Before you read this review: go find a version of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" and put it on. (I'm sure you have it someplace. John Cale's version is recommended, but just about anyone will do.)Back? Good. And I guess now I'll have to explain what Cohen has to do with Lispector - I suppose it's possible that Cohen's read the book, but it's not like they're all that closely related (apart from the fact that the book opens with a cry of "hallelujah"). But what they have in common is that approach, that ecstasy that's not necessarily religious but which might be the same feeling that's behind religion - not God, but that which some people fill with God. And the self-referential attempt to capture it all in words.The Stream of Life is a letter from a her to a him, one long monologue that begins the day she wakes up with the sun and finds that life has gone on. It's an incredible feeling, an epiphany she has to try and catch: to describe LIFE in mere words, all that's beautiful and fucked up, the concrete and the abstract, the bits you can't help but paint or sing. But just like you supposedly can't dance about architecture you can't really write about feelings; the words are just words, they don't cover it. She needs time. She has to manipulate language, duck under their superficial definitions and get at the core meaning, while at the same time trying to stop time, freeze the NOW she's trying to describe before it's passed and the feeling of having understood something is lost to the pale cast of thought and everything becomes just more words. Where does the music go after you've played it?Lispector goes deep-sea fishing in her language, soul, philosphy, love, art and keeps bumping into the words we once used to represent emotions rather than the emotions themselves, "the it;" she treats language the way a saxophone player in jazz might treat notes, refusing to play the basic melody but playing around it, surrounding it from all directions, alternately divebombing it and caressing it before restating the theme at the end. The novel - if you can even call it that - is subjective taken to the extreme, the sheer experience of experiencing taken to the degree where everything becomes a subject - everything is "I," I am "it." Being as a conscious act of creation: "I am myself.""Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent," as a dull Austrian once put it. But Lispector isn't a philosopher, she's a fiction writer, and she refuses to be silent; she WILL force language to capture that second of clarity, jubilation, grief, extacy - like a Coltrane who's learned to paint, like Molly Bloom on E. This is prose that wants to top poetry. It takes her 127 pages and I'll be damned if she doesn't manage it. I can't sum it up - that would sort of defeat the purpose; maybe my attempt to use words to describe her attempt to use words to speak of that which cannot be spoken about, that secret chord that goes all the way to the divine, was doomed from the beginning. But on the other hand, if it could be easily summed up we wouldn't need literature, would we? I don't want to feel the horrible limitations of living only by that which makes sense.I just know that The Stream of Life lights up what, for lack of a better word, I call my soul. And that it's amazing, mankind's ability to watch everything go wrong and yet stand their with nothing on our tongues but "hallelujah."
Reading this before I sleep at night because I need something quiet and almost meditative. Flagging parts that stood out to me. There's something about the way she writes, the way her words crawl into the brain. --"I know that my gaze must be that of a primitive person surrendered completely to the world, primitive like the gods who only allow the broad strokes of good and evil and don't want to know about good tangled up like hair in evil, evil that is good." (7)"This is life seen by life. I may not have meaning but it is the same lack of meaning that the pulsing vein has." (8)"What I tell you should be read quickly like when you look." (11)"And madly I take control of the recesses of myself, my ravings suffocate me with so much beauty. I am before, I am almost, I am never. And all of this I won when I stopped loving you." (12) "I know what I am doing here: I am telling of the instants that drip and are thick with blood." (16)"A dangerous balance, mine, mortal danger for the soul. The night of today looks at me with torpor, verdigris and lime. I want inside this night that is longer than life, I want, inside this night, life raw and bloody and full of saliva. I want this word: splendidness, splendidness is the fruit in its succulence, fruit without sadness. I want distances. My wild intuition about myself. But my main thing is always hidden. I am implicit. And when I make myself explicit I lose the humid intimacy." (18)
Do You like book The Stream Of Life (1989)?
This is a book that I will return to at least once a year. The prose reminds me of Saul Williams’ poetry, although Saul was born a mere five years before Lispector died in 1977, so any thoughts of reincarnation do not hold in this particular instance.A bricolage of paragraphs longing for understanding on the present moment are placed like Tibetan prayer flags in the work -- there seems to be a thread or current running throughout the pieces. Of course Água Viva means The Stream of Life, so she spends much of the book’s length on coming to grips with mortality. Translator Stefan Tobler did a fine job in presenting this in English.It’s a wonderful work and I cannot recommend it highly enough. Even to thumb through it a paragraph at a time seems to offer quite a payback. The book reads more like music or a painting than a novel, in fact. It is no wonder that it has influenced a great number of Brazilian artists, including musician Cazuza who read it 111 times.
—Jack Waters
despite an illuminating introduction by biographer and series editor benjamin moser, água viva left me desiring a bit more from this slender work. lispector's prose is as radiant as always, yet without even the flimsiest of narrative structures to support and lend balance to her often-challenging syntactical structure, the writing in água viva has little to cohere to. it is not so much lispector's lack of plot that makes this book arduous (straying, at times, precipitously close to tedious), but instead the inherent difficulties in writing within such a format or style. yes, her musings (on life, god, flowers, mirrors, emotion, painting, etc.) are indeed intriguing, lyrically conveyed, and often disarmingly beautiful, though given the nature of her art, i believe her fiction works best when in possession of a nucleus around which her unique stylings can freely revolve. this unrestrained, uncentered technique can be an ambitious one and when it works well it can exceed the limitations of conventional plot (see joseph joubert and fernando pessoa's bernardo soares heteronym for two dexterous examples). água viva, however, is a bit too unmoored to ably showcase much more than the allure of her prose and the depth of her existential imaginings. for i want to feel in my hands the quivering and lively nerve of the now and may that nerve resist me like a restless vein. and may it rebel, that nerve of life, and may it contort and throb. and may sapphires, amethysts and emeralds spill into the dark eroticism of abundant life: because in my darkness quakes at last the great topaz, word that has its own light*translated from the portuguese by stefan tobler
—jeremy
A remarkable piece of work. It's not a novel, it's not poetry, I'm not sure what it is! I think the writer sums it up best herself: "I want to have the freedom to say unconnected things as a deep way of touching you".And say them she does. No plot, no characters (except her and the man she is addressing), simply a set of "unconnected things", no story line. Actually, they are anything but unconnected - there is a carefully constructed and subtle progression of ideas which are introduced, then quoted , then echoed. And it works surprisingly well. In this utterly unconventional way, Clarice Lispector somehow manages to convey a fragile and feminine character. One barely knows anything about her by the end. She smokes, that's about it. But somehow her fragility comes across clearly. I'm not busting a ut to read more of CL, but am glad I spent a couple of hours reading this one. You don't realise what use the language can be put to until you've read it!
—Peter Ellwood
