The Passion According to G.H., Clarice Lispector's mystical novel of
1964, concerns a well-to-do Rio sculptress, G.H., who enters her maid's
room, sees a cockroach crawling out of the wardrobe, and, panicking,
slams the door--crushing the cockroach--and then watches it die. At the
end of the novel, at the height of a spiritual crisis, comes the most
famous and most genuinely shocking scene in Brazilian literature...
Lispector wrote that of all her works this novel was the one that "best
corresponded to her demands as a writer."