“Luísa remains motionless, sprawled atop the tangled sheets, her hair spread out on the pillow. An arm here, another there, crucified by lassitude. The heat of the sun and its brightness fill the room. Luísa blinks. She frowns. Purses her lips. Opens her eyes finally, and leaves them fixed on the ceiling. Little by little the day enters her body.”
The word “lassitude” arrives almost inevitably after those first three words, or at least it does for anyone acquainted with Clarice Lispector’s grammar and syntax, translated here by Katrina Dodson. A bright stain of sunlight takes possession of the room in which Luísa stirs.
I return often to Lispector’s enigmatic, imperturbable figures and her serpentine prose. This story, The Triumph, opens the Complete Stories, and begins, like her first novel, with a clock: an object that recurs obsessively in her work. Clocks too haunt Franz Kafka, in the stories and diaries alike, none more memorably than in the high-strung opening of The Metamorphosis.
Lispector is sometimes compared to Virginia Woolf, but it is Kafka who shadows my reading of her most closely. “As I compared the tower clock with my watch I realised that it was much later than I had thought and that I had to hurry; the shock of this discovery made me feel uncertain of the way, I wasn’t very well acquainted with the town as yet; fortunately, there was a policeman at hand, I ran to him and breathlessly asked the way.”
The sentence is Kafka’s, yet with only a slight adjustment in syntax it could pass through Lispector’s world. Both bring forward the demonic and the dreamlike in such a way that it seems impossible to have perceived these states before reading them.