A Paixao Segundo G H by Clarice Lispector; ed. by Benedito Nunes.Publication Date: 1988.
Clarice Lispector’s 1964 Brazilian novel, "The Passion According to G. H.," is a powerful tale of the dangers and consequences of existential isolation. Lispector read Dostoevsky’s works in Portuguese translation during her formative years, and there are echoes here of Raskolnikov’s tortured hours of thought in his isolated St. Petersburg quarters, and consistent allusions to Dostoevsky’s study of the “raskol” or “schism” that the human mind can undergo under such circumstances. In Lispector’s novel, the protagonist is an upper middle class woman living in Rio de Janeiro, known only as G. H., who struggles with the meaningless condition of her life. Her existential angst is brought to a peak when she spots a cockroach in the dark depths of her wardrobe. As she studies it further, she notices its “black and radiant eyes, the eyes of a girl about to be married,” and in a state of frenzied delirium and goaded by murderous repulsion, G. H. severs the insect in half between the door and its frame. She then takes the oozing entrails of the cockroach, which represent for her the fundamental matter of life common to all beings, and proceeds to put them in her mouth.
Clarice Lispector was a Brazilian author of innovative short stories and novels. Born into a Jewish family in Chechelnyk, southwestern Ukraine, Lispector, along with her family, fled the suffering of the pogroms during the Russian Civil War, emigrating in 1922 to northeastern Brazil. While studying for a degree in law, Lispector published her first short stories, and gained national renown at the age of 23 with the publication of her first novel, "Near to the Wild Heart" (1943). She wrote eight more major novels, numerous collections of short stories and children’s fiction, and is considered one of Brazil’s greatest modernist writers.