‘Love’ by Clarice Lispector

Clarice Lispector’s electric sentences get inside me, change me. Reading Lispector is an acutely physical experience: she’s somehow able to move through thought and plug straight into feelings. Over the last few years, my most profound reading experiences have been in her company. Her novels Hour of the Star and Ågua Viva felt like blood transfusions – I came away from both books feeling simultaneously startled and renewed. Two lines from Hour of the Star, translated by Benjamin Moser, now serve as the epigraph to Open Up:

‘The facts are sonorous but between the facts there’s a whispering. It’s the whispering that astounds me.’

I’ve been taking my time with Lispector’s Complete Stories, partly because I’ve decided I’m only allowed to buy her books when I visit Foyles in London, and partly because each of her stories is like a small bomb: it takes time to recover from each blast.

I genuinely could have picked any number of her stories to share with you today. Her four-page story, ‘A Chicken’, is, I dare say, the best story you’ll ever read about a chicken. But ‘Love’ typifies the thing I admire most about Lispector’s work: here she captures something fleeting and lasting, a kind of profound emotional weather that you rarely encounter on the page, but for all its oddness – perhaps because of its oddness – feels uncannily true. ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘this is what living actually feels like . . .’

If you have some time, I recommend watching this interview with Lispector from 1977. It’s incredibly moving, especially so when you consider that 1977 is the year Lispector died.

‘I Stand Here Ironing’ by Tillie Olsen

‘I Stand Here Ironing’ is a remarkable, candid work of fiction, which, for me, feels haunted by a tone of life-(l)earned resignation. In other hands, you could come away from this kind of material feeling hopeless, but there’s something about the clear-sighted bracing honesty of Olsen’s vision, something so wise about her prose, that I came away from the story feeling like a different person to the one who went into it, as in that oft-cited quotation from Gogol’s ‘The Overcoat’:

‘and from that day forth, everything was as it were changed and appeared in a different light to him’

Reading Olsen felt like a splash of cold water across of my face: it told me to wake up and write the truth.

‘The Dinosaurs’ by Italo Calvino

This story is from Calvino’s astounding, beautiful, smart, funny, cosmic, human, gorgeous, tender, inventive, enlivening, and ultimately genius book of stories, Cosmicomics, which was published in 1965.

Like the entire collection, ‘The Dinosaurs’ is charming, disarming, and as wise as time. Reading it, I found myself suspending disbelief from the very start, and it was such a joyful suspension to give into Calvino’s voice – to allow myself to be carried with the tale as it restlessly and effortlessly invents the tracks that bring us along its course.

It’s a story about ageing, about adapting, about hiding, about surviving, about myth-making, and about emigrating and integrating. And it’s also a story about groups and belonging, about being alone and persisting, about likenesses and differences, about falling in love and connecting, and how the story of all these things is also the story of the history of the world.

Calvino is a writer who knows that you needn’t sound serious to take a subject seriously. In Open Up, I have a story called ‘Aberkariad’, a fifteen-thousand-word novella about a family of seahorses – a work of fiction I never would have embarked upon had it not been for reading Calvino. Reading Cosmicomics is pure pleasure, and what William Weaver achieves in his translation from the Italian is just ridiculous.

‘The Lover’ by Joy Williams

I first read Joy Williams’s ‘The Lover’ ten years ago. Though I’m not sure ‘read’ is quite the right word. Encountering ‘The Lover’ felt to me like entering a trance – and that’s how I feel whenever I spend time with Joy Williams’s writing, as if I’m watching or undergoing some kind of hypnosis.

In Joy Williams’s stories, sentences are incantations that pull characters across the stage, momentarily illuminating their troubled, hidden selves. The language skims away the shell of the self, so that we’re left to view those troubled parts we often try to protect and disavow: the gooey yolks which can be so frightening, perplexing, but in their own way also beautiful, and oddly human.

Joy Williams’s sentences don’t behave like other writers’ sentences. They tremor, and I must confess they leave me physically shaken. They hook into the quiet, deep channels of my blood and they don’t let go. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned I have to space out my reading of her work or otherwise I can be left feeling overwhelmed.

If you haven’t read her fiction before, I recommend you make yourself a hot drink, put yourself somewhere quiet, and take a deep breath.

‘Blackberries’ by Leslie Norris

I think ‘Blackberries’ is a quintessential short story of childhood, both lovely and sad. I first read the story fifteen years ago and was immediately delighted, on the first page, by the description of . . . but, no, I won’t say. In fact, I’m reluctant to tell you anything about the plot, because I think the story’s beauty is the way its prose gently holds you in its grasp, slowly revealing and shifting perspective and focus, and delivering you – in just five pages – to somewhere both unexpected and inevitable.

As Lorrie Moore says in her introduction to the Faber Book of Contemporary Stories about Childhood: stories about childhood are often stories about the acquisition of knowledge, about the moments when the child discovers something new about their world. In this instance, it would feel scale-tipping of me of to tell you anything that the child himself doesn’t yet know at the beginning of the story.

‘Blackberries’ is a gem of a story, and I’m sad that Leslie Norris’s fiction has fallen out of print. He’s an important Welsh writer, and I really hope his Collected Stories is reissued sometime soon.

‘Thank You’ by Alejandro Zambra

Alejandro Zambra is a Chilean poet, novelist and short-story writer. His style is agile and nimble, allowing him to get in and out of the smallest psychological nooks, whilst still spinning all his many narrative plates. He is a writer who respects the reader, who doesn’t want to bend the truth of reality in order to make his job easier.

In a Zambra story, you encounter honesty, wit, irony, actual dramatic tension, a facility to weave technology and popular culture into the story without it grating, and a narrative self-consciousness which reveals an unfaltering gaze – and which, in turn, asks you to look a little closer at the way you tell your stories. If that all sounds a little po-faced, let me backtrack and say this: spending time with Zambra is a delight.

‘Thank You’ (which appeared in Zambra’s debut collection, My Documents, translated by the genius Megan McDowell) is a wonderful story, both typical and atypical of Zambra’s work. It is harsh, rough, tender, funny, shocking, and ultimately lovely.

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This piece was originally published on the Faber website, September 2023.