I loved this book. It's eerie and funny and profound and filled with deep thematic undercurrents about the nature of language. I've been trying to find the right direction to go on a longer fiction piece when I started reading this book and it was just what I needed. It helped me set a new tone in my work, it gave me a great example of how something could be gothic and still have room for humor, how it could be realistic but filled with elements of the occult. Thanks DeLillo!
November 2006 Archives
This short, metafictional book is about a poor, uneducated, unattractive woman who lives a short, banal life. But it's metafictional, so it's also about the teller of the story, a man who wants to be moved by this woman but isn't quite. And Lispector is a feminist author, so it's also about the feminist subtext, about male dominated society and the struggle to be relevant.
What do I have to say about it? I don't know. I'm not in the mood to give opinions.
When I last read this book, I had the following to say:
"I have mixed feelings about the novel. It was a great read and I really connected with the protagonist. But even though I was enthralled until the end, I could feel things slipping away from me more and more. If anyone else reads this book, please give me a call, because more than anything else I need to discuss it with someone."
Well, my wish came true, because I read the book for my literature seminar and got to discuss it with the professor and the class. While I still have similar feelings about the disappearance of major characters halfway through the book, we talked about how this is a novel of doppelgangers and duplicates, how new characters served as almost identical replacements for old characters. I'm still not sure why that's necessary but I'll accept that it is an intentional move on the author's part. Anyway, I've already written about this book so I'll write no more here.
