At the Point of the Sword, Magic

Sarah McEachern reviews Clarice Lispector’s “Covert Joy: Selected Stories.”

By Sarah McEachernApril 1, 2025

• Fiction

I READ A NEW Clarice Lispector translation every few years, but unlike other favorite authors, I find it difficult to consume multiple titles in a row. It’s better to leave a little breathing room. Not because Lispector is a difficult writer, but because every time I pick up one of her books, I find that I need to rise to the occasion of becoming a better reader to understand her. My own shortcomings are laid bare. It becomes clear I must grow up a little. Rachel Kushner suggests this in her introduction to the new collection of selected Lispector stories, Covert Joy: “While reading itself is not passive, you can relax, while she is hard at work, asking questions that are inside you, too, so that you yourself don’t have to frame them.” As I wrote for the Los Angeles Review of Books back in 2021, translating Lispector has changed the lives of her translators. But reading Lispector does as well. Her writing poses questions, but how you choose to answer them over the course of a short story collection gradually reveals more about yourself.

Covert Joy, translated by Katrina Dodson, is no exception to this Claricean effect, as they call it. Naturally, I hoarded my advance copy for weeks, not ready to begin reading, until finally I did. I felt much like the character in the titular story, a young girl borrowing books from her friend whose father owns a bookstore. She hunkers down to read one but finds herself strategically procrastinating:

I opened it, read a few wondrous lines, closed it again, wandered around the house, stalled even more by eating some bread and butter, pretended not to know where I had put the book, found it, opened it for a few seconds. I kept inventing the most contrived obstacles for that covert thing that was joy. Joy would always be covert for me. I must have already sensed it. Oh how I took my time! I was living in the clouds … There was pride and shame inside me. I was a delicate queen.

As often happens in Lispector’s writing, you realize you’re looking into a mirror: her characters and plots begin to reflect back on you. She starts to read your mind a little. Somehow, this Brazilian writer, dead since 1977, is looking a bit too deeply into you and asking just the right questions. As when you gaze at the large portrait of Lispector assembled when you arrange the New Directions editions of her novels Near to the Wild Heart (1943), The Passion According to G. H. (1964), Água Viva (1973), and A Breath of Life (1978), you realize that reading her work is like entering a staring contest you’re inevitably going to lose.

Benjamin Moser’s Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector (2009) drummed up much interest in Lispector and contributed to her resurgence in English translation, as did his role as the editor of the translation project with New Directions. Covert Joy, the 17th translation issued by the press, is part of a years-long project involving many different translators—Magdalena Edwards, Alison Entrekin, Idra Novey, Johnny Lorenz, and Stefan Tobler, along with Dodson and Moser himself—to bring Lispector’s complete works into English. It’s a robust translation project that even some of the most gifted and celebrated writers don’t have the privilege of receiving.

But perhaps the fact that a biography provided the initial kindling to her revival in English says more about us than it does about the author, or her inscrutable life. How frequently do we scan the Wikipedia pages of famous writers looking for some childhood trauma that explains their work, a cheat code to “get it” quicker? After all, understanding a writer’s life is supposed to give us a specific way of interpreting their work. To attempt this with Lispector is perhaps to narrow in on her stories about others and outsiders. Were these themes shaped by her youth as the child of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants? By her mother’s death? Or maybe by her marriage, which made her a diplomat’s wife, constantly in new places. Or perhaps by her lisp, which she had throughout her life and frequently passed off as an eccentric accent. Could it be that a simple speech impediment led to Lispector’s unique prose, which Dodson describes as “subtly disorienting […] with its slightly foreign-sounding syntax and the either too few or too many commas that disrupt the pace of reading.” Is it possible to reverse the mirror Lispector holds up to her readers to understand her stories more deeply? Or does that only create a sort of infinite regress of reflections?

