Lispector at her most philosophically radical.
A meditation on the nature of life and time, Água Viva (1973) shows Lispector discovering a new means of writing about herself, more deeply transforming her individual experience into a universal poetry. In a body of work as emotionally powerful, formally innovative, and philosophically profound as Clarice Lispector’s, Água Viva stands out as a particular triumph.
"This is a fictional account of a woman’s attempt to escape from conventional time and exist instead in a perpetually renewing “this instant-now”. Lispector pursued this same seemingly impossible aim through a number of books – getting closer and closer to the confused and thrilling feeling of fully conscious aliveness. Água Viva is where she succeeds most amazingly."
― Toby Litt, The Guardian
"Brilliant and unclassifiable… Glamorous, cultured, moody, Lispector is an emblematic twentieth-century artist who belongs in the same pantheon as Kafka and Joyce."
― Edmund White
"This is a book that, like a good painting, can be picked up anywhere and that will continue to reward renewed contact over months and years of acquaintance."
― Scott Esposito, Barnes & Noble Review
"Her images dazzle even when her meaning is most obscure, and when she is writing of what she despises she is lucidity itself. "
― The Times Literary Supplement
"One of 20th-century Brazil’s most intriguing and mystifying writers."
― The L Magazine
Lispector dispenses with, or rather swerves around, narrative altogether, and gives her main subject—being—to us straight, in the form of aphorisms linked together and floating against a background of only white paper. By some sleight of hand she manages to create a sense of forward motion without offering any kind of character development. —Rachel Kushner
