Água Viva

This is a book that should not — cannot — be read. Please don't bother. This is a book that is to be experienced. If there were a plot to this novel, it would be this: a painter reflects on her identity. "It's with such a profound happiness," she mysteriously begins, and deeper down we go from there, passing animals, mirrors, floral anatomy, and being itself on the way to a hidden room of the mind. Lispector's compact replications of a consciousness stream cascade over you, into you. Like the living water of the title, the pulsating prose has a rush, a weight, a slippery presence that can make you feel more alive. Recommended By Thomas L., Powells.com

A meditation on the nature of life and time, Água Viva (1973) shows Lispector discovering a new means of writing about herself, more deeply transforming her individual experience into a universal poetry. In a body of work as emotionally powerful, formally innovative, and philosophically profound as Clarice Lispector's, Água Viva stands out as a particular triumph.

"One of 20th-century Brazil's most intriguing and mystifying writers." The L Magazine

"This is a fictional account of a woman's attempt to escape from conventional time and exist instead in a perpetually renewing 'this instant-now'. Lispector pursued this same seemingly impossible aim through a number of books - getting closer and closer to the confused and thrilling feeling of fully conscious aliveness. Água Viva is where she succeeds most amazingly." Toby Litt, The Guardian

"Brilliant and unclassifiable... Glamorous, cultured, moody, Lispector is an emblematic twentieth-century artist who belongs in the same pantheon as Kafka and Joyce." Edmund White

Clarice Lispector (1925-1977), the author of such works as Near to the Wild Heart, The Hour of the Star, and The Passion According to G. H., is the internationally acclaimed novelist and short-story writer from Brazil and the subject of Benjamin Moser's magisterial biography Why This World.