Family Ties     by Clarice Lispector, Translated by Giovanni Pontiero Original title: Lacos de familia Original language: Portuguese Country: Brazil   Published by Univ of Texas Pr Pub. Date: September 1984 Format: Paperback Dimensions: 0.50 x 8.97 x 6.00 in. ISBN: 0292724489 List Price: $14.95, £7.99 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £7.99 Buy online from Amazon.com for $10.47 Publisher Unknown Pub. Place: UK List Price: £12.95 Not available for ordering Publisher Unknown Pub. Place: UK List Price: £6.95 Not available for ordering Published by Texas UP Pub. Date: 1972 Pub. Place: USA Format: Paperback, 156 pages Not available for ordering

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Clarice Lispector is universally recognised as being the most original and influential Brazilian woman writer of her time. In feminist circles she is revered as an intensely feminine writer who articulates the needs and concerns of every woman in pursuit of self-awareness. Critics worldwide have found much to admire in her introspective writings, both fictional and non-fiction. Her obsessive questioning of human relationships and the social constraints which threaten rather than foster meaningful communication bring her to the conclusion that the problem of existence is that of language itself.

In all her work there is relentless self-questioning. Aware that she was speaking on behalf of all mankind, she was wont to say: ’I am so mysterious that I do not understand myself.’ She saw the human condition as flawed, fragmentary and incomplete; the darker side of our nature as being compounded of fear, revulsion, cruelty and hatred. But once having recognised the inherent contradictions, she set about trying to reconcile freedom with restraint, humility with pride, solitude with the need to communicate. Strength had to be drawn from weakness, human reversals transformed into salvation. Despite her Ukrainian-Jewish background, Lispector identified completely with Brazil and, most of all, with north-eastern Brazil. Memories of her childhood, especially in Recife, evoked the authentic Brazil where traditions and folklore had been preserved. [G P]

However there also seems something classically Jewish in her ’strangeness’ to the world, a level of delicate self-questioning that stems perhaps from a minority consciousness. Also we could cite her tremendous but unsentimental sympathy for the underdog as in her novella Hour of the Star. Above all there is a simultaneous refusal to take anything for granted while finding great pleasure in new worlds that is essentially ’Diasporic.’ [R K]

Family Ties is a compilation of thirteen short stories, all linked by one theme: love. There is love and how it binds family members together, love and how it imprisons, love and love’s cruelty, love and how it liberates or should liberate us.

Writing of love for Lispector is to write about the human condition. Each story is a profound journey into the psychology of her mainly female characters. Strong women, weak women, old women and young girls. Some men too; strong and weak; old and young. All of them seem to be on the verge of experiencing something new; plodding through their daily and often boring routines, set in their habits and habituated to the superficiality that surrounds them. But whether it is a blind man chewing gum, or a dead dog found in the streets, or a buffalo in a zoo, or the smallest woman on Earth in Equatorial Africa, these men and women are all susceptible to experiencing a breaking point in their consciousness.

Lispector brings the external world into the inner reality of each human being she encounters in her writings. And with words that so transparently transmit emotions she relates the intensity of this inner world when questioned, when shattered.

Thus the fifteen year old girl in Preciousness who is subjected to the sexual gaze of two young men in the street feels a huge change has occurred, something has been taken from her. The woman of The Imitation of the Rose focuses on a bunch of flowers and feels an intensity she has not known before. Should she give away these roses in their unbelievable beauty, or does she want to keep them for herself? The three young men of Mystery in São Cristóvão, on their way to a party, stop in a garden to break off a stem of hyacinth, but a white face behind the window stops them, scares them, makes them run away and a great mystery settles on this house.

Writing of love, Clarice Lispector draws us into another’s inner self and so draws us into our own inner self. She does it by showing us that love, at the core of the human being and what links us one to the other, however strong it is, very rarely manages to deliver the spiritual liberty we expect of it. And families, as in the story Happy Birthday, end up being linked more by superficiality than by love.

In these short stories Clarice Lispector creates worlds that could be ours, worlds and existences that seem totally normal and yet are totally absurd, life that is real and surreal at the same time. She seems to be able write outside the usual social and political constraints with great feeling, wisdom, scepticism and warmth She writes about what is most real and what is kept furthest away from daily life. She questions, she shatters and she (re)creates.

’And she considered the cruel necessity of loving. She considered the malignity of our desire to be happy. She considered the ferocity with which we want to play. And the number of times when we murder for love. She then looked at her mischievous son, as if she was looking at a dangerous stranger. And she was horrified at her own soul, which, more than her body, had engendered that being so apt for life and happiness. And thus she looked at him attentively and with uneasy pride, her child already without two front teeth, his evolution, his evolution under way, his teeth falling out to make room for those which bite best.’ (p92 The smallest woman in the world)

Family Ties is a compilation of thirteen short stories, all linked by one theme: love. There is love and how it binds family members together, love and how it imprisons, love and love’s cruelty, love and how it liberates or should liberate us.

Writing of love for Lispector is to write about the human condition. Each story is a profound journey into the psychology of her mainly female characters. Strong women, weak women, old women and young girls. Some men too; strong and weak; old and young. All of them seem to be on the verge of experiencing something new; plodding through their daily and often boring routines, set in their habits and habituated to the superficiality that surrounds them. But whether it is a blind man chewing gum, or a dead dog found in the streets, or a buffalo in a zoo, or the smallest woman on Earth in Equatorial Africa, these men and women are all susceptible to experiencing a breaking point in their consciousness.

Lispector brings the external world into the inner reality of each human being she encounters in her writings. And with words that so transparently transmit emotions she relates the intensity of this inner world when questioned, when shattered.

Thus the fifteen year old girl in Preciousness who is subjected to the sexual gaze of two young men in the street feels a huge change has occurred, something has been taken from her. The woman of The Imitation of the Rose focuses on a bunch of flowers and feels an intensity she has not known before. Should she give away these roses in their unbelievable beauty, or does she want to keep them for herself? The three young men of Mystery in São Cristóvão, on their way to a party, stop in a garden to break off a stem of hyacinth, but a white face behind the window stops them, scares them, makes them run away and a great mystery settles on this house.

Writing of love, Clarice Lispector draws us into another’s inner self and so draws us into our own inner self. She does it by showing us that love, at the core of the human being and what links us one to the other, however strong it is, very rarely manages to deliver the spiritual liberty we expect of it. And families, as in the story Happy Birthday, end up being linked more by superficiality than by love.

In these short stories Clarice Lispector creates worlds that could be ours, worlds and existences that seem totally normal and yet are totally absurd, life that is real and surreal at the same time. She seems to be able write outside the usual social and political constraints with great feeling, wisdom, scepticism and warmth She writes about what is most real and what is kept furthest away from daily life. She questions, she shatters and she (re)creates.

And she considered the cruel necessity of loving. She considered the malignity of our desire to be happy. She considered the ferocity with which we want to play. And the number of times when we murder for love. She then looked at her mischievous son, as if she was looking at a dangerous stranger. And she was horrified at her own soul, which, more than her body, had engendered that being so apt for life and happiness. And thus she looked at him attentively and with uneasy pride, her child already without two front teeth, his evolution, his evolution under way, his teeth falling out to make room for those which bite best. 92