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“The Smallest Woman in the World” is one of the most well-known and best-loved stories in the collection. It is, in a way, a story about an outsider. The discovery in the jungle of a pygmy woman, Little Flower, creates a maelstrom of conversations among the locals when her story reaches the newspaper. Interest in and inquiries about the tiny African woman quickly take a perverse turn. A complicated story packed into very few pages, it’s about our projections onto the idea of an outsider, the image of an anomaly. An old woman, reflecting on the news of the small native, “considered the cruel necessity of loving. She considered the malignity of our desire to be happy. Considered the ferocity with which we want to play. And how many times we will kill out of love.” Obsession, excitement, and curiosity soon give way to cruelty. All this doesn’t affect Little Flower, who remains far away, thrilled with the impending birth of her child, a tiny baby from a tiny mother. In another tale, “Love,” Ana’s day is disrupted when she notices a blind man on the tram chewing gum. Lispector writes, “The tram rumbled along the tracks and the blind man chewing gum stayed behind forever. But the damage was done.” These glimpses of otherness disrupt and throw off their witnesses’ center of balance. “A blind man chewing gum had plunged the world into dark voraciousness.”

It’s easy to try and connect these stories about outsiders to specific aspects of Lispector’s own life. Indeed, it’s too easy, not to mention boring and lazy, to try to unlock the author in this way. Her writing says differently if you pay close attention. In “Family Ties,” an elderly grandmother looks at the generations of her family who have come to celebrate her 89th birthday, and all she can think of is her revulsion at all of them. Even those to whom we belong most closely can feel like outsiders. What Lispector is writing about, across her work, is the strangeness of life: how quickly things can go from one extreme to the other, how seemingly contrasting ideas and moments are interconnected. In Kushner’s words, “Her aspiration is nothing less than to uncover the bizarre mystery of consciousness, to contemplate being while being, to apprehend life while living it.” The more (and more closely) you read Lispector, the more you see the same patterns repeated. The world isn’t broken down into digestible pieces but rather expands beyond categories until it’s clear everything is connected. The consciousness of of opposites dissolves. As Lispector writes in “The Waters of the World”: “There it is, the sea, the most unintelligible of non-human existences. And here is the woman, standing on the beach, the most unintelligible of living beings. As a human being she once posed a question about herself, becoming the most unintelligible of living beings. She and the sea.” There’s no need to simplify something complex, because as Lispector frequently points out in these stories, the simple is in fact quite complex. Yet for all the challenges her work poses, she’s a very accessible writer: her prose is as welcoming, embracing, and inviting as it is ethereal, sly, and strange.

It’s unlikely that Covert Joy will be many readers’ first experience of Lispector. Her stories were previously gathered by New Directions in a complete collection translated by Dodson and released in 2015. While this new collection shares a title with one originally published in Portuguese in 1971, the current book is not its English translation. Dodson’s afterword explains at length the arrangement and choices made for this new gathering, which pulls from multiple decades of Lispector’s career. Unlike The Complete Stories, whose contents are organized by years of publication, Covert Joy flows a bit more freely in time. Each story appears in The Complete Stories, so while nothing here is new, this collection—20 stories in all—represents, as they say, the greatest hits.

New Directions touts Covert Joy as a “pocket size” edition of Lispector’s stories, since the larger anthology runs to 640 pages. The question of where exactly the book fits in the project of translating her complete works into English remains a bit vague, even after reading Kushner’s excellent introduction and Dodson’s wonderful afterword. The Complete Stories was such a staggering accomplishment that it’s hard to see the need for a slimmer version. If one is looking for pocket-size, the short novels Água Viva or The Hour of the Star (1977) come to mind first. Still, Covert Joy makes for a fine entry point into the author’s short-form writings, and one can’t go wrong reading Lispector.

As is always the case when I read Lispector, I am compelled to reexamine all my preconceptions about what books can be and do. Lispector’s writing is always an ego check. I spend so much time thinking and writing about books, and yet I see, when reading Lispector, how much I underestimate literature, cutting it to fit the confines of my imagination rather than forcing my imagination to expand. The challenge is not consuming her work but being worthy of communion with it. With Lispector, it always becomes clear that we’ve been asking the wrong questions about literature. The only thing that matters is how we can get better at reading, in order to interact with her writing on its own terms.

Over the year, I’ve learned that the only key theme to bear in mind when reading Lispector is rebirth. Moments of reawakening and epiphany—she writes about them often. Her short stories are cocoons that turn into chrysalises over and over again. In the last story of the collection, “That’s Where I’m Going,” Lispector writes, “Where a thought expires is an idea, at the final breath of joy another joy, at the point of the sword magic—that’s where I’m going.” Lispector is most interested in transformation. Reading Lispector in translation—a metamorphosis of its own—offers one of the richest, most realized ways to encounter her writing. New Directions’ multi-tiered project is perhaps the best approach to her work, making it easier to find the core of Lispector. In “That’s Where I’m Going,” she writes, “I go, witch that I am. And I am transmuted.” Her uniquely playful prose, always full of surprise and charm, comes vibrantly and unmistakably alive in the hands of the myriad translators entrusted to bring us her words. She sounds like herself. She is always—even in her bleakest, grossest, strangest moments—delightful.

This is nowhere truer than in “The Egg and the Chicken.” What stark joy I felt when I opened the page to this story! The playful repetition of the word egg—149 times in 3,631 words—covers every page. What fun to read such an oddly spelled word over and over. No doubt, it must be a different experience in Portuguese, where egg is ovo, which feels much more elegant to me. Reading “The Egg and the Chicken,” with its delightful silliness, is a reminder of how exhilarating it was to learn to read in the first place. The effect is well described in the eponymous story, when the young girl says, “This time I didn’t even fall: the promise of the book guided me, the next day would come, the next days would later become the rest of my life, love for the world awaited me, I went skipping through the streets as usual and didn’t fall once.”

To connect these mesmerizing moments throughout the collection is itself a draw for readers, conveying the sense that there is a key that unlocks and reveals Lispector to us, harnesses the strange energy she emits. But once again, all we have is a mirror that reflects back our laziness and arrogance and lack of imagination. We need to delve much deeper into ourselves to really read Lispector the way she deserves to be read. As she tells us in “The Egg and the Chicken,” “Since it is impossible to understand, I know that if I understand it this is because I am making an error. Understanding is the proof of error. Understanding it is not the way to see it.” As we read, we try to untangle the multitude of threads she has woven together, but always we miss a stitch. The text will be the same when we reread it; the only thing that will change is ourselves.

For example, I kept noticing animals as they came up in the stories, maybe because my own cat was sick and I ended up sobbing in the vet’s office for him to be saved. I finished this review with him lying on my feet. I was attuned to how much animals offer our lives, how absolutely unfathomable it is that we have animals living in our houses—how strange and wonderful! Lispector clearly was interested in this, we see in “The Buffalo,” when a woman disgruntled in love visits the zoo to work it out. Lispector writes, “I love you, she then said with hatred to the man whose great unpunishable crime was not wanting her. I hate you, she said beseeching the buffalo’s love. Provoked at last, the enormous buffalo approached unhurriedly.” Maybe the best place to work out your troubles is indeed the zoo. Why exactly do we think we’re so different from animals? Where does this arrogance come from? Yet another ego check—they abound in Lispector’s stories.

And then there are all the chickens—in “The Egg and the Chicken,” in “A Chicken,” and in “The Foreign Legion,” which has a chick at the center of its plot. (Dodson playfully titles her afterword “The Keeper of the Egg.”) As Lispector says simply in “A Chicken,” “The chicken is a being. It’s true you couldn’t count on her for anything.” But the chicken’s three-page plight reveals so much about the strange joy of life. Pondering eggs in “The Egg and the Chicken,” the woman thinks, “The eggs crackle in the frying pan, and lost in a dream I make breakfast.” Eggs seemingly contain the world and all its strangeness, and soon she notices “white and yolk, merriment amid fighting, the day that is our salt and we are the day’s salt, living is extremely tolerable, living keeps us busy and distracts us, living makes us laugh.” Once again, how complex the simple is if you slow down to observe, how circular and interconnected ideas become. The chicken and the egg. The outsider and the family. The woman and the sea. “The egg exposes,” Lispector writes. “Whoever plunges deeper into an egg, whoever sees more than the surface of the egg, is after something else: that person is hungry.”

At the end of “Covert Joy,” the young girl says, “I was no longer a girl with a book: I was a woman with her lover.” What growth has reading Covert Joy offered me by its end? What opportunities does it offer all its readers if we’re strong enough to accept them? What Lispector is writing about, finally, is the absolute bizarreness of life—how overcomplicated we’ve made it with all our systems and labels and differences. All you really need to do is think about an egg a bit to figure it all out. Or, maybe, get lost a bit more, which is honestly more fun than figuring anything out.