Clarice Lispector has been gone for nearly 50 years. Nevertheless, New Directions Books has published a fantastic new story collection, Covert Joy, the latest and perhaps final volume in the imprint’s definitive English language revival of the legendary Brazilian writer. The publisher has ushered in a new era of appreciation for Lispector in the English speaking world, beginning with its biography by series editor Benjamin Moser, which reignited interest in Lispector’s work, and culminating in this artful distillation of her short stories. Thanks to a nimble translation by Katrina Dodson — who won a 2016 PEN Translation Prize for her efforts on Lispector’s exhaustive Complete Stories — Covert Joy overflows with humor, formal bravery, philosophical depth, and immediacy, all hallmarks of this important Brazilian writer.
While the Collected Stories surveys the Lispector canon from top to bottom, Covert Joy amounts to a lightweight curation of some of her most surprising, playful, and intelligent short works. In the context of the whole Lispector series, Covert Joy seems like the best on-ramp to me, the most logical place for the uninitiated to become acquainted with this singular author, an artist as challenging to read as she is rewarding. The strangeness of Lispector’s voice is a reflection of her worldview — time and again, the bizarre beauty of life and the overwhelming vibrancy of sensory experience renders her characters ecstatic and nearly incoherent. This aesthetic of sensuality is apparent from the first story in the collection, “Love,” in which a busy housewife undergoes a spiritual awakening at the sight of a blind man chewing gum. The woman, Ana, dwells on the minutiae of organizing a household, cooking and shopping and cleaning, until the encounter with the blind man humbles her with “nausea” and attunes her to the chaos of organic matter in a botanical garden. She is overwhelmed by the disorganization of the natural world, stunned into wonder by entropy, death, and decomposition. Her mind’s eye unfocuses and assumes a wide lens, taking in a new and holistic view of the universe and her own mortality.
Animals play a recurring role in the book. They often startle or lull characters into a state of harmony with nature or a hypnosis of the body, like in “The Buffalo,” the story of a woman who goes to the zoo and wanders from one enclosure to another in search of an outlet for the bitterness she feels toward a man who has just broken up with her. Lispector rattles off a string of near perfect descriptions of the zoo creatures — “the giraffe was a virgin with freshly shorn braids,” “monkeys happy as weeds,” the lioness who “recomposed her head” like a sphinx, and “the camel’s large, dusty eyelashes above eyes dedicated to the patience of an internal craft.” The woman is desperate to lash out at something after suffering the indignity and betrayal of a breakup. She marches from cage to cage, looking for an animal with the right personality to absorb her hatred, until the buffalo unexpectedly pacifies her with its “small red eyes.”
“I love you, she then said with hatred to the man whose great unpunishable crime was not wanting her. I hate you, she said beseeching the buffalo’s love.”
Such material can make acolytes out of readers and writers alike who have yet to encounter work of such sensitivity and artfulness. Like with some of the best writing, a Lispector story convinces us within the first sentences of the author’s authority and trustworthiness. In her case, we are willing to go along for the ride in part out of pleasure from reading her descriptions and in part out of curiosity to see what alien landscape of the mind she will take us to next.
“The Chicken” is wonderful flash fiction, concise and inevitable as a parable, but with a devastating turn. The man of the house decides to slaughter a chicken for his family’s dinner, but the creature eludes him through sheer passion for life, winning over each of the family members and earning a temporary reprieve. The family’s murder of the chicken is inevitable but also shocking, thanks to the journey we have taken with the animal, portrayed through Lispector’s expertly close, omniscient point of view. We develop an affinity and affection for the chicken, just as the family does, but the story ends with a role reversal whereby the animal is humanized and the human beings are dehumanized, reduced to something atavistic and primal.
A sort of companion piece, albeit with a completely different structure and voice, appears in “The Egg and the Chicken.” Unlike the relatively linear narratives of other stories, “The Egg and the Chicken” struck me as a literary experiment using the building blocks of language and symbolism, an experiment in abstraction that is no less impressive for its difficulty. This story is challenging in the way that only Lispector can be challenging. It uses repetition to gradually drain the phrase “the egg” of meaning until its recurrence becomes a kind of chant that drones underneath the sentences, pulsing and pointing toward meaning, then breaking down instead into epistemological fragments or aphorisms like: “The egg has no itself. Individually it does not exist,” and “Never thinking about the egg is a way of having seen it.” While Covert Joy contains tales that we may recognize as realist, it also strays into the realm of experimental surrealism, providing plenty of fodder for literary scholarship, as well as recreational reading.
Ultimately, Covert Joy will affect its readers as the cover suggests. The title story, about a young girl who borrows a much-desired book from a friend, is both charming and subversive, a love letter to books and to the secret pleasures of reading. The girl lies in a hammock, savoring the physical presence of the book in her lap. “I was no longer a girl with a book,” the narrator confides in a veritable whisper: “I was a woman with her lover.” Here is also an example of translator Katrina Dodson’s careful oversight. Dodson translates the Portuguese word from the title, “clandestina,” into the English “covert,” preserving Lispector’s emphasis on stealth and the girl’s determination in borrowing the book from her resistant friend, as though she is duty bound, while retaining the elevated diction associated with the world of adults.
In the end, Lispector is quite convincing: there is magic in the quotidian and the mundane, if only one is willing to open one’s eyes to the chaos of consciousness and the happy meaninglessness of life.
FICTION
Covert Joy
by Clarice Lispector
New Directions Publishing Corporation
Published March 18, 2025
