4.0
The Passion According to G.H.
ByPublisher Description
Lispector’s most shocking novel.
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.”
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesThe Passion According to G.H. Reviews
4.0
“An ode to loving existence without requiring it to justify itself. The book is a trippy way of expressing acceptance of being one element among many, in a world that does not need us in order to be real.
The message is beautiful, but this is extremely hard to rate. Giving the book a 1, 2 or 4 stars would all feel correct.
and… I, too, would likely have a nervous breakdown and an identity crisis if locked in a room with a cockroach.”
““In the matter of living, one can never arrive beforehand.”
“I lost something that was essential to me, and that no longer is. I no longer need it, as if I'd lost a third leg that up till then made it impossible for me to walk but that turned me into a stable tripod. I lost that third leg. And I went back to being a person I never was. I went back to having something I never had: just two legs. I know I can only walk with two legs. But I feel the useless absence of that third leg and it scares me, it was the leg that made me something findable by myself, and without even having to look for myself. (…) The idea I had of what a person is came from my third leg, the one that pinned me to the ground. But, and now? will I be freer? (…) The two legs walking, without the third that holds you back. And I want to be held back. I don't know what to do with the terrifying freedom that could destroy me.
But was I happy while imprisoned?””
About Clarice Lispector
Clarice Lispector (1920–1977), the greatest Brazilian writer of the twentieth century, has been called “astounding” (Rachel Kushner), “a penetrating genius” (Donna Seaman, Booklist), and “one of the twentieth century’s most mysterious writers” (Orhan Pamuk).
Other books by Clarice Lispector
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