Água Viva

A meditation on the nature of life and time, Agua Viva (1973) shows Lispector discovering a new means of writing about herself, more deeply transforming her individual experience into a universal poetry. In a body of work as emotionally powerful, formally innovative, and philosophically profound as Clarice Lispector's, Agua Viva stands out as a particular triumph.

“"This is a fictional account of a woman's attempt to escape from conventional time and exist instead in a perpetually renewing "this instant-now". Lispector pursued this same seemingly impossible aim through a number of books - getting closer and closer to the confused and thrilling feeling of fully conscious aliveness. ”

"Brilliant and unclassifiable... Glamorous, cultured, moody, Lispector is an emblematic twentieth-century artist who belongs in the same pantheon as Kafka and Joyce." -- Edmund White "This is a book that, like a good painting, can be picked up anywhere and that will continue to reward renewed contact over months and years of acquaintance." -- Scott Esposito - Barnes & Noble Review "Her images dazzle even when her meaning is most obscure, and when she is writing of what she despises she is lucidity itself. " -- The Times Literary Supplement "I had a sort of missionary urge with her...but I started thinking, even when I was 19: How can I help this person reach the prominence she deserves?" -- Benjamin Moser "One of 20th-century Brazil's most intriguing and mystifying writers." -- The L Magazine

Clarice Lispector was born in 1920 to a Jewish family in western Ukraine. As a result of the anti-Semitic violence they endured, the family fled to Brazil in 1922, and Clarice Lispector grew up in Recife. Following the death of her mother when Clarice was nine, she moved to Rio de Janeiro with her father and two sisters, and she went on to study law. With her husband, who worked for the foreign service, she lived in Italy, Switzerland, England, and the United States, until they separated and she returned to Rio in 1959; she died there in 1977. Since her death, Clarice Lispector has earned universal recognition as Brazil's greatest modern writer. Born in Belem, Brazil, in 1974, Stefan Tobler is a translator from Portuguese and German. He won English PEN's Writers in Translation prize. His translation of Raduan Nassar's A Cup of Rage was longlisted for the 2016 Man Booker International Prize. Benjamin Moser is the author of Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle Award, and is also the editor of a new translation of Clarice Lispector's work, of which this is the sixth volume. A former books columnist at Harper's Magazine, Moser is now a columnist at The New York Times Book Review, and is currently at work on the authorized biography of Susan Sontag. He lives in the Netherlands.

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