The Passion According to G.H.

The Passion According to G.H., Clarice Lispector's mystical novel of 1964, concerns a well-to-do Rio sculptress, G.H., who enters her maid's room, sees a cockroach crawling out of the wardrobe, and, panicking, slams the door — crushing the cockroach — and then watches it die. At the end of the novel, at the height of a spiritual crisis, comes the most famous and most genuinely shocking scene in Brazilian literature...

Lispector wrote that of all her works this novel was the one that "best corresponded to her demands as a writer."

"Over time, I've come to admire and even love this novel. In fact, as soon as I slammed the book shut, my understanding of G.H.'s story began to take on an almost-corporeal reality. Trying to put this into words is a slippery thing. What I was beginning to appreciate was that I could not consider Lispector's philosophical concerns for any length of time without losing my grasp on those concerns, yet I could somehow feel them, sense the substance of them in my own mind, in those deep pools of thought where language doesn't quite reach, and which words can't express." Emma Komlos-Hrobsky, Tin House

"Lispector's prose is unforgettable...still startling by the end because of Lispector's unsettling forcefulness. " The Boston Globe

"Her novels, and G.H. in particular, are filled with a sense of longing and desperation — a yawning desire for meaning itself." Sarah Gerard, BOMB

Lispector's most shocking novel.

Clarice Lispector (1925-1977), the author of such works as Near to the Wild Heart, The Hour of the Star, and The Passion According to G. H., is the internationally acclaimed novelist and short-story writer from Brazil and the subject of Benjamin Moser's magisterial biography Why This World.

Idra Novey is a poet and translator. She is a lecturer at the Creative Writing Program at Columbia University. Her work has appeared in the Paris Review, The Believer, and Ploughshares, and her collection The Next Country appeared in 2008.

Series editor Benjamin Moser, who contributes afterwords for all four of these new translations, is the author of Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, due out in paperback from Oxford University Press in May 2012. He also just completed a new translation of Lispector's The Hour of the Star.