The Smallest Woman in the World, by Clarice Lispector


Clarice Lispector at the Wikipedia: click here

Family Ties (Laços de familia) (where we can find our short story): click here

The Smallest Woman in the World: review

The Smallest...: another review

The Smallest...: a quiz

The Smallest...: a power point and a summary / analisis

The Smallest...: a debate

 

 

Presentation, by Roser Gelabert

BIOGRAPHY:
Clarice Lispector was born in Ukraine in 1920 as Chaya Pinkhasivna Lispector in a Jewish family. It was a time of chaos, famine, and racial war. Her grandfather was murdered; her mother was raped; her father was exiled, penniless, to the other side of the world. They fled first to Moldavia and Romania and finally to Brazil in 1922, where they adapted their names to the Portuguese. Since then, Chaya received the name Clarice.
Her mother died when she was 10 years old. She continued her education and entered the Law School in Rio de Janeiro, but she followed her dream in the newsrooms, where her beauty and her brilliance made a dazzling impression. In 1940, she published her first novel “The Triumph””. Three months later his father died at 55 years old.
As a student she met her future husband, the diplomat Maury Gurgel Valente, whom she married in 1943 and whom she accompanied to many different countries, and she didn't only leave her family and country, but her job as a journalist in which she already had a reputation. For 15 years Clarice led a boring life as a perfect wife, but she never stopped writing and always missed Brazil.
On her first trip to Europe, in Naples in 1944, during the Second World War, she was a volunteer in the infirmary assisting Brazilian soldiers. There she confessed “I don't really know how to write travel letters, I really don't even know how to travel”.
In 1946, she published her second novel “O Lustre” before they settled in Bern where her first child Paulo was born.
Back to Rio de Janeiro in 1949 she returned to her journalistic activity under the pseudonym of Tereza Quadros, but in 1952 she left Brazil again moving with her husband to Washington D.C., where her second son Pedro was born. In 1954, she published the translation of her book “Near to the wild heart” into French, with a cover by Henri Matisse.
In 1959, she separated from her husband and returned to Rio de Janeiro. There she resumed her journalistic activity in order to get the necessary money to become independent. A year after, she published “Lazos de familia”, which had some success, and the next year “La manzana en la oscuridad”; in 1963 she published “The Passion according G.H.”, which is considered her masterpiece.
In 1966, the writer fell asleep with a lit cigarette, which started a fire in her room and burned much of her body. She spent months in hospital. Her right hand would never regain its mobility. This had a big impact on his state of mind and caused frequent depressions.
Clarice made many translations due to her command of Portuguese, English, French and Spanish, and Hebrew and Yiddish with some fluency. The only translation into Spanish was “Historia de los dos que soñaron” de Jorge Luís Borges in the Jornal do Brazil.
Between the late sixties and the early seventies she published children’s books, translations and adaptations of foreign works, getting great recognition.
She died in 1977, victim of ovarian cancer in Rio de Janeiro, some months after the publication of her last novel “La hora de la estrella”, at the age of 56.

STYLE:
Clarice developed a unique literary style marked by singularities and linguistic innovations. She does not adopt the normative grammar standard, the sentences are not made with coherent rigour, but with a chaotic syntactic structure. Nevertheless, they are full of beauty and freshness of artistic expression.
Her fiction focuses on the deepest regions of the unconscious, she centres her work on the individual and her most intimate afflictions, reproducing the thoughts of the characters. In this way she tried to make the readers to analyse her works on their own. Therefore, the common denominator of her texts is the idea of knowledge in itself. So, it is the spontaneity of the representation of thought of the characters what characterizes the chaos of such a literary mark.
Currently, the work of Clarice Lispector continues arousing interest, which leads her to be considered one of the most widely read and recognized Latin-American authors in the world.

