Clarice Lispector

So James Baldwin and Toni Morrison for sure.

I think Clarice Lispector is going to be on there.

And then, oh my gosh, there's one space left.

I think, I think, um, I love Shyam Salvadori.

This is a central struggle, is the fact of human language being quite limited in its ability to convey actual realities about the world.

As a writer, and I'm sure you experience this, we are all just drawing these perimeters around concepts.

The writer Clarice Lispector, who I love, wrote once that she was trying to unite the symbol with the thing itself, and the symbol here is the language, and the thing itself is the reality.

And when it comes to this like heady concept of looking at a plant, something without a face, something without a brain, and trying to understand its alacrity and its vibrancy without reducing it to a sort of humanoid form is the struggle around using a word like intelligence or consciousness to describe a plant.

And so scientists that you just mentioned, scientists are flipping over backwards to use words that dance around that concept so that they are not drawn into this sticky debate about how much of our own human notion to drape onto plants.

Sontag, her life and times.

And he also wrote a very compelling biography of the writer Clarice Lispector.

Why This World, a biography of Clarice Lispector.

So Ben is a biographer in many ways, and that comes through in the form of the

book.

One, there were elections in Israel on Tuesday, so two days ago, which I actually want to talk about a little bit.

But there were also elections in Brazil where the result was much more encouraging.

And you also have a connection to Brazil because of your first biography, which I love so much, the Clarice Lispector book.

And I was reading, I was also reading some really nice books by, I guess I would say, yeah, like women who have had spiritual experiences, but they don't label it as such.

I think I found that really really yeah helpful to see that I'm not alone and other people have experienced something like this and specifically with similar maybe emotional intellectual temperament as me there was one book I love Clarice Lispector she's like a Brazilian author I think she's one of the best and She has a book called The Passion According to GH.

And it's about this woman.

Yeah, in this book, the narrator is this woman who goes into like one of the rooms in her apartment.

Yeah.

I think it's one of Lispector's best, if not her best.

It's certainly my favorite or I think her best of what I've read, not counting too much of life that one's definitely my favorite but passion according to gh is i think her best of what i've read but um i've talked about it before but i think it's the general gist of it is there's this woman who's fairly well off in brazil i think she's a sculptress or something like that and uh she's like going about her apartment and her maid's got the day off and she goes into the maid's room and like opens up the wardrobe There's a giant cockroach crawling out of it and she slams the door and it like cuts the cockroaches in half and she opens it to like confirm the kill.

And she sees all of the like innards of the cockroach pouring out.

There's something in the voice.

You know, I was talking the other night about about Brazilian Jews, which is where my first book was about Clarice Lispector and about going to these people's houses in Rio or in Sao Paulo.

And they're speaking a different language and they have completely different experience and everything, but they're obviously Jewish.

And I couldn't describe why, but I remember when I was young thinking, oh, this is like, these people are obviously Jewish.

The same year he began writing the New Books column at Harper's, Moser published his own first new book.

Why This World? A Biography of Clarice Lispector, whose words you'll hear at the end of today's episode.

His second book, Sondhag, A Life, won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography.

And in 2023, he published The Upside-Down World, Meetings with the Dutch Masters, which mingles memoir and art criticism while exploring Moser's adopted country, Holland.

Your new book is your fourth.

And really any one of your first three books we could have had on in the world at the time.

Biography of Clarice Lispector.

Biography of Susan Sontag that won the Pulitzer Prize.

But it all, I think, is part of the same story.

And I think the reason I tell it through people is because as a biographer of great writers, you know, Clarice Lispector and Susan Sontag and people like that that I've written about, I always think that that's a good, that biography is a good way to tell intellectual history.

Because As Sontag writes, ideas break bones.

Ideas send bombs to bomb children in tents.