Lispector stacks different versions of cockroach death like a musician performing a dizzying solo. And then comes murder.” This cockroach murder is achieved by mixing flour, sugar, and plaster to create a substance they’ll eat, then die from as the plaster dries inside them. One story, “The Fifth Story,” is composed entirely of digressions, detailing events that Lispector playfully informs us could be called instead “The Statues,” “The Murder,” or “How to Kill Cockroaches.” In the story, the narrator is “complaining about cockroaches” when “a lady overheard me. “The beauty of Brasília is its invisible statues.” Later, Brasília is “a splattered star” in the next beat, Lispector writes, “then I’ll say the worst word in the Portuguese language: armpit. “In Brasília are the craters of the moon,” she writes. No influence can explain a writer who can go from the register on display in “A Chicken” to the mind-blowing phantasmagoric stream of consciousness of “Brasília,” a complex, ambivalent reverie about an entire city that is by turns raucous, silly, profane, hilarious, mournful, satirical, and sometimes journalistic. Take Lispector’s almost-folktale “A Chicken,” in which dinner takes flight and must be caught and brought home … after which the chased chicken can no longer be viewed as just food.

In some of the later mystical stories, she also can conjure up an outright religious experimentalism that suggests a whole other set of writers entirely, and when she injects surrealism it’s in a way that reminds me of the artist and writer Leonora Carrington.Īnd then there are the total outliers among her works, stories that suggest no one but herself.

For example, she’s often described as “middle class,” but I’ll be damned if I don’t see in some of these stories as much of an affinity for Charles Bukowski as Anton Chekhov.

But, like most enduring writers, Lispector, who died in 1977, was more than one thing, capable of inhabiting more than one role.

Jeff vandermeer