THE SMALLEST WOMAN IN THE WORLD:
This story is part of a collection of thirteen short stories called “Family Ties”. It was published in 1960 after the Lispector’s permanent return to Brazil from the United States.
This short story begins in the depths of Equatorial Africa. The French explorer and hunter, Marcel Pretre, comes across a tribe of surprising small pygmies. He was even more surprised when, among the smallest of these, in the Eastern Congo, Marcel found himself facing a woman no more than forty-five centimetres tall, adult, black, silent and pregnant. “Black as a monkey” he informed the press.
He called her “Little Flower”.
Her race will soon be exterminated. Besides disease, the deadly effluvium of the water, insufficient food, the great threat to the Likoualas are the savage Bahundes that hunt them with nets and eat them.
For strategic defence they live in the highest trees. The Likoualas use only a very limited language and their members communicate primarily by gestures.
The explorer is amazed by this unique creature, considering her the rarest and most extraordinary creature on the earth because of her minute size.
A photograph of Little Flower was published in the colour supplement of the Sunday papers, life-size. She was wrapped in a cloth, her belly already very big. She had a flat nose, a black face, splay feet. She looked like a dog.
When readers of the Sunday newspaper see the photograph, they react in different ways:
A woman said “It gives me the creeps”.
A lady was upset all day, almost if she was missing something.
Little Flower made a little girl feel that “Sorrow is endless”.
A mother said to her daughter “Poor little thing! How sad she is! It’s the sadness of an animal. It isn't human sadness”.
A clever little boy had a clever idea: “She would be our toy!”
In another house they imagined her serving their table, with her big little belly!
In the meanwhile, in Africa, methodically the explorer studied the little belly of the smallest human being. It was at this moment that the smallest woman in the world began laughing warm, warm. Little Flower was enjoying life. She was experiencing the sensation of not having been eaten yet. So she was laughing. The rare thing herself felt in her breast a warmth that might be called love. She loved that sallow explorer and also the explorer’s ring and the explorer’s boots. In the jungle, love is not to be eaten, love is to find a boot pretty, love is to like the strange colour of a man who isn’t black, love is to laugh for love of a shiny ring.
The explorer tried to smile back, and then he was embarrassed. He coloured, prudishly. He was undoubtedly sour.
The explorer getting control of himself, severely recaptured the discipline of his work, and went on with his note-taking. He had learned how to understand some of the tribe’s few articulate words, and to interpret their signs. By now he could ask questions.
Little Flower answered “Yes. It’s very nice to have a tree of her own to live in.”
Marcel Pretre had some difficult moments with himself. But at least he kept busy taking notes.
“Well”, declared an old lady, folding up the newspaper decisively, “Well, as I always say: God knows what He's doing”.

COMMENTS:
In my opinion, Clarice Lispector tells the reader a beautiful story, which serves as an excuse for us to reflect on some topics.
One of them is how people around the world react to the image of “Little Flower”. Without knowledge or cause, these people express fear of what the “civilized world” doesn’t know. This image evokes highly emotional responses. Lispector calls attention to many individual reactions.
In two cases she noted the emptiness of love and silence of Little Flower.
In a home, a girl about to be married felt an ecstasy of pity: “Mamma, look at her little picture, poor little thing! Look how sad she is!” “But”, said the mother, “It’s the sadness of an animal. It isn’t human sadness”. Here we can see the sympathy and subsequent dehumanization of Little Flower.
In another house, a boy asked his mother if Little Flower would howl and if she would be their toy.
Her child’s reaction makes her have a lot of thoughts about her own feelings and the superficiality of their life.
In another house, in each member of the family was born the desire to have that tiny and indomitable thing for itself. “Imagine her serving our table”.
Meanwhile, in Africa, the explorer studied the little belly of the smallest woman in the world, and for the first time he felt sick, because for the first time she was laughing. She was enjoying life because she wasn’t being devoured. This is the secret goal of a whole life. The explorer was baffled.
She loved that sallow explorer and his ring and his boots too.
The explorer had some thoughts about the difference of the meaning of love in his world and in the humidity of the forest where love is not to be eaten.
The explorer tried to smile back, and then he was embarrassed; he coloured prudishly. He was undoubtedly sour.
Severely he recaptures the discipline of his work. He has learned how understand some of the tribe’s few articulate words. By now he could ask questions.
Little Flower's answer “Yes. That is very nice to have a tree of her own to live in” maybe could be interpreted as an invitation from her to the explorer… At the end of the story, there is a lady who declared “God knows what He’s doing”.
In my opinion, with this end, Lispector wanted to express that everything in our life can serve to reflect and to improve in our feelings.

 Flores Man at the Wikipedia: click here

 
 
Kivu Island
Kivu Island

 
 
 ISSUES
 
In the story, there is the expression “a box within a box”. It’s something like the Russian dolls called matryoshkas. There are some stories like matryoshkas, e.g., The French Lieutenant’s Woman, by John Fowles, where the story situated in the 19th century gets mixed with the story of the two protagonists situated in the 20thcentury. In our case, there is a big story, a “container story”, and then some smaller stories inside the big one.

👉Do you remember other novels or narratives with a similar struture?

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👉How much is it, in centimetres, seventeen and three-quarters inches?

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The story is about a pigmy woman. Pigmies exist now, and they live in the Congo basin. But some years ago an ancient race of small people was discovered in Indonesia, in Flores Island. They don’t exist anymore, but this people coexisted for a long period of time with the humans as we know them now. Some people say some specimens of this race were hiding in the jungle of their island... in the last century! But our question is the “otherness”, the fact that, when we meet someone different from us, we become some more aware of our identity. And there is a debate about what is better for us people: to try to avoid or reject what is different from us, or to try to get mixed with this alterity.

👉What is your opinion about this?

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The explorer called the woman “Little Flower”. This is a kind of compliment, but it’s also a evidence that somebody have power upon another somebody. The explorer acts as if he was God: he gives names to unknown things.

