The Passion According to G.H (Penguin Modern Classics) Paperback – 6 Feb. 2014

I'm in something of a Lispector reading phase right now - read 'The Hour of the Star' decades ago, and although it made a lasting impression on me, I wasn't sure why, and with hindsight I somehow don't feel I was wholly 'ready' for now. Recently, I've read Agua Viva as well as The Passion, have The Besieged City on my 'bought and to read' list and am working my way through the Complete Stories.The Passion barely has a conventional plot, it's about - if anything - a transformative experience whose specific circumstances I'm not sure I am able to fully buy into. But this doesn't really matter - I feel Lispector is very explicitly inviting us to step into our own experience in old or (new-very-old) ways and what happens in G.H's maid's bedroom is by any stretch a good enough vehicle for what is essentially intended as a universalist 'message' or lure. At this stage in my life, personally I feel ripe for her work, and unhesitatingly ready to accompany her, or to acknowledge an appeal repeatedly made by the narrator of 'The Passion' to reach out my hand to her. Any comment on the quality of the translation is limited by my lack of knowledge of Portuguese, alas, yet with that massive caveat in place, I can say that nothing jars, and all my intuition is the adverb 'lovingly' would not be inapt.

No cliches, pure work of art! If you are in search of real creative talent, Clarice Lispector will amaze you.

Brilliant writer: a Brazilian James Joyce.

The Passion According to G. H. follows no complex plot. A single bourgeois woman enters the room of her African maid, who has recently resigned for unspecified reasons. The narrator is astonished by how the room’s harsh brightness contrasts with the sombre milieu of the rest of her penthouse apartment, and appalled by what appears to be a caricature of herself scrawled on a wall. Opening a wardrobe door, she is startled to see a cockroach. She makes the error, or perhaps takes the liberating step, of slamming the door on the body of the unfortunate roach. In the whole of the rest of the book, she decides to take one single further minor if bizarre and, it turns out, hugely significant action.The twin experiences of the cartoon and the vision of the dying cockroach precipitate a tidal wave of perception, in turn provoking complex metaphysical reflection, full of ambiguities and contradictions but framed in beautiful language, almost hallucinatory in its intensity. These reflections lead, through frequently counter-intuitive logic, to a series of overwhelming emotions: joy, despair, horror, resignation. Despite the relative absence of dramatic events and the reader’s consternation at the contradictory quality of the prose, the narrative is driven forwards by its luminously transcendental language.While the novel has been described as mystical, its emphasis on experience as the primary motivation in the task of every individual to come to terms with their own status as a human being and that being’s place in the world position it firmly within the body of existential phenomenology. Although her methods are very different, Lispector’s aim is identical to that of Sartre: to explore how the individual might, through the intense complexities of experience, break through the comfortable constructs of reality to determine their genuine place in the physical world. In the case of GH, this is achieved by her final carefully deliberated and small but revolting transgression.The circuitous and contradictory nature of the text is a challenge, but the luminescent quality of the language (in Idra Novey’s compelling translation) is more than compensation. A satisfying read.

Maybe I'm not "high-brow" enough for this, but after reading the reviews was expecting something rather special, and instead read what I felt to be a rather pretentious and drawn out psycholiogical "belly button gaze" by Ms Lispector. Possibly in its age it would stand differently, but I couldn't rate it as an essential work.

Seemed written by a very depressed, self-absorbed person. That may have been the point - an early feminist perspective, "I matter"? Regardless, I did not enjoy it.

A remarkable - and difficult - exploration of a breakdown. A highly introspective woman ('G.H.') enters her maid's bedroom and sees a cockroach which triggers an existential crisis.Everything is in the writing. Life proceeds at a snail's pace with plenty of retrospection, reminiscent of Kafka and Henry James. The highly intelligent, alert and spoilt G.H. 'lived well, really well ... on the top floor of a superstructure ... [where] at least nothing spoke and nobody spoke'. Her days are devoid of virtually any activity, on top of which she is a control freak, obsessed with 'rules and laws', but this is counteracted by her micro-focused imagination.‘Buried beneath the sentimental and utilitarian construction ... the thing part ... was too powerful and was waiting to reclaim me.’ It is hard to tell how unbalanced G.H. is, because of the lucidity of her musings. She experiences emptiness and joy, talking intimately to the reader, 'my love', before confronting her absolute, girlish horror of the cockroach, and then plunging into its ancient being.It is hard going, reading such intense intellectualising of a very particular and - on the surface - minor sensory experience: 'its existence was existing [as an] acute calibration of the minutest sensation of me'. But the labour pays off, giving an unflinching sense of the frailty of life, which can as easily turn to horror as to joy.The work is a bit like a Nordic drama in which the sole actor is stripped so naked that all you can see is the blood coursing through her veins, while her eyes hold you in an intense searchlight.