Jacobs, Adriana X. and Claire Williams, eds. 2022. After Clarice: Reading Lispector’s Legacy in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge: Legenda. 466 pages.

Roughly five years after the 2017 high-profile University of Oxford conference dedicated to Brazil’s Ukraine-born literary superstar Clarice Lispector’s life, oeuvre, and evolving legacy, there comes a fascinating volume out of the Modern Humanities Research Association, in Cambridge. It is a daunting, massive editorial project of 446 pages with an illuminating introduction by the two editors, Adriana X. Jacobs and Claire Williams, and 28 chapters masterfully divided into seven parts: (I) Maps and Places, (II) Archives and Manuscripts, (III) Theorizing Clarice, (IV) Writing and Rewriting, (V) The Posthuman, (VI) Transmediality and Performance, and (VII) Translating Clarice.

One’s journey into After Clarice’s infinite and intricate universe of ideas, paintings, and storytelling, as well as into its boundless canvas of artistic creations, recreations, influences, and suggestions—of and for future reverberations—starts with its cover. There, a colorful collage designed by Clarice Lispector’s granddaughter, Mariana Valente, features a small ship with a clear allusion to her family’s 1922 immigration trip from Ukraine to Brazil. Among other symbolic items, explain the editors, the image depicts “flora and fauna of Brazil, the typewriter that Lispector preferred to hold in her lap as she typed, and her interest in astrology and the occult” (9).

Obviously, the vast map of Lispector’s interests and concerns could not be fittingly represented on a single canvas, or even in any single book, no matter how extensive and profound. After Clarice, though, strives to discuss a plethora of themes and materials by which it “gestures to the future readers and scholars” of the internationally acclaimed author, declare the editors: it is a scholarly effort that does not ignore the “ways that our own thinking about life and literature has been shaped by our encounters with the texts” (9–10). Subjective and creative approaches to Lispector’s writings are, thus, mighty components of the book material’s kaleidoscopic dynamics (a metaphor also implied by the editors). Such is the case with Nádia Gotlib’s perception of the novelist’s essay on her own concept of vanguard literature while she, Gotlib, scrutinizes that concept’s fictional manifestation in The Passion According to G. H. and in The Hour of the Star. Also, in the same Part II (Archives and Manuscripts), equally intriguing and elucidating are Elvia Bezerra’s and Paloma Vidal’s contributions where they describe in vivid details their emotional and bewildering encounters with Lispector’s archived notes and drafts.

Reflection and fragmentation, inter-configuration and mutation, apart from myriad colors, shapes and sizes, are processes at play in the book’s analytical and creative writing pieces, but, also, in the visual and audio performances described in various chapters. In fact, all five chapters in Part VI (Transmediality and Performance) draw heavily on subjective and creative approaches by which Lispector’s literary works have mutated and transfigured into other art forms. Carlos Mendes de Sousa’s article, for instance, explores the widespread presence of music, with a bold statement on how dissonance and spontaneous sounds of daily life stimulated Lispector’s penchant for experimental writing. Kiran Leonard, on the other hand, explains the lyrics of a song of his that is inspired by many of Lispector’s texts.

On the cutting edge of creative and subjective pursuits, actress and translator Magdalena Edwards shows how she makes her own body visually speak during a face-to-face presentation and an essay in which she plays the triple role of translator, The Chandelier protagonist Virginia, and Lispector herself—a multilayered story partly based on the body language and statements made by Lispector’s famous 1977 TV interview. If Mariela Méndez’s essay develops a convincing queer reading of a TV series based Lispector’s “Correio feminino” (the journalistic column under the Helen Palmer pseudo-name), Sara André da Costa’s piece inspects the powers of semiotic expansion and transcreation in Suzana Amaral’s film adaptation of the novel The Hour of the Star.

Out of a fierce commitment to explore and share the paths through which Lispector’s appeal, reception, and influence stretch far beyond the academic world, After Clarice includes chapters on/of poetry, personal essays, music, and television and theater. There are also provocative and enlightening discussions on the recreation of Lispector’s works through translations, in Part VII. Additionally, this section includes topics regarding biographies, as they can be perceived as translations of real-life scripts and circumstances. In this closing section, one can clearly see a major contribution toward the fruition of one of the 2017 conference organizers and the present volume editors’ goals: to reach out to international scholars and translators working in non-Western languages, such as Hebrew and Mandarin. In the last essay of the volume, Min Xuefei alludes to her own translation as a process of intimacy, with a sharp eye on stylistic traits, such as ambiguity and repetition, but also on the many-folded challenges and pitfalls of making a nuanced, complex type of writing attainable within a drastically different culture and literary tradition. Likewise, it is extremely relevant to learn that editors Jacobs and Williams are aware (as they say so themselves), that “often implicit in relations of influence are uneven power dynamics” (3). As a result, they mean to “decenter anglophone influence and translation.” They explain that five of Lispector’s translators were present at that 2017 conference, and that seven of her translators are contributors to this book with their critical thoughts on the arduous mission of recreating and disseminating her work abroad (3).

Prone to remain a definitive grand source for Claricean studies for many decades to come, After Clarice offers us essays developed by young and not so young scholars from around the globe and across various disciplines, intellectual spheres and artistic realms. Furthermore, the book provides an array of mesmerizing performances, poems, songs, stories, studies and testimonials. Drawn through a wide variety of theoretical slants, like Hélia Correia’s disconcerting rewriting of the classic “The Imitation of the Rose,” or Idra Novey’s testimony on the transformative effective of translation over the translator’s own poetic output, both placed in Part IV (Writing and Rewriting), this authoritative release is exceptionally edifying and thought-provoking. With elaborate theoretical underpinnings, such as those in Marta Peixoto’s views on encounters as affective processes, or in Julie Côté’s understanding of Lispector’s role in Hélène Cixous’s theory of écriture féminine, in Part III (Theorizing Clarice), or even in Kelli Zaytoun’s thoughts on post-humanist notions on the links between subjectivity and death (all of these featured in Part V, The Posthuman), Jacobs and Williams set the stage for much more to come out on and from the colossal legacy of a true genius.

As if all of this wealth of critical and artistic writings were not compelling, gracious, graceful, or instructive enough, one must be thankful for one more gem: Giovanni Pontiero’s “Afterword to the Besieged City” and the story behind a precious whole book translation lost for several decades and then recaptured (as charmingly told by the editor Claire Williams in the closing chapter of Part II). Lastly, one’s deepest gratitude must go to all who made After Clarice possible. If she is somewhere up there, Clarice Lispector now has an approving smile on her face.