Água Viva (novel)
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''Água Viva'' () is a 1973 novel by the
Brazil Brazil, officially the Federative Republic of Brazil, is the largest country in South America. It is the world's List of countries and dependencies by area, fifth-largest country by area and the List of countries and dependencies by population ...
ian author
Clarice Lispector Clarice Lispector (, born Chaya Pinkhasivna Lispector (; ) December 10, 1920December 9, 1977) was a Ukrainian-born Brazilian novelist and short story writer. Her distinctive and innovative works delve into diverse narrative forms, weaving them ...
. The novel has an unconventional form and uses no other form of structure other than double paragraph breaks, lacking chapters or sections. It also does not feature conventional plot or named characters and is framed as a directionless monologue from an artist, perhaps speaking to a lover, the public, or the work itself. In the novel, Lispector states that her goal is to fire "an arrow that will sink into the tender and neuralgic centre of the word". In Portuguese, ''Água Viva'' literally means "living water", a meaning that has been linked to the novel's fluid prose by some critics, but generally denotes the oceanic animal known in English as
jellyfish Jellyfish, also known as sea jellies or simply jellies, are the #Life cycle, medusa-phase of certain gelatinous members of the subphylum Medusozoa, which is a major part of the phylum Cnidaria. Jellyfish are mainly free-swimming marine animal ...
. In its first translation into English, published in 1989, it was titled ''Stream of Life.''


Background

Clarice Lispector was a Brazilian writer, most famous for her enigmatic and mystical 1964 novel The Passion According to G.H. According to the critic Alexandrino Severino, ''Água Viva'' arose out of an earlier 1971 draft ''Objeto Gritante'' (Loud Object) that Lispector edited down for clarity, though academic Sonia Roncador has held that the two works should be seen separately as complete literary works in their own right. In 1966, Lispector was caught in a fire at her home in
Rio de Janeiro Rio de Janeiro, or simply Rio, is the capital of the Rio de Janeiro (state), state of Rio de Janeiro. It is the List of cities in Brazil by population, second-most-populous city in Brazil (after São Paulo) and the Largest cities in the America ...
which left her severely injured. Some literary critics, most notably Benjamin Moser, have argued that the unhappy lives of her Jewish refugee parents, in particular the rape of her mother Mania in pogroms in the aftermath of the
First World War World War I or the First World War (28 July 1914 – 11 November 1918), also known as the Great War, was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War I, Allies (or Entente) and the Central Powers. Fighting to ...
in what is now
Ukraine Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It is the List of European countries by area, second-largest country in Europe after Russia, which Russia–Ukraine border, borders it to the east and northeast. Ukraine also borders Belarus to the nor ...
have cast a long shadow over her work. In the words of one critic, her writings become "personal, desperate, and ultimately claustrophobic" in the light of this familial trauma. This emphasis has been challenged by other scholars, especially in Brazil. Thiago Cavalcante Jeronimo argued in a 2018 essay, for example, that the rape of Lispector's mother, and its long-running emotional impact, was an "interpretive assumption" by Moser and had become "an incident 'proven without proof' by the biographer-who-fictionalizes".


Reception

Hélène Cixous Hélène Cixous (; ; born 5 June 1937) is a French writer, playwright and Literary criticism, literary critic. During her academic career, she was primarily associated with the Centre universitaire de Vincennes (today's University of Paris VIII) ...
translated ''Água viva'' into French in 1980, and it formed an integral part of her seminars at Paris VIII. Cixous argued that in the novel Lispector "gives us, not books, but the living saved from books, from narratives, from repressive constructions". Earl Fitz and Elizabeth Lowe, the latter of which knew Lispector personally, were the first to translate ''Água Viva'' into English in 1989 for
University of Minnesota Press The University of Minnesota Press is a university press that is part of the University of Minnesota. It had annual revenues of just over $8 million in fiscal year 2018. Founded in 1925, the University of Minnesota Press is best known for its book ...
. Another translation of the novel into English by Stefan Tobler was published by
New Directions Publishing New Directions Publishing Corp. is an independent book publishing company that was founded in 1936 by James Laughlin (1914–1997) and incorporated in 1964. Its offices are located at 80 Eighth Avenue in New York City. History New Directions ...
in 2012 and then by
Penguin Books Penguin Books Limited is a Germany, German-owned English publishing, publishing house. It was co-founded in 1935 by Allen Lane with his brothers Richard and John, as a line of the publishers the Bodley Head, only becoming a separate company the ...
in 2014, and ''Água Viva'' and has since received significant literary attention, following the trajectory of the author herself from "virtually unknown to anglophone readers during her lifetime to become something of an icon". Shannon Burns has written in the Sydney Review of Books that the novel was a "marvel of lyrical expression, a musical musing" that despite its "straining Heideggerian neologisms", is "pure witchcraft." Addie Leak has argued that it is a "delicately glistening spiderweb of thoughts, an interior monologue at its most experimental". Lispector herself had reservations about the novel, and Rob Doyle, writing in
The Irish Times ''The Irish Times'' is an Irish daily broadsheet newspaper and online digital publication. It was launched on 29 March 1859. The editor is Ruadhán Mac Cormaic. It is published every day except Sundays. ''The Irish Times'' is Ireland's leading n ...
, thinks that in "one sense, she’s right – it’s bloody awful. The prose gushes with unfiltered emotion so that you don’t know where to look. And yet, there is a thrill in reading these breathless, fitfully coherent fragments, each deployed in a vain quest to capture the living moment of naked existence."


References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Agua Viva (novel) 1973 Brazilian novels Novels by Clarice Lispector