Introductions
Clarice Lispector’s (1920-1977) writing permeates the algorithms of Substackers and LitFic fans alike, with seemingly infinite video essays on her brilliance. Some describe the reading experience of her tumbling, stream-of-consciousness style with the fervor of a new initiate, but despite her recent pop culture resurgence, Lispector’s work has been a part of the literary canon since her first publication, Near to the Wild Heart, was released in 1943 (she was just twenty-three years old at the time). Critics have praised her as a giant of modernist literature and the greatest Brazilian writer of the 20th century, and following Benjamin Moser’s biography of her life, Why This World (2009), her writing was introduced to the English-speaking world.
An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures is one of Lispector’s more polarizing novels, and it’s also my personal introduction to her writing. In it, Lispector invites us into the intimate world of Lóri, a primary school teacher, as she navigates her relationship with love, pleasure, existentialism, and spirituality with a philosophy teacher named Ulisses.
First Impressions
I typically don’t enjoy stream-of-consciousness writers, but the themes of existentialism, identity, and intimacy (both shared and solitary) made me want to read An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures despite my past preferences. Also, whenever I hear people start using spiritual and religious language to describe a reading experience (I’ve heard more than a few booktubers refer to reading Lispector as “a religious experience”) I just can’t help myself. I need to know.
In the beginning, I really struggled to get into a comfortable “flow” and was constantly distracted by my own interjecting thoughts and expectations. I kept searching for plot points and themes, trying to get a handle on the characters and the nature of their relationship. What motivates these two people? Why are they drawn to each other? What woman would ever be attracted to Ulisses (I found him repulsive, condescending, and frustratingly evasive, not to yuck Lóri’s yum, but…ew).
Still, I tried to keep an open mind and approach Lispector’s writing with curiosity and without judgement for her characters (though I admit I wasn’t always successful).
The Reading Experience
I realized while reading An Apprenticeship that I had a lot of preconceptions about what a novel is and how they are “meant” to be read. Once I let go of the idea that there needed to be certain structures, characters that made sense, and a clear thesis, I realized I was measuring my reading experience using metrics that weren’t intended for this kind of novel.
Up until the halfway point, I had been reading Lori as a frustratingly passive character and evaluating whether or not her actions and thoughts “made sense” and whether I personally felt her relationship was worthy of her time and existential crisis. After I spent more time with her cycles of thought and her exploration of feeling and philosophy, I realized how much of myself I was imposing onto her narrative and it made me confront my own judgment and need to categorize her instead of exploring her emotions and her nonlinear path of self-acceptance with her.
There were times when I was reading this book where I felt the narration was spinning in meaningless circles. I would look off into the middle distance, catch myself twisting my mouth in judgement, but as time went on I felt a perspective slowly emerging, the meandering sentences careening wildly until they began to show a pattern, a center of gravity around which they orbited.
Like the narrator, I was searching for meaning within the constantly flowing stream of consciousness. Not every thought was meaningful to me, but I think that’s what Lispector was trying to communicate about relationships, love, and living.
So much of this novel was about one woman’s understanding of herself and what it means not just to love but to be a human being and to accept that a lack of understanding is a necessary and inevitable part of human existence. Lóri’s communications with “the God”, her confusion, her devotion to herself, her fluid and fervent prayers–they all felt so human to me. There were parts I didn’t understand or even enjoy, but in the midst of my confusion, I found there were moments when Lispector captured human life and thought so tenderly and with such tangible desire and unabashed hope that I caught a glimpse of that transcendent feeling that draws her most ardent fans to her work.
Final Thoughts / Who would I recommend this book to?
I would recommend An Apprenticeship for people who are interested in having a different experience from a novel and are open to approaching reading from a new perspective. Sometimes, authors like Lispector can feel intimidating, especially when they hold so much admiration in literary circles. For me, there were definitely times when I felt I wasn’t really “getting it”, and that maybe I wasn’t keyed into whatever higher plane of thought that Lispector’s admirers had access to, but I think there is value in approaching a text with an open mind and not immediately dismissing your own confusion with a lack of intelligence. You don’t have to come away feeling enlightened or even having a particular reaction at all (there’s no “right” or “wrong” way to engage with a book) but Lispector encourages the reader to challenge the way they view love and relationships and human thought here, and I think that makes it a thought-provoking and worthy read.
I’ll close out my thoughts with this excerpt, and if it makes you feel what I did, I hope you’ll consider reading An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures:
But sometimes the unbearable anxiety would come: she wanted to understand enough so that she’d at least become more aware of everything she didn’t understand. Though deep down she didn’t want to comprehend. She knew it was impossible and every time she had thought she’d understood herself it was because she’d understood wrongly. Understanding was always a mistake–she preferred the largesse, so wide and free and without mistakes, of not-understanding. It was bad, but at least you knew you were in the full human condition.
Yet sometimes she’d guess right. There were cosmic streaks that substituted for understanding. (33)
Thank you for reading my first blog post for OMOI! If you liked An Apprenticeship, or are looking for media that would complement your reading experience, I would recommend Anne Carson’s thesis, Eros the Bittersweet, for a philosophical, linguistic, and poetic dive into the topics of love, desire, and the way human language reflects human desires in the poetry of Greek lyric poet, Sappho.
