impatient, impassioned energy
Lispector was a successful journalist, but not a conventional one. Too Much of Life works in almost uninterrupted continuity with the writer’s fiction – stylistically and otherwise. Like her posthumous masterpiece, The Hour of the Star, her columns straddle realism, memoir, philosophy and politics, each dependent upon – and obscuring – the other.
An account of helping an older woman to safety during torrential rain spins from reportage to fantasy. When the grateful traveller calls her an angel, she takes the compliment as fact. Over the course of a taxi ride, relations between the two turn sour and Lispector divests herself of angelic characteristics: “swishing my invisible tail”, she makes her exit, “careful to leave my folded wings behind on the seat”.
Those familiar with her writing will find old obsessions here: tragedy, religion, death, the cunning and cruelty of men and women, the pleasure of living and, after a 1967 fire leaves her scarred for life, the pain of defeat.

Writing as Transformation | the New Yorker

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