I hear it, the fall…I wait for myself, I wait for myself to slowly rise up and truly appear before my eyes.

Free and open to all, our Library is a unique collection of around 4,000 books dedicated to the exploration of contemporary drawing.I may have had such a hard time with it because I had to finish it in time for a discussion, and I think it lends itself to an absolutely free/boundless reading. Between the two pieces, looking at them (the one she had already slept and the one she had yet to sleep), isolated in the timeless and the spaceless, an empty gap. La prima e la terza persona si accavallano creando prospettive multiple, dal monologo che scaturisce dal più buio fondo dell'identità allo sguardo dall'alto di una voce narrante che sa tutto – e quasi se ne rammarica.

I have another Lispector, The Hour of the Star, but I might leave it for a few months just to put a bit of space between the two.Last year I read another dazzling debut by a twenty-three-year-old, Nada by Carmen Laforet, which I much preferred to Near to the Wild Heart. Se ogni tecnica è una specie di specchio nel mondo, qui la superficie riflettente appare deliberatamente infranta in minuscoli pezzi. It would be hard to say that Joana is more human (I’m not sure that’s possible…), but she’s certainly a more rounded character than is the case towards the end of the first part. If I bought this, I’d stay on the shelf for ages because I’d never feel ready to engage in such a challenging read. However, as I have enjoyed recent novels with a great deal of introspection maybe I will be pleasantly surprised?

I like that notion of a deity - the first one I have come across which doesn’t fill me with anger, guilt and nauseating frustration at the injustice of it all. Otavio made her into something that wasn’t her but himself and which Joana received out of pity for both, because both were incapable of freeing themselves through love, because she had meekly accepted her own fear of suffering, her inability to move beyond the frontier of revolt. The whole book is a miracle of balance, perfectly engineered,” combining the “intellectual lucidity of the characters of Dostoevsky with the purity of a child.The title was chosen by a male friend and the bright pink cover of the first edition was chosen by a man in the publishing wing of the paper she worked for. Thank you for this Stefanie – I knew that it was a mistake not to read the bio along with the fiction. Soon, in my own home, where I raised my daughter, I’ll have to apologize to that girl for goodness-knows-what… She’s a viper.