Why this world : a biography of Clarice Lispector / Benjamin Moser

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Fun vonen is a yid? -- That irrational something -- The average pogrom -- The missing name -- Statue of Liberty -- Griene gringos -- The magical stories -- National melodrama -- Only for madmen -- Flying down to Rio -- God stirs the waters -- Straight from the zoo -- Hurricane Clarice -- Trampoline to victory -- Principessa di Napoli -- The society of shadows -- Volume in the brain -- The country of a thousand years of peace -- The public statue -- The third experience -- Her empty necklaces -- Marble mausoleum -- The intimate balance -- Redemption through sin -- The worst temptation -- Belonging to Brazil -- Better than Borges -- The cockroach -- And revolution! -- The egg really is white -- A coarse cactus -- Possible dialogues -- Cultural terror -- I humanized myself -- Monstre sacre -- The story of instants that flee -- Purged -- Batuba jantiram lecoli? -- Hen in black sauce -- Pornography -- The witch -- The thing itself -- Lispectorian silence -- Speaking from the tomb -- Our Lady of the Good Death.

"That rare person who looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf," Clarice Lispector is one of the most popular but least understood of Latin American writers. Now, after years of research on three continents, drawing on previously unknown manuscripts and dozens of interviews, Benjamin Moser demonstrates how Lispector's art was directly connected to her turbulent life. Born amidst the horrors of post-World War I Ukraine, Clarice's beauty, genius, and eccentricity intrigued Brazil virtually from her adolescence. Why This World tells how this precocious girl, through long exile abroad and difficult personal struggles, matured into a great writer, and asserts, for the first time, the deep roots in the Jewish mystical tradition that make her both the heir to Kafka and the unlikely author of "perhaps the greatest spiritual autobiography of the twentieth century." From Ukraine to Recife, from Naples and Berne to Washington and Rio de Janeiro, Why This World shows how Clarice Lispector transformed one woman's struggles into a universally resonant art.