Soulstorm     by Clarice Lispector, Translated by Alexis Leviton Original title: A Via crucis do corpo Original language: Portuguese Country: Brazil   Published by New Directions Pub. Date: June 1989 Format: Hardcover Dimensions: (in inches): 0.77 x 8.23 x 5.64 ISBN: 0811210901 List Price: $19.95 Buy online from Amazon.com for $19.95 Published by New Directions Pub. Date: 1989 Pub. Place: USA Format: 175 pages Not available for ordering

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Twenty-nine stories and fragments from Lispector’s collections: The Way of the Cross (1974) and Where you were at night (1974) are gathered together here. They range in style and topic, from abstract streams of consciousness, like ‘Silence’ or ‘A Report on a Thing’, quasi-autobiographical reflections like ‘The Man who Appeared’ or ‘For the Time Being’ and the surreal nightmare images of ‘Where you Were at Night’, to complex and disturbing narratives like ‘The Body’ or ‘In Search of Dignity’.

As Lispector reveals in her ‘Explanation’, the first half of the collection, the stories from The Way of the Cross, were commissioned by her editor, who wanted: «three stories which, said he, had really happened. The facts I had, only imagination was missing. And the subject was dangerous.» The stories she came up with deal with social misfits and taboo subjects such as bigamy, homosexuality, sexual promiscuity, murder, prostitution, rape, and sexual desire in the elderly. This sounds rather shocking but in fact the stories are so exaggerated and parodic that they seem like tragicomic cartoons! The style is often like that of a tabloid newspaper or a fanciful soap opera, using short dramatic sentences and dialogues.

In trying to portray «reality» and the secret lives of the people she observed around her she created eccentric and colourful characters, admitting that her work could be seen as trash. «But there’s a time for everything. There’s also a time for trash. This book is a bit sad because I discovered, like a foolish child, that it’s a dog’s world.»

This close observation of people’s intimate lives continues in the second half of the book, but the joky tone of many of the earlier stories is lost in favour of melancholy and soul-searching, leading to philosophical musings about love, life and death.

Senhora Jorge B. Xavier simply couldn’t have said how she had gotten there. Not through some main gate. It seemed to her that, half in a dream, she had entered through a kind of narrow opening in the midst of the rubble of a building under construction, as if she had slipped sideways through a hole made just for her. The fact is, the first she knew, she was already inside.

Yes, the first she knew, she realized that she was very much inside. She was walking endlessly through the subterranean passages of the Maracanã Stadium... 73