👉Why didn’t he ask her name? Why didn’t he introduce himself?

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In the story, two tribes are mentioned, the Likoualas, whom Little Flower belongs to, and the Bahundes, that hunt, kill and eat Likoualas.

👉But, which is the worst danger for the Likoualas, the Bahundes or the explorer? That is: is the ecosystem as good as we usually think for some species?

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The Bahundes are cannibals. Do you think that when we eat meat we are a kind of cannibals? There’s a sentence in the story that begins “The sadness of an animal...” Can an animal be sad as a human being? Animalists say animals have feelings, and so we cannot kill or eat them.

👉But, when in a documentary you see a frog being eaten by a snake, can you see horror on the frog's face?

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The story talks about a woman belonging to a tribe, but no other member of the tribe appears in the tale, not a man, not even the woman’s child’s father, not even the chief of the tribe.

👉Why do you think is that?

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In “The Smallest...” we have again (remember Conrad) a western man that compares the non western being with a dog.

👉Do you think this comparison is a good one (the dog is the man’s best friend) or, the other way round, a negative one (it compares a person with an animal)?

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Another topic we mentioned when we talked about Zweig (his novel The Heart’s Impatience) is the “perverted tenderness”, the confusion between love and pity. I think it happens something similar with philanthropy.

👉Is philanthropy a positive useful thing or a perverted one?

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“The woman [the one who saw the picture in the paper] was upset all day, almost as she was missing something. Besides, it was spring and there was a dangerous leniency in the air.”

“And she had a horror of her own soul that, more than her body, had engendered that being, adept at life and happiness. [...] ‘I’m going to buy him a new suit’, she decided.”

You can see here a mixture of deep thoughts combined with ordinary observations or common desires. This is a reminiscence of the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, the existentialism: we are transcendental beings, but, notwithstanding this, we have to eat, breathe, walk..., the commonest of actions, because we live in the material world. We are free spirits in a world that isn’t free, that is compact.  They say Clarice Lispector was an existentialist writer.

👉Can you tell us a bit more about this existentialist thinking?

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The woman loved the explorer, loved his boots, his ring..., and because these material objects, she loved him from head to toes, body and soul.

👉What is love, real love? Can we say "love = love + its circumstances"?

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SOME VOCABULARY

lukewarm, outdoing, wavered, insane, splay, leniency, enthralling, sallow


 

The Lagoon, by Joseph Conrad


Joseph Conrad at the Wikipedia: click here

The Lagoon at the Wikipedia: click here

The Lagoon: audiobook on youtube

The Lagoon: review

The Lagoon: analisis






Presentation, by Natalia Huertas

Biography

Jozef Teodor Konrad Nałęcz-Korzeniowski was born on December 3, 1857, in Berdychiv, Podolia, back then Poland occupied by the Russians, now Ukraine.

His father was dedicated to writing and translating Shakespeare and Victor Hugo and at the same time was a political activist in the service of the Polish nationalist movement, for this reason he suffered a sentence to forced labour in Siberia. His mother died of tuberculosis during the years of exile and four years later his father died.

At the age of 17 he travelled to Italy and then to Marseille where he enlisted as a sailor aboard the Mont Blanc ship. By this experience, he found his passion for adventure, travel, the marine world and boats.

In 1878, he moved to England to escape military conscription, there he worked as a crewman on ships iin the ports of Lowestof and Newcastle, he spended his free time reading Shakespeare and because of that at the age of 21 years he mastered English and writing all his work in this language. 

After obtaining English citizenship, he changed his name to Joseph Conrad.

When he was 40, he settled in an English country house and wrote regularly. What he had experienced until then had given him enough material to write several biographies. He has been one of the best English writers of all time.

But he was not loved by everyone, in 1975 a Nigerian writer, Chinua Achebe called him a racist; he said that his book Heart of Darkness was an offensive book full of degrading stereotypes about Africa and Africans.

He died in Bishopsbourne, England, on August 3, 1924, at the age of 66.

The Story

This story is full of symbolisms and reflects the reality of the world we live, a constant struggle of our thoughts and the moral ambiguity that exists when we have to make transcendental decisions for our life.

In this story the author reflects the conflict he felt between, reality and illusion, betrayal and guilt, and guilt versus honour and heroism.

-  Reality versus illusion: through a narrator we can see the difference between what characters believe themselves and what they actually are.

-  Betrayal versus guilt: when Arsat's brother had fallen and Arsat didn't help him, he ran away with his love, and because of that his brother was murdered.

-  Guilt versus honour and heroism: after Arsat's love died, he decided to get some kind of revenge, this way he could regain his honour and his loyalty to his brother.

