Portuguese

Revisiting central points in Clarice Lispector's literary universe, Água viva is pure incandescence of inventiveness and language. An enigmatic female voice – all audacity, delirium and seduction – guides the narrative. This woman, whose name we do not know, wishes to change her profession and become a writer. She is an I that claims the occupation of a space and a time, that addresses a mysterious thou and proposes the daring alignment of humans and animals, nature and language, towards the center of life, which Clarice pursued in all her works.

Challenging limits and without yielding to convention, this book inaugurates a shared space between who writes and who reads: in this woman, in her restlessness or in her lethargy, in her fractures or in her drives, we recognize a humanity in its raw state. The fragmentary tone is countered by a cadence of demands and reflections as deeply individual as peremptorily universal. A disconcerting book, which offers a hypothesis of fusion between writing and reading, form and theme, body and thought: radically innovative, by suspending the formulas of novelistic representation, and irresistibly transgressive, in exposing the seams of fiction and the lyrical voice.

Água viva is a triumph of Clarice Lispector, who here attempts a new writing of self and of the world.

«Água viva is the late and nocturnal speech, at times almost somnambulant […] of a painter who wishes to change her means of expression and thus seeks to account, in this night ‘longer than life’, for her birth as a writer […]. More than witnessing this birth, the reader is given the opportunity to participate in it and in the discovery of the (i)world, with the shock of one who sees the formless take shape.»
Joana Matos Frias