Fresh from the enormous success of her debut novel Near to the Wild
Heart, Hurricane Clarice let loose something stormier with The
Chandelier. In a body of work renowned for its potent idiosyncratic
genius, The Chandelier in many ways has pride of place. "It stands
out," her biographer Benjamin Moser noted, "in a strange and difficult
body of work, as perhaps her strangest and most difficult book." Of
glacial intensity, consisting almost entirely of interior
monologues--interrupted by odd and jarring fragments of dialogue and
action--the novel moves in slow waves that crest in moments of
revelation. As Virginia seeks freedom via creation, the drama of her
isolated life is almost entirely internal: from childhood, she sculpts
clay figurines with "the best clay one could desire: white, supple,
sticky, cold. She got a clear and tender material from which she could
shape a world. How, how to explain the miracle ..." While on one level
simply the story of a woman's life, The Chandelier's real drama lies
in Lispector's attempt "to find the nucleus made of a single instant ...
the tenuous triumph and the defeat, perhaps nothing more than
breathing." The Chandelier pushes Lispector's lifelong quest for that
nucleus into deeper territories than any of her other amazing works.
