The Passion According to G.H. - Clarice Lispector

6/10

I’ve resolved to keep these reviews at 1,000 words or less going forward. I’m hoping it’ll make me more disciplined, and most importantly, more readable. 

Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to G.H. is a strange novel. It is strange in the way a pitbull that plays the piano is strange: you probably haven't come across one before, and in any case, it isn't doing what it's supposed to be doing. Of the ten golden rules of fiction writing, Lispector breaks eight of them and reimagines the rest. Her writing is unconventional and unconstrained, and thus it is bold; it doesn't care what you think about it, or even whether you understand it. For those intrigued by novelty, Lispector is an excellent choice.

Reading Lispector is like navigating a fever dream with both hands tied behind your back. The novel is close to 200 pages long but consists of only one event: on page 46, the protagonist G.H. crushes a cockroach to death with the door of her wardrobe. Everything else that “happens” takes place in G.H.’s head; the novel is almost exclusively composed of her thoughts. The Passion According to G.H. lacks something that is often presumed indispensable to fiction: a plot, or even the semblance of one. 

In place of actions and interactions, we have G.H.’s inner monologue. G.H. is the novel’s only character, and she never steps foot outside her apartment. Lispector provides few explicit details about her life  -- we know she is Brazilian, we know she is relatively well-off, and we know she's an amateur sculptor. Everything else must be pieced together from her unending stream of reflections, realizations, and speculations. This is no easy task, and it is made almost impossibly difficult by Lispector’s prose, which consistently hovers between the line separating the sensible from the nonsensical. Lispector’s sentences are as baffling as they are mysterious; upon reading them, one has the unmistakable feeling that they are saying something significant, perhaps even profound, but upon closer examination, their meaning dissolves into senseless vowels and consonants, leaving you scratching your head in frustrated fascination. It’s unclear whether Lispector actually wants us to comprehend her sentences, or if she’s trying to lead us toward a broader, more amorphous “understanding” of G.H. that resembles our non-linguistic apprehension of works of art and the natural world. This feature of Lispector’s prose distinguishes The Passion According to G.H. from works such as Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground -- when the Underground Man philosophizes, his thinking always remains clear, structured, and sensible. G.H.’s musings seem penetrating upon the first reading, but utterly meaningless upon the second. Whether Lispector’s perplexing prose is “good” or “bad” is open to debate, but what cannot be denied is the sheer distinctiveness and creativity of her style. 

If there’s one thing for certain amidst the confusion and strangeness, it's that over the course of the novel G.H. experiences a profound existential crisis. We don’t know why or how it was triggered, but her thoughts, feelings, and observations are folded into it without exception. The cockroach, the room reorganized by her former maid, the view of the city from her window -- they are not as they seem, for they all represent monumental themes of existential significance: God, love, mortality, humanity, inhumanity, the nature of perception, the nature of interpretation, salvation, civilization, transcendence, and so on. We follow her as she ponders these questions, as she thinks above, below, and between them with persistence born of equal parts curiosity and desperation, and we watch her as she arrives at realizations that we do not, and cannot, fully understand. Her contemplative engagements with the structure of time and the essence of truth are meant solely for herself; she is not speaking to us, and she is certainly not seeking our approval. An obscure and obsessive poet-philosopher, her thoughts move in wide, gyrating circles that display glimmers of profundity without the corresponding clarity. Indeed, The Passion According to G.H. isn’t so much a novel as it is an extended poem -- intricate, mysterious, confusing, and beautiful. As G.H. ultimately concludes, “Life just is for me, and I don’t understand what I’m saying. And so I adore it.”

The Passion According to G.H. is a fascinating novel, but it is not without its faults. Lispector attempts to walk a fine line with her prose, but she leans towards the domain of incoherence too readily and too frequently. In the beginning, we can sit back and enjoy the strange and unsettling effect of Lispector's distinctive style, but as we continue to flip through pages of disjointed revelations and incomplete reflections, we realize that we are mostly just confused. Of course, the novel is supposed to be confusing, but in my humble opinion, Lispector went a little overboard. It’s virtually impossible to distinguish between significant and insignificant sentences, significant and insignificant chapters, for while G.H. appears to arrive at a multitude of important realizations throughout the novel, we can’t really identify them because for the most part we don’t know what she’s talking about. The prose, like the novel’s ideas and themes, is uniformly obscure, and it's hard to care about 200 pages of circular, occasionally unintelligible writing when you don’t understand the point. The novel’s plot doesn’t progress, for it has none, and we don’t know whether G.H.’s existential musings are leading us to something meaningful, for we can’t make sense of her thoughts. In my opinion, we wouldn’t miss out on much if the novel were half its current length; at the very least, it would give us more time to check out Lispector’s other works. 

The Passion According to G.H. is a bizzare, unconventional, and occasionally beautiful novel. It undoubtedly deserves credit for showing us an alternative approach to fiction writing, and its prose is unique, creative, and poetic. But Lispector should not have been so quick to dismiss narrative conventions that, while formulaic and familiar, often result in engaging, impactful, and meaningful storytelling. With all that in mind, I’m inclined to give Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to G.H. a solid 6/10.