4.0 

An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures

By Clarice Lispector & Stefan Tobler &
An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures by Clarice Lispector & Stefan Tobler &  digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

Now in paperback, a romantic love story by the great Brazilian writer

Lóri, a primary school teacher, is isolated and nervous, comfortable with children but unable to connect to adults. When she meets Ulisses, a professor of philosophy, an opportunity opens: a chance to escape the shipwreck of introspection and embrace the love, including the sexual love, of a man. Her attempt, as Sheila Heti writes in her afterword, is not only “to love and to be loved,” but also “to be worthy of life itself.”

Published in 1968, An Apprenticeship is Clarice Lispector’s attempt to reinvent herself following the exhausting effort of her metaphysical masterpiece The Passion According to G. H. Here, in this unconventional love story, she explores the ways in which people try to bridge the gaps between them, and the result, unusual in her work, surprised many readers and became a bestseller.

Some appreciated its accessibility; others denounced it as sexist or superficial. To both admirers and critics, the olympian Clarice gave a typically elliptical answer: “I humanized myself,” she said. “The book reflects that.”

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An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures Reviews

4.0
“This book left a mark on me. And I will be revisiting it probably for the rest of my life 🫠”

Stefan Tobler

Born in Belém, Brazil, Stefan Tobler is the publisher of And Other Stories and, whenever time permits, a translator from Portuguese and German. His translation of Arno Geiger’s The Old King in His Exile was shortlisted for both the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize and Schlegel-Tieck Prize, and his other translations include the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize-shortlisted Água Viva by Clarice Lispector and the Man Booker International Prize finalist A Cup of Rage by Raduan Nassar.

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