The Chandelier

Synopsis

‘She found the best clay that one could desire: white, supple, sticky, cold … She would get a clear and tender material from which she could shape a world’

Like the clay from which she sculpts figurines as a girl, Virginia is constantly shifting and changing. From her dreamlike childhood on Quiet Farm with her adored brother Daniel, through an adulthood where the past continues to pull her back and shape her, she moves through life, grasping for the truth of existence. Illuminating Virginia’s progress through intense flashes of image, sensation and perception, The Chandelier, Lispector’s landmark second novel, is a disorienting and exhilarating portrait of one woman’s inner life.

Author

Clarice Lispector was a Brazilian novelist and short-story writer. Her innovation in fiction brought her international renown. She was born in the Ukraine in 1920, but in the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Civil War, the family fled to Romania and eventually Brazil. She published her first novel, Near to the Wildheart, in 1943, when she was just twenty-three, and the next year was awarded the Graça Aranha Prize for the best first novel. She died in 1977, shortly after the publication of her final novel, The Hour of the Star.