The Passion According to G.H. (New Directions Books)

I'm in something of a Lispector reading phase right now - read 'The Hour of the Star' decades ago, and although it made a lasting impression on me, I wasn't sure why, and with hindsight I somehow don't feel I was wholly 'ready' for now. Recently, I've read Agua Viva as well as The Passion, have The Besieged City on my 'bought and to read' list and am working my way through the Complete Stories. The Passion barely has a conventional plot, it's about - if anything - a transformative experience whose specific circumstances I'm not sure I am able to fully buy into. But this doesn't really matter - I feel Lispector is very explicitly inviting us to step into our own experience in old or (new-very-old) ways and what happens in G.H's maid's bedroom is by any stretch a good enough vehicle for what is essentially intended as a universalist 'message' or lure. At this stage in my life, personally I feel ripe for her work, and unhesitatingly ready to accompany her, or to acknowledge an appeal repeatedly made by the narrator of 'The Passion' to reach out my hand to her. Any comment on the quality of the translation is limited by my lack of knowledge of Portuguese, alas, yet with that massive caveat in place, I can say that nothing jars, and all my intuition is the adverb 'lovingly' would not be inapt.

No cliches, pure work of art! If you are in search of real creative talent, Clarice Lispector will amaze you.

The Passion According to G. H. follows no complex plot. A single bourgeois woman enters the room of her African maid, who has recently resigned for unspecified reasons. The narrator is astonished by how the room’s harsh brightness contrasts with the sombre milieu of the rest of her penthouse apartment, and appalled by what appears to be a caricature of herself scrawled on a wall. Opening a wardrobe door, she is startled to see a cockroach. She makes the error, or perhaps takes the liberating step, of slamming the door on the body of the unfortunate roach. In the whole of the rest of the book, she decides to take one single further minor if bizarre and, it turns out, hugely significant action. The twin experiences of the cartoon and the vision of the dying cockroach precipitate a tidal wave of perception, in turn provoking complex metaphysical reflection, full of ambiguities and contradictions but framed in beautiful language, almost hallucinatory in its intensity. These reflections lead, through frequently counter-intuitive logic, to a series of overwhelming emotions: joy, despair, horror, resignation. Despite the relative absence of dramatic events and the reader’s consternation at the contradictory quality of the prose, the narrative is driven forwards by its luminously transcendental language. While the novel has been described as mystical, its emphasis on experience as the primary motivation in the task of every individual to come to terms with their own status as a human being and that being’s place in the world position it firmly within the body of existential phenomenology. Although her methods are very different, Lispector’s aim is identical to that of Sartre: to explore how the individual might, through the intense complexities of experience, break through the comfortable constructs of reality to determine their genuine place in the physical world. In the case of GH, this is achieved by her final carefully deliberated and small but revolting transgression. The circuitous and contradictory nature of the text is a challenge, but the luminescent quality of the language (in Idra Novey’s compelling translation) is more than compensation. A satisfying read.

Brilliant writer: a Brazilian James Joyce.

Maybe I'm not "high-brow" enough for this, but after reading the reviews was expecting something rather special, and instead read what I felt to be a rather pretentious and drawn out psycholiogical "belly button gaze" by Ms Lispector. Possibly in its age it would stand differently, but I couldn't rate it as an essential work.

A remarkable - and difficult - exploration of a breakdown. A highly introspective woman ('G.H.') enters her maid's bedroom and sees a cockroach which triggers an existential crisis. Everything is in the writing. Life proceeds at a snail's pace with plenty of retrospection, reminiscent of Kafka and Henry James. The highly intelligent, alert and spoilt G.H. 'lived well, really well ... on the top floor of a superstructure ... [where] at least nothing spoke and nobody spoke'. Her days are devoid of virtually any activity, on top of which she is a control freak, obsessed with 'rules and laws', but this is counteracted by her micro-focused imagination. ‘Buried beneath the sentimental and utilitarian construction ... the thing part ... was too powerful and was waiting to reclaim me.’ It is hard to tell how unbalanced G.H. is, because of the lucidity of her musings. She experiences emptiness and joy, talking intimately to the reader, 'my love', before confronting her absolute, girlish horror of the cockroach, and then plunging into its ancient being. It is hard going, reading such intense intellectualising of a very particular and - on the surface - minor sensory experience: 'its existence was existing [as an] acute calibration of the minutest sensation of me'. But the labour pays off, giving an unflinching sense of the frailty of life, which can as easily turn to horror as to joy. The work is a bit like a Nordic drama in which the sole actor is stripped so naked that all you can see is the blood coursing through her veins, while her eyes hold you in an intense searchlight.

