Prickly, eccentric, endlessly complex — the Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector (1920-77) has remained a bundle of contradictions years after her death.
Lispector was idolized for her best-selling stories of emotional tumult and alienation; her glamorous appearance — she was famously compared to a “she-wolf” — and immensely private nature only added to the mystique. Her most impressive writing amounts to philosophical, spiritual investigations of what it means to be alive, with a few indelibly grotesque images peppered in. Across her books, she conjured up worlds in which joy was often “the hardest thing to understand,” as one character puts it, and universes with a distinctive moral chill.
The more Lispector you read, the more elusive she becomes. She even remained a mystery to herself; as she once said, ahead of a possible trip to the Sphinx, “I’ll see who devours whom.”
Aside from profound, occasionally disturbing stories, the other sure bet in Lispector’s work is a near-constant element of surprise.
What a pleasure, then, to encounter new illustrated editions of two stories she wrote for children. These wise, cheerful and kooky fables, both translated by Benjamin Moser, draw on the author’s abiding fascination with and affinity for animals.
The narrator of ALMOST TRUE (NYRB Kids, 48 pp., $19.95, ages 5 to 9) is an irresistibly precocious dog named Ulisses, who brings back tales from the natural world for Lispector to transcribe.
“Can I bark out a story that seems almost like make-believe and almost true? It’s only true in the world of someone who likes to invent things, like you and me,” he tells the reader.
The story at hand is one of justice, revolution and forgiveness. A greedy fig tree that can’t bear fruit conspires with a witch and comes up with a scheme to work a group of chickens around the clock, tricking them into laying eggs nonstop, in the hope of getting rich.
“The fig tree’s thought went rotten and turned into envy,” Ulisses explains. “It rotted even more and turned into revenge.”
The chickens, once they realize they’re being exploited, rally for better conditions, then celebrate their victory with a thousand lollipops, and eventually model a level of grace every reader can admire.
Throughout the book, Lispector includes sound effects that cry out to be read aloud. Every so often a bird trills in the middle of Ulisses’ narration — “pirilim-pim-pim” — and when the chickens stage their ultimate protest from the branches of the fig tree, their eggs crack on the ground with a pleasing, musical thump: “pló-quiti, pló-quiti, pló-quiti.”
The illustrations, by Carla Irusta, are wonderful. A gang of miffed chickens, wings propped on their hips, radiate indignation; you’re practically moved to grab picket signs in their defense. And watching Ulisses bound across the pages, one ear cocked in curiosity, you can’t help feeling grateful for his dispatches from the animal world, lovingly typed out by Lispector on the Olympia typewriter that was nearly always perched on her lap.
In THE MYSTERY OF THE THINKING RABBIT (NYRB Kids, 48 pp., $19.95, ages 5 to 9), Lispector imagines an action-packed life of adventure for what appears to be an extraordinarily ordinary pet bunny. It turns out that in addition to being a “very white rabbit,” he’s a talented escape artist.
Joãozinho, the hero of the story, is modeled on the pet rabbits Lispector’s two sons kept, and soon finds a way to make a break from his hutch despite his very average intelligence. In time, he regularly slips out after meals to pay visits to his girlfriend, who’s a bit of a nag; to check in on his offspring; and to “have a look at things” beyond his cage.
According to Moser’s 2009 biography of Lispector, “Why This World,” she originally wrote “The Mystery of the Thinking Rabbit” to appease her son Paulo, who was “fed up with her writing for grown-ups.” The resulting book is highly personal to their relationship, with plenty of wry asides like this one: “Paulinho, if for people it’s nice to love a rabbit, just imagine how great it is to love a rabbit when you’re its father or mother. Don’t even get me started.”
There’s a buoyant, joyful absurdity to the story, helped along by Kammal João’s kinetic illustrations of a bunny with important places to be.
Lispector seems to revel in the unanswerability of the questions both these tales pose. As someone who has battled for years to make sense of her work, I wondered how her lifelong preoccupations — particularly the darker ones — would manifest in books for children. Happily, these stories tap into a playfulness and sense of wonder innate to the author.
As she once noted in her newspaper column, “All living beings, apart from man, are a riot of amazingness.” That sounds like exactly the kind of person who should be writing for young minds.
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