The Passion According to G.H.
Cover for the first Brazilian edition of the novel, Editora do Autor, 1964.
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| Author | Clarice Lispector |
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| Original title | A Paixão segundo G.H. |
| Country | Brazil |
| Language | Portuguese |
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Publication date
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1964 |
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Published in English
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1988 / 2012 |
| Media type | |
| Preceded by | A Legião estrangeira (The Foreign Legion) |
| Followed by | Uma aprendizagem ou o livro dos prazeres (An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures) |
The Passion According to G.H. (A paixão segundo G.H.) is a mystical novel by Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, published in 1964. The work takes the form of a monologue by a woman, identified only as G.H., telling of the crisis that ensued the previous day after she crushed a cockroach in the door of a wardrobe. Its canonical status was recognized in 1988 by its inclusion in the Arquivos Collection, the UNESCO series of critical editions of the greatest works of Latin American literature. It has been translated into English twice, the first time in 1988 by Ronald W. Sousa, and then by Idra Novey in 2012.
The novel was written in a quick burst at the end of 1963, following a period of difficulty in Lispector's life. "It's strange," she remembered, "because I was in the worst of situations, sentimentally as well as in my family, everything complicated, and I wrote The Passion, which has nothing to do with that." The novel was published in the following year by Editora do Author, which was run by Lispector's friends Rubem Braga and Fernando Sabino.
When the book opens, G.H., a well-to-do resident of a Rio de Janeiro penthouse, reminisces on what happened to her the previous day, when she decided to clean out the room occupied by the maid, who had just quit.
"Before I entered the room, what was I?" G.H. asks. "I was what others had always seen me be, and that was the way I knew myself."
In the maid's room, G.H. expects chaos. Instead, to her shock, she finds a desert; "an entirely clean and vibrating room as in an insane asylum from which dangerous objects have been removed".
The room was the opposite of what I had created in my house, the opposite of the soft beauty that came from my talent for arrangement, my talent for living, the opposite of my serene irony, of my sweet and exempt irony: it was a violation of my quotation marks, of the quotation marks that made me a citation of myself. The room was the portrait of an empty stomach.
Only one thing disturbs the room's perfect order: black carbon scratches on the dry white wall, outlining a man, a woman, and a dog. Pondering the inscrutable drawing, she realizes that the black maid, whose name she has forgotten, and whose face she has trouble calling to mind, had hated her. Overwhelmed by anger, she opens the door to the wardrobe. Terrified by the cockroach she sees emerging, she slams the door shut, severing the cockroach in its centre, and sees the still-living animal's entrails beginning to ooze out.
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