The Chandelier

Fresh from the enormous success of her debut novel Near to the Wild Heart, Hurricane Clarice let loose something stormier with The Chandelier. In a body of work renowned for its potent idiosyncratic genius, The Chandelier in many ways has pride of place. "It stands out," her biographer Benjamin Moser noted, "in a strange and difficult body of work, as perhaps her strangest and most difficult book." Of glacial intensity, consisting almost entirely of interior monologues – interrupted by odd and jarring fragments of dialogue and action – the novel moves in slow waves that crest in moments of revelation. As Virginia seeks freedom via creation, the drama of her isolated life is almost entirely internal: from childhood, she sculpts clay figurines with "the best clay one could desire: white, supple, sticky, cold. She got a clear and tender material from which she could shape a world. How, how to explain the miracle..." While on one level simply the story of a woman`s life, The Chandelier`s real drama lies in Lispector`s attempt "to find the nucleus made of a single instant... the tenuous triumph and the defeat, perhaps nothing more than breathing." The Chandelier pushes Lispector`s lifelong quest for that nucleus into deeper territories than any of her other amazing works.