The Passion According to G.H.

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."

“"She is quite a thing to discover indeed."”

-- The Los Angeles Times "[Lispector] left behind an astounding body of work that has no real corollary inside literature or outside it." -- Bookforum "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 "Over time, I've come to admire and even love this novel. In fact, as soon as I slammed the book shut, my understanding of G.H.'s story began to take on an almost-corporeal reality. Trying to put this into words is a slippery thing. What I was beginning to appreciate was that I could not consider Lispector's philosophical concerns for any length of time without losing my grasp on those concerns, yet I could somehow feel them, sense the substance of them in my own mind, in those deep pools of thought where language doesn't quite reach, and which words can't express." -- Emma Komlos-Hrobsky - Tin House "Lispector's prose is unforgettable... still startling by the end because of Lispector's unsettling forcefulness." -- Boston Globe "A lyrical, stream of consciousness meditation on the nature of time, the unreliability of language, the divinity of God, and the threat of hell." -- The Rumpus "One of 20th-century Brazil's most intriguing and mystifying writers." -- The L Magazine "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?" -- San Francisco Chronicle "A penetrating genius." -- Donna Seaman - Booklist

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. Idra Novey is a poet and translator. She is a lecturer at the Creative Writing Program at Columbia University. Her work has appeared in the Paris Review, The Believer, and Ploughshares, and her collection The Next Country appeared in 2008. 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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