Near to the Wild Heart
The rare first Brazilian edition, published by the newspaper A Noite in December 1943.
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| Author | Clarice Lispector |
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| Original title | Perto do coração selvagem |
| Cover artist | Tomás Santa Rosa |
| Country | Brazil |
| Language | Portuguese |
| Genre | Short stories |
| Publisher | A Noite Editora |
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Publication date
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1943 |
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Published in English
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1990 / 2012 |
| Followed by | O Lustre (The Chandelier) |
Near to the Wild Heart (Perto do coração selvagem) is Clarice Lispector's first novel, written from March to November 1942 and published around her twenty-third birthday in December 1943. The novel, written in a stream-of-consciousness style reminiscent of the English-language Modernists, centers on the childhood and early adulthood of a character named Joana, who bears strong resemblance to her author: "Madame Bovary, c'est moi", Lispector said, quoting Flaubert, when asked about the similarities. The book, particularly its revolutionary language, brought its young, unknown creator to great prominence in Brazilian letters and earned her the prestigious Graça Aranha Prize.
It has been translated into English twice, the first by Giovanni Pontiero in 1990, and again by Alison Entrekin in 2012.
When Lispector began writing, in March 1942, she was still a law student at the Faculdade Nacional de Direito (National Law School), and was also working as a journalist. In February, she had transferred to the newspaper A Noite (The Night), once one of the glories of Brazilian journalism but by then under the direction of the dictatorial Getúlio Vargas government. She had published some stories and journalism, and turned to one of her colleagues, Francisco de Assis Barbosa, for help with the novel she had begun writing. She pieced the book together by jotting down her ideas in a notebook whenever they occurred to her. To concentrate, she quit the tiny maid’s room in the apartment she shared with her sisters and brother-in-law and spent a month in a nearby boardinghouse, where she worked intensely. At length the book took shape, but she feared it was more a pile of notes than a full-fledged novel. Her great friend Lúcio Cardoso, a slightly older novelist, assured her that the fragments were a book in themselves. Barbosa read the originals chapter by chapter, but Clarice vividly rejected his occasional suggestions: “When I reread what I’ve written,” she told him, “I feel like I’m swallowing my own vomit.”
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Wikipedia