In Água Viva Clarice Lispector aims to 'capture the present'. Her direct, confessional and unfiltered meditations on everything from life and time to perfume and sleep are strange and hypnotic in their emotional power and have been a huge influence on many artists and writers, including one Brazilian musician who read it one hundred and eleven times. Despite its apparent spontaneity, this is a masterly work of art, which rearranges language and plays in the gaps between reality and fiction.
A bewitching, jewel-like book unlike anything in modern literature. Agua Viva baffles and inspires me ... Each word of the book lands with the sweet force of a blade ... crystalline -- Carlos Valladares ― Gagosian Quarterly
An emblematic twentieth-century artist who belongs in the same pantheon as Kafka and Joyce ― Edmund White
Lispector stands at the pinnacle of Brazil's impressive literary achievement ― Washington Post Book World
One of the very great writers of the last century ― Guardian