Great writing but I would avoid the Penguin edition unless you are an ant. The book is like a toy and the print is tiny. I don't know what's up with Penguin UK these days, many of their books seem poorly produced - crap paper and unclear print.

This book was life-changing for me, I couldn't recommend it more! Much of the book reminded me of Kafka's The Metamorphosis, but if the story was completely inverted. I'm not a theist but the meditation on God was brilliant and genuinely shifted my perspective on theism as a whole. The discussion of beauty was also riveting, especially since I am a bit obsessed with beauty and disgusted by bugs myself, so this book really changed how consider beauty in my life and how/why/why maybe I shouldn't be so disgusted by bugs. I thought the ambiguous position of the reader was also really unique and brilliant--the narrator addresses the reader as several different people throughout the novel. The later chapters reminded me of Dante's Inferno, but it (like what I said with Kafka) totally turns it on its head. I recently took a class in Eastern Religions and made a lot of connections so if you are interested in that this is a great read. The use of space and time in the novel is also worth noting--kinda reminded me of some Virginia Woolf so if you like her books you will totally love this! Speaking of Woolf, she one time said reading Dostoevsky was like being in a whirlwind, and I think that applies perfectly to this book, as Lispector does an amazing job at repeating and transforming and connecting various different phrases/ideas that develop as the book goes on and it gives an effect I can't quite put into words but it just really amazed me. If you care about French Existentialism this is another must-read, as it seems to (as with other works) twist Sartre's No Exit and Being and Nothingness on its head a bit. Now that I'm on the philosophy train, really thought-provoking meditations on humanism and psychoanalysis are another reason why I loved this book so much. Politics (specifically nationalism, racism, classism, and gender) / othering are also explored in this book which I found fruitful and honestly, now that I'm writing this I don't think there is a base the reader didn't hit in my idea of a great book. I even think there's space to connect it with Plato's allegory of the cave (the wall mural), and his theory of aesthetics. Lastly, I really loved the way the book explores identity and how illusory individuality/inside is. With all that being said, the reading was surprisingly digestible and just does an outstanding job portraying complex ideas in a shocking clear/understandable manner. Read it!

Is Clarice Lispector the prophet of the millennial “can’t even” generation? And could that be the reason she’s so overpraised by a certain cohort of young female critics? I wonder this because a lot of Lispector’s work follows the same general pattern: a woman goes to perform a seemingly mundane task, but in the course of doing it, for reasons that are never quite clear, she becomes overwhelmed, a sort of mental paralysis sets in, and she can’t go through with whatever she was supposed to do. So millennial! In this novel G.H. has decided to spend the day cleaning her apartment -- a manageable task, one would think -- but no! Preparing to clean the maid's room, she closes the door of a wardrobe on a cockroach, not quite killing it. Then (as one does?) she spends the rest of the novel staring at the dying cockroach as the wardrobe door squeezes its whitish insides out and she has, I suppose, some sort of spiritual crisis/mystical experience. I couldn't quite piece it together, but the general tenor seemed to be: we are all just composed of physical matter, inevitably subject to decay and death, and there is no larger meaning to existence. In terms of the writing, maybe this was a translation issue but I repeatedly had the disorienting sensation of understanding all the words in a sentence but still having no clue what the sentence meant. Representative (I swear!) example: “Contact with supersound of the atonal has an inexpressive joy that only flesh, in love, tolerates.” If you read that and think, “Genius—I want 190 pages of that!” then this book is for you. If not, I’d recommend reading something else. It is possible, though, that this book is a profound masterpiece, and I just didn't get it. I did finish it, which suggests there's something there.

É uma ótima tradução de "A Paixão Segundo GH" da Clarice Lispector, fica a recomendação. A tradutora realmente se preocupou em trazer todos os elementos do livro original, os simbolismos que surgem no correr da obra, para o equivalente da lingua inglesa, tarefa não muito fácil neste tipo de livro, que usa da técnica do fluxo de consciência como narrativa. O ebook manteve todos os detalhes estruturais da obra original, os elementos estéticos que a autora fez questão de ali colocar. Vale a pena.

I received the book damaged !!!

Absolutely obsessed and in awe of Lispector's works. But unfortunately, this copy too, like other recent editions from Penguin use cheap, abominable quality of paper. How much profit can a conglomerate make at the cost of quality. How much greed. Also, received damaged book. The packaging was just a thin plastic layer and no bubble wrap. Seller do better!