AGNI, 2024
on Agua Viva by Clarice Lispector (translated by Tobias Ryan), AGNI Fall 2024.
“…The first time I read Agua Viva it seemed to me the sum of an ungraspable wisdom. I immediately felt like wrapping myself up in it, listening again and again to that voice and the mystery it probed. Writing about such a text or its author seemed like snatching at the impossible. I had to be encouraged to do so indirectly. Only one question left me speechless at first, but speechless with abundant words: And the female body? Confronting the impossibility of thinking about such a subject had given rise to what my sudden grandiloquence would have qualified as a vast world. The world? More like the impersonal which Lispector justly discerns in Agua Viva. I want to grab hold of the is of the thing. Because this book is one of those rare books which does not manifest a feminine body but an inner body – female perhaps, in the sense that it seeks to be entirely itself and also to escape its sex. And that frightened me even more. It must sometimes be left to a chance question to make spark a desire which can never be extinguished…”