Literary Figure

Conrad said that his aspiration had always been "a meticulous narration of the truth of thoughts and deeds"

In this story I found many words that define a contrast

-  black / white

-  heroism / cowardice

-  reality / illusion

      - light / darkness 

which is a typical characteristic in the stories that Conrad has written.

Conrad's descriptions of the high seas, the Malay Archipelago, and South America were based on his experiences and observations. For everything else that he couldn't delve into, he used literary sources.

In his novels he represented singular universes, he strove to create a sense of place, his characters often represented his destiny in isolated circumstances.

Fun Facts

One of the most watched films of the last decades, Apocalypse Now, is based on Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness.

In 1995, a series based on the life of Joseph Conrad was broadcast on Spanish television.
«...TVE-1, the first channel of TVE, transmits from today the series El rajá de los mares, which narrates the life of one of the best English writers, Joseph Conrad....» El País. (August 31, 1995)

 

THEMES / QUESTIONS

Characters, plot, scenery.

Do you think possible writing well in a language that isn't your mother tongue?

Exiled writers: to write about your country, is it better to be an exile?

Some say that all the literary works are autobiographical. Is it possible to write something completely non-autobiographical?

According to Sebald, Conrad said he felt his only presence in the Congo was already a crime. Do you feel guilty of the world problems? That is, if you are a man, do you feel guilty of injustices  against women? If you are white, do you feel guilty of injustices against black people?

Is it possible a friendship between opressors and opressed ones?

Is exotism a kind of colonialism?

In some of Conrad books, the protagonist tries to get redemption for some past guilty deeds doing some kind of heroicity. Do you think is it possible to redeem completely our past mistakes? How?


VOCABULARY

wake, astern, pile, demeanor, squat, gnaw, sow, ember, withstand, mournful, leap, fitful, wreath, ripple

 

SEBALD ON  CONRAD
 

W.G. Sebald, in his book The Rings of Saturn, writes a chapter about a period of Conrad’s life and about the singular meeting of Joseph Conrad and Roger Casement. Roger Casement was a British diplomat and an Irish conspirator who worked for the independence of Ireland. There’s a novel by Vargas Llosa, El sueño del celta, where he relates the life of this fighter for the freedom of his country. Well, it’s curious to see how we can understand better situations that don’t have any effect on us or that are very far away from us than situations that are nearer in space or time. But, to go back to our topic: Casement denounced the atrocities committed by the Belgian companies and colons under the rule of king Leopold II during the Congo conquest, and Conrad meet Casement in his travel up the river Congo at the end of the 19th century, and they agreed completely about this point. There’s a book about this horror: El fantasma del rey Leopoldo. Now, when you consider why Belgium or other countries became all of a sudden very rich, you have to suspect...

In his book, Sebald explains that Conrad had to live a very adventurous life. When he was five years old, his father left his business to dedicate entirely to the cause of the independence of Poland, at this moment under the Russian Empire. So, very young already, he saw conspirators, secret conversations, mysterious people, intellectuals, poets, writers trying to overthrow a foreign government imposed upon their country. In this period, the supporters of the nationalist party wore black clothes (that was forbidden by the tsar) as a sign of mourning for the repressed people. In Ireland, in the past, the British government also forbade the green colour. And you know already about yellow. But Conrad’s father (a writer, poet and translator) was arrested and exiled to a very cold town. In consequence of the conditions of this exile, his mother died (she was 32) and four years later his father (he was 49). So Conrad was an early orphan and lived under the tuition of his uncle. However, he got a very good education in languages (e.g. French) and sciences.

When he was 17 he expressed his desire to go to sea, to be a seaman. This was the most extraordinary calling for a member of the Polish gentry and for somebody who had never seen the sea. So she went to Marseilles and worked as a sailor. But, when he wasn’t at sea, he stayed at Marseilles and meet very peculiar people: bohemians, adventures, etc., and... Spanish Legitimists! There were machinations, conspirators, illegal trade, smuggling, etc. Conrad was involved in many of these things and even had an affair with a woman called Doña Rita, an ex-goat shepherd from the mountains of Catalonia, or perhaps Paula, an ex-goose girl from Hungary, (at the present we still ignore if she was the same person); she was Prince Don Carlos’s lover. At the crisis of this love affair, in 1877, Conrad was shot by a rival, or shot himself, in the chest, but he survived.

He went aboard again, now to Constantinople, and then to England, where he lived and learn English for 12 years. At this moment he went back to Poland to visit his family and there he applied for a job with the Société Anonyme Belgue pour le Commerce du Haut Congo. They offered the command of a steamer to go up the Congo River. At the time the Congo was a vast unmapped land. The Société established there a slavery system of work where 500.000 people died every year for exhaustion and cruelties; however, in 10 years, the value of the company shares was ten times higher.

Conrad realized then that, by his mere presence in the Congo, he was guilty of that horror.

After some months, he went back to Europe completely down because of what he had witnessed.