Clarice Lispector Entrevista, a new collection of interviews conducted by the enigmatic Brazilian writer, edited and prefaced by Professor Claire Williams, has just been published by Rio-based Editora Rocco.
Prof Williams said,
‘Many of Clarice Lispector’s readers are unaware that she started out as a journalist, in the early 1940s, before publishing a début novel that astonished the critics and proceeding to become Brazil’s best-known and loved, and most-translated woman writer. In the late 1960s she was invited to conduct a series of interviews for the glossy weekly magazine Manchete. She put her own twist on the interview format, just as she did in every genre in which she worked. The editors let her write about people she knew (or wanted to know) from the worlds of the arts, science, sports, music and literature, but she was also required to engage with less exciting prospects, such as politicians and – even worse, for Lispector – politicians’ wives. Most of her interviews were not simple Q&As, but rather proper conversations, with input from both participants. She challenged them with philosophical questions like ‘what is love?’ or, ‘do you like living dangerously, like me?’ In some of the encounters, though, Lispector’s dislike for her subject is clear from her short, sarcastic comments.’
The book brings together 83 interviews, 35 for the first time since they came out in the press. Prof Williams has been working on the interviews since she came across them in the archives in Rio de Janeiro in 1996. They are neither literature nor literary, unlike Lispector’s highly celebrated fiction and newspaper articles. Still the interviews provide biographical information about her and her subjects, and outline a ‘Who’s Who’ of celebrity culture in Rio in the 1960s. Although they were big names at the time the interviews were first published, many of the interviewees are unknown today outside Brazil. Nevertheless, international audiences may have heard of the musicians Tom Jobim and Vinícius de Morais, the conductor Isaac Karabtchevsky, the authors Nélida Piñón and Jorge Amado and the football coaches Zagallo and João Saldanha.
About Prof Williams
Prof Claire Williams has been researching Lispector’s life and works for thirty years. The author’s short stories are among the first texts students of Portuguese study at Oxford, which is home to the only independent department of Portuguese in the UK. Prof Williams joined Oxford in 2009 as Fellow and Tutor in Portuguese at St Peter’s and Professor of Brazilian Literature and Culture in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages. She teaches Modern Literature from the Portuguese-speaking world, Brazilian Cinema and Contemporary Brazilian Literature. Her research focuses on women’s writing and minority writing from the Lusophone world. She is interested in women’s life writing (especially biography), travel writing and translation. Other recent publications are the co-edited After Clarice: Reading Lispector’s Legacy in the Twenty-First Century (Legenda/MHRA, 2022) and a volume of biographical texts by Portuguese writer Maria Ondina Braga (1923-2003), Biografias no Feminino (Imprensa Nacional, 2023).
To see, read and hear more from Prof Williams on her recent work on Clarice Lispector, you can explore the following resources: