Janeiro in 1959, she published the stories of Family Ties and the novel The Passion According to G.H. Injured in an accident in 1966, she spent the last decade of her life in frequent pain, steadily writing and publishing novels and stories, including Água Viva, until her premature death in 1977.
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