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First edition, first printing in English translation. Hard cover, 8vo, in green cloth, titles in white to the spine, in the original, unclipped pictorial dust jacket, 313 pp. CONDITION: Fine, in a Fine dust jacket. Remnants of bookstore label over the jacket barcode. (Not a remainder.) In mylar protector. **A sensitive young woman, Virginia, is raised in a middle class yet repressive household in a small Brazilian town, isolated and melancholy. Her only ally, her older brother Daniel, protects her on the one hand and yet also exposes her to dangerous and sometimes cruel acts, which they ritualistically pursue in a childhood "Shadow Society" in a contorted means to express thwarted independence and personal agency. Her only other relief is as a self-trained artist, literally peopling her small world with figures made from riverbank clay. As a young adult, she escapes to city life, but has trouble adapting to expected social norms. Disconnection to her self, and to others, is often expressed in broken interior monologues, a style of narration in which the reader is mesmerized by the momentary power of this young woman's realizations, paradoxically often expressed in a synesthesia of connected colors, emotions and sounds. Can Virginia overcome her isolation and insecurities to lead a happy life? This is the question... This was Lispector's second novel, written when she was 23 years of age in1946, and not translated into English from the Portuguese until 2018. Author CLARICE LISPECTOR, (1920-1962) has been called " the greatest living writer in Brazilian history." The author's family escaped persecution in 1922, fleeing from a Ukrainian shtetl to the far shores of Brazil. After law school in Rio, Clarice went into journalism. She began writing full-time after marriage to a diplomat. Ground-breakingly modern in form and substance, the author excels in voicing the revelations of a developing feminist consciousness, set against the macho culture in which she lived and worked. Scarce to market in hardcover. (AMJ).
Ref: CLAR 9737
$70.00