The Stream of Life     by Clarice Lispector, Translated by E. Lowe and E. Fitz Original title: Água Viva Original language: Portuguese Country: Brazil   Published by Univ of Minnesota Pr (Txt) Pub. Date: June 1989 Format: Paperback, 79 pages Dimensions: 0.30 x 7.99 x 5.32 in. ISBN: 0816617821 List Price: $12.95, £10.50 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £10.50 Buy online from Amazon.com for $12.95 Published by Minnesota UP: Minneapolis Pub. Date: 1989 Pub. Place: USA Format: 79 pages Not available for ordering

Click on image to see enlargement

This liquid narrative (the title very literally means «living water») is difficult to define in terms of genre, style or theme; as it says, «categories pin me down no longer.» It is like a series of pulsations, the narrator’s attempts to capture the «now-instant», «it» or «X» of a fleeting moment or sudden sensation before it slips through one’s net. It does have a narrator, a painter, who describes the artistic creative process by comparing literature to painting and also to music — linking her writing to improvisational jazz. Whilst describing her movements, her insomnia, the cups of coffee she drinks and cigarettes she smokes, she enumerates her seemingly random thoughts, giving the text a sense of immediacy, as if it is being written as we read it.

Without a solid structure the words flow irrepressibly forth in what Hélène Cixous in her helpful foreword describes as being «always a question of beginnings.» The reader can start to read at any point because the narrative is circular, an idea emphasised in the text with the images of the spinning wheel, the rushing stream, regression to past lives and the cat which, having given birth, eats the placenta! This absence of sense, the concept of «not-knowing», is celebrated in Lispector’s other works, such as The Passion according to G.H. and the crônicas of Discovering the World, and upholds the importance of suspending rational thought to embrace the ambiguity and possible multiple meanings of a word or a phrase. This is why Lispector’s language is complicated but compelling: she reveals that its meaning is never definitive but shifts from moment to moment, like running water.

The most abstract and least conventional of Lispector’s novels, The Stream of Life paved the way for her later works The Hour of the Star and A Breath of Life which are also concerned with the process of writing literature.

I don’t know what I’m writing about: I’m obscure even to myself. Initially I had only a lunar, lucid vision, and then I clasped that instant to myself before it died and perpetually dies. I transmit to you not a message of ideas but rather an instinctive voluptuousness of what is hidden in nature and that I sense. And this is a feast of words. I write in signs that are more gesture than voice. All this is what I used to paint, probing into the intimate nature of things. But now the time has come to stop painting in order for me to remake myself, I remake myself in these lines. I have a voice. Just as when I throw myself into the outline of my sketch, this is an exercise in life without planning. The world has no visible order, and I have only the order of my breathing. I let myself happen. 16