Translated by Johnny Lorenz. New York, NY: New Directions, 2019. 208 pages. $23.95.
Virgínia, the protagonist of Clarice Lispector’s second novel, The Chandelier, has come to live in the city after leaving her family’s estate in rural Brazil. In the rain and heat of the city street, her heart stirs and she feels seen, perhaps for the first time: “In the street she could be discovered by someone’s gaze,” Lispector writes. “[I]n her chest a contradiction of freedom and pleasure was being born, so intense and so mundane.”
This internal space, of aching contradiction, is Lispector’s most riveting territory. The city presses in on Virgínia and, feeling suffocated, she withdraws into herself (from which she can’t escape). But what should happen to a person who, instead of internalizing, experiences the world only at its surface? In what ways might she become empowered? These are the questions Lispector asks in The Besieged City, the novel that followed The Chandelier, through the experience of another young female character, Lucrécia, Virgínia’s ostensible opposite. Lacking an inner-life, Lucrécia has in its place an animal nature through which she confronts the world outside, as a horse eyes up the stable door.
The city here is the fictional São Geraldo, a backwater outpost in the 1920s, when the novel opens, with a market, charcoal works, trash mound, railroad, city gate, and a thousand trembling horses. A hill stands over the narrow streets of the fictional place that seems to be neither Recife, where Lispector grew up, nor Rio de Janeiro, where she came of age, or Bern, Switzerland, where she wrote the novel. (“Nobody knows where that besieged city is,” a Brazilian critic once wrote, according to Lispector biographer and translator Benjamin Moser.) Lucrécia lives in a dowdy apartment with her widowed mother, Ana, who keeps a plaintive eye on her daughter, amidst the weariness of one generation’s incomprehension of the other. Ana hopes Lucrécia will find a suitor.
Just as Lispector suggests that “everything that Lucrécia Neves could know of herself was outside her,” everything that the reader could know of São Geraldo comes from Lucrécia. The complete intimacy between the young woman and her city mirrors another work of the midcentury: Time of the Doves, by Catalan novelist Mercé Rodoreda. As in Time of the Doves—which opens with Natalia, a naive young woman at a street fair escaping the assuming clutches of a young mechanic, Quimet—Lispector places ambivalent Lucrécia next to a soldier boyfriend, Felipe, in the center of a saints day festival crowd. “Faces were appearing and disappearing. Lucrécia found herself so close to a cheek that she laughed at it,” writes Lispector. Church bells ring eleven o’clock and “the fair stalls were warping as they dripped . . . the carousel illuminating the air in twirls, the lights falling trembling.” With this, Lispector establishes a descriptive language for the city suffused with a sensory ache but that can’t overwhelm, for Lucrécia is São Geraldo and São Geraldo Lucrécia. Lispector’s greedy, visceral, and sometimes jarring prose is as well-suited to the urban landscape as to the rough ocean of the heart.
Felipe, stationed there from somewhere more modern, laughs at the small-time celebration. Prideful Lucrécia takes Felipe’s response as an affront and, like Natalia fleeing Quimet, pushes away from her date and heads home. On the way, she stops for a moment of quiet reverie with São Geraldo, as if confirming the city’s fidelity to her unique vision. “When she raised her head she decided not to forget to look at the narrowest house, the smallest shadow,” Lispector writes, “The closed shops with their rolling gates of iron. She was being gentle with all of them. I’m really touching this lamppost, she thought with more confidence. The lamppost was freezing.”
Lucrécia’s intimacy with São Geraldo—“the glory of a person was having a city,” she realizes later in the novel—is the base from which Lispector develops a notably sophisticated set of urban observations: on the different ways one experiences a provincial city in contrast to a larger, more cosmopolitan one; on tradition, technology, and modernity and urban change; on the painful dissonance between a person’s lifecycle evolution and a city’s propulsive transformation; and, ultimately, on postmodernism’s objectification of urban history. By the end of the novel, old São Geraldo has been turned into a monument of itself and incorporated into a sprawling metropolis with a new name. In this sense, the simple plot of The Besieged City isn’t quite what matters, though the quiet happy ending has much to do with Lucrécia’s ability to see the city in her own image and not as a predatory fabrication of men and their great ideas. By force of this vision, Lucrécia is indeed learning to empower herself.
“Every man seemed to promise a woman a bigger city,” Lispector notes, setting up another key urban observation: a woman—rather more internal, like Virgínia, or external, like Lucrécia—experiences the city at close range. The bigger city is precisely not what Lucrécia, alive to her own primitive reality, needs.
Rejecting Felipe and a second suitor, the taciturn Perseu, Lucrécia marries an older and wealthier man, Mateus. (Rodoreda’s characters in Time of the Doves, Mateu, a tender friend of Quimet, and Pere, an ill-fated suitor of Natalia, suggest that beyond these thematic connections she may have been influenced by The Besieged City when she wrote the novel in 1957.) Mateus moves Lucrécia to a bigger city immediately after the wedding. “She was ceremonious and happy on the threshold of the big city,” Lispector writes. “A fire truck siren was going by to announce her.” But the siren is rather a warning. If, in São Geraldo “a street was a street, a church a church, and even horses wore bells,” in the busy metropolis it isn’t clear what anything is for or who people really are, or where exactly Lucrécia fits. While this sounds like a facile anti-modern critique, Lispector’s insight is an important one about the way a person brings home to a new place, often baggage that impedes integration. Large, cold cities make room for people with nothing to lose, but Lucrécia, refusing to give up her agency, won’t let go of São Geraldo.
Natalia’s experience in Rodoreda’s Barcelona attests to the significance of Lucrécia’s insistence. Quimet’s foolish dreams amount to a kind of assault—and that’s before he becomes a soldier, and the city comes under violent attack. It’s worth noting that war, like any transformative urban intervention, is a masculine, predatory act. Under double assault, far differently from Lucrécia, Natalia can’t fathom her immense and broken city; the best she can do is carve her name on a door, a slight engraving to render her existence.
When Mateus and Lucrécia return to São Geraldo it is already something else, and no longer the city she had formed with her own gaze. It’s changing faster than any one person does and eventually, like Natalia, she comes to live in a place she can no longer grasp. São Geraldo, Lispector writes, “had been the one that left her behind.” Cities change even as we hang on to what was. But Lucrécia, who relies on a primal imagination, isn’t stuck. For her, and for Lispector, what matters isn’t exactly the city itself, but the tricky relationship between person and place. Lucrécia invents her city, which, in turn, gives her life meaning, and her imagination becomes a rather satisfying interior force.
