Agua Viva

By Clarice Lispector, Stefan Tobler (translator),

Book cover of Agua Viva

Book description

A meditation on the nature of life and time, Agua 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, Agua Viva…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Agua Viva as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Last year, I went on a run where I read nothing but Clarice Lispector, completely surrendering to her experimental spellcasting and literary bewitchment. Ukrainian-born and Brazilian-raised, the iconoclastic Lispector was unmistakably her own as a writer, searching for "the word that has its light."

This brings me to my favorite of the Lispector books that I devoured: Água Viva. It is a happy birthday dirge and confessional, a sustained incantation punctuated by necessary silences, a chamber music concert performed in the bluest hours by a splintered soloist.

Or, in the words of Lispector herself, "This isn't a book…

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