magiadoreal

By  TERRENCE RAFFERTY There’s a whiff of madness in the fiction of Clarice Lispector. The “Complete Stories” of the great Brazilian writer, edited by Benjamin Moser and sensitively translated by Katrina Dodson, is a dangerous book to read quickly or casually because it’s so consistently delirious. Sentence by sentence, page by page, Lispector is exhilaratingly, arrestingly strange, but her perceptions come so fast, veer so wildly between the mundane and the metaphysical, that after a while you don’t know where you are, either in the book or in the world. “Coherence, I don’t want it anymore,” a character in one of her stories thinks. “Coherence is mutilation. I want disorder.” That character, a 37-year-old woman in melancholy flight from her husband or lover, has this revelation too: “It was a lie to say you could only have one thought at a time: She had many thoughts that intersected and were multiple.” Especially in the 1970s, in the last decade of Lispector’s life, when that...