Passion According to G.H.

The Passion According to G.H., Clarice Lispector’s mystical novel of 1964, concerns a well-to-do Rio sculptress, G.H., who enters her maid’s room, sees a cockroach crawling out of the wardrobe, and, panicking, slams the door—crushing the cockroach—and then watches it die. At the end of the novel, at the height of a spiritual crisis, comes the most famous and most genuinely shocking scene in Brazilian literature… Lispector wrote that of all her works this novel was the one that “best corresponded to her demands as a writer.”

"She is quite a thing to discover indeed.", "[Lispector] left behind an astounding body of work that has no real corollary inside literature or outside it.", "Her images dazzle even when her meaning is most obscure, and when she is writing of what she despises she is lucidity itself.", "Over time, I’ve come to admire and even love this novel. In fact, as soon as I slammed the book shut, my understanding of G.H.’s story began to take on an almost-corporeal reality. Trying to put this into words is a slippery thing. What I was beginning to appreciate was that I could not consider Lispector’s philosophical concerns for any length of time without losing my grasp on those concerns, yet I could somehow feel them, sense the substance of them in my own mind, in those deep pools of thought where language doesn’t quite reach, and which words can’t express.", "Lispector's prose is unforgettable... still startling by the end because of Lispector's unsettling forcefulness."

Clarice Lispector (1920–1977), the greatest Brazilian writer of the twentieth century, has been called “astounding” (Rachel Kushner), “a penetrating genius” (Donna Seaman, Booklist), and “one of the twentieth century’s most mysterious writers” (Orhan Pamuk). Caetano Veloso is one of Brazil's foremost musicians. Idra Novey is the award-winning author of the novels Those Who Knew and Ways to Disappear. She teaches fiction in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University.