Near to the Wild Heart (Penguin Modern Classics)

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The title, Near To The Wild Heart Of Life, comes from a passage in the novel A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man by James Joyce:

Katrina Cowling (Bradford, UK) is an artist based in Yorkshire. She has just completed the Kenneth Armitage Sculpture Fellowship, Leeds (2021-2023) at Leeds Arts University. Katrina has a place at the Royal Academy Schools in London to study for her Postgraduate Diploma from October 2023 for three years. There was a great, still moment, with nothing inside it. She dilated her eyes, waited. Nothing came. Blank. But suddenly the day was wound up and everything spluttered to life again, the typewriter trotting, her father's cigarette smoking, theIn her solo exhibition at the Blenheim Walk Gallery, Katrina Cowling adopts a critical eye and an exploratory approach to interrogate material and metaphor in the post-industrial city. A quest for measuring the eternity and finding some sense in defining the immortality while the object of all desires remains nothing but one’s own life. A truly wild heart. Cardoso suggested a title, borrowed from James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “He was alone. He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life.” This became the book’s epigraph, which, together with the occasional use of the stream-of-consciousness method, led certain critics to describe the book as “ Joycean.” The comparison annoyed Lispector, who had not read Joyce; instead, the book bears the much more distinctive mark of Spinoza, whom she had been reading at the time she wrote it. [6] Cover art by Julia Robinson

Enjoy strange, diverting work from The Commuter on Mondays, absorbing fiction from Recommended Reading on Wednesdays, and a roundup of our best work of the week on Fridays. Personalize your subscription preferences here. Author’s Bio I got that Joana was often unhappy and happy at the same time; that she was disassociated from other people, that she was having trouble integrating her self with her body, that she had a horror of being trapped and an obsession with freedom. All of that is real to me. marriage is a goal, after I get married nothing more can happen to me. Just imagine: to have someone always at your side, never to know loneliness. - My God! - never to be by yourself, never, never. And to be a married woman, in other words, someone with her destiny traced out. Atsigulė kniūbsčia ant smėlio, rankomis užsidengusi veidą, palikusi tik mažutį plyšelį orui. Vis tamsiau, tamsiau, tada pamažu ėmė ryškėti apskritimai, raudonos dėmės, pūstašoniai virpantys burbulai, tai didėjantys, tai mažėjantys. Smėlio kruopelės graužė odą, spaudėsi į ją. Net užsimerkusi jautė, kaip greitai jūra pakrantėje susisiurbia bangas, irgi užmerktais vokais. Ir jos klusniai grįžta, delnai ištiesti, kūnas laisvas. Gera klausytis jų mūšos. Aš esu žmogus. Ir daugybė dalykų dar atsitiks. Kas? Kas nutiks, ji papasakos sau pačiai. Vis tiek niekas nesuprastų: ji ką nors pagalvodavo, bet paskui nemokėdavo lygiai taip papasakoti. Ypač neįmanoma su tais apmąstymais. Pavyzdžiui, kