The Passion According to G.H.     by Clarice Lispector Original title: A Paixao segundo G.H. Original language: Portuguese Country: Brazil   Published by Univ of Minnesota Pr (Txt) Pub. Date: April 1989 Format: Paperback ISBN: 0816617120 List Price: $12.95, £6.95 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £5.56 Buy online from Amazon.com for $12.95 Published by Minnesota UP: Minneapolis Pub. Date: 1988 Pub. Place: USA Format: 173 pages Not available for ordering

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The Passion According to G.H. is a novel that somehow feels like a series of short stories, for each chapter starts with a sentence that gives it a theme.

The overall theme is the same as in the compilations The Foreign Legion and Family Ties; getting to the bottom of the drawer, coming to an understanding of oneself and the essence of life, embodied, essentially and symbolically, in the notions of love, honesty, truth.

In The Passion according to G.H. a woman is questioned existentially about her life but the questions find no answers. It speaks of the self-discovery of a human being, in this case the almost anonymous G.H., as she questions, criticises and wonders. It examines the processes G.H. goes through to arrive at a greater understanding of what her life is about, of what life is about. The crucial moment is the premeditated killing of a cockroach in the door of a wardrobe.

Before this pivotal event, G.H. is the one others see and perceive; she is her name. A name that we only know as G.H., her initials as engraved on her suitcase. Even though she is a questioning being she lives in ignorance of her own self. Something is amiss but it eludes her. She tries to grasp it but only distances the possibility of understanding by talking too much, by delaying the silence that could reveal what she is searching for. She defines herself by all her possible external extensions, never being truly honest — she fears what honesty may reveal.

There is one prerequisite for change: that the deadly safe routine should be broken. Killing the cockroach is more about killing than about what she kills; about what she kills in herself and the effect that has on her life from that moment on. It is about her starting to be truthful with herself and leaving the fears that immobilise behind her, replacing them with a new courage that will set her free, that will give her the necessary space to undergo her mystical experience of the self.

In a story where all seems to fall apart, chapters are symbolically linked by the last sentence of the previous chapter becoming the first sentence of the next one, as if this sentence were a unique point of reference to hold onto, for everything else is being questioned, dismantled, thrown away. The ‘I’ of the protagonist is fused with the ‘I’ of the author in a way that allows any reader to fully identify with G.H. and ‘become’ her.

This is a world where external and internal realities rarely meet, or coincide, but when they meet, an explosion takes place. She tries to bring into her meaningless life of routine the dimension of the spiritual embodied in rituals, here the killing of a cockroach and what follows it; the ‘eating’ of the cockroach. The ‘moment of truth’ in itself becomes crucial. In this moment, everything else disappears so that G.H. can make sense of what this killing means to her, of how it changes her.

But are the discoveries of infancy like those made in a laboratory, where one finds what one will? Was it when, only when I became an adult that I started to fear and grew the third leg? Can I, as an adult, have the childlike courage to love myself? to lose oneself is to go looking with no sense of what to do with what you might find. The two walking feet minus that extra third one that holds a person down. And I want to be held down. I don’t know what to do with the horrifying freedom that can destroy me. But while I was held down, was I happy? Or was there — and there was — an uncanny restless something in my happy prison routine? Or was there — and there was — that throbbing something to which I was accustomed that I thought throbbing was the same as being a person? Isn’t that it? Yes, that too... that too... 5-6