One of Elena Ferrante's Top 40 Books by Women G.H. a well-to-do Rio sculptress enters the
room of her maid which is as clear and white 'as in an insane asylum from which dangerous
objects have been removed'. There she sees a cockroach - black dusty prehistoric - crawling
out of the wardrobe and panicking slams the door on it. Her irresistible fascination with the
dying insect provokes a spiritual crisis in which she questions her place in the universe and
her very identity propelling her towards an act of shocking transgression. Clarice Lispector's
spare deeply disturbing yet luminous novel transforms language into something otherworldly
and is one of her most unsettling and compelling works. Clarice Lispector was a Brazilian
novelist and short story writer. Her innovation in fiction brought her international renown.
References to her literary work pervade the music and literature of Brazil and Latin America.
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 sailed to 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. Many felt she had given Brazillian literature a
unique voice in the larger context of Portuguese literature. After living variously in Italy
the UK Switzerland and the US in 1959 Lispector with her children returned to Brazil where
she wrote her most influential novels including The Passion According to G.H. She died in 1977
shortly after the publication of her final novel The Hour of the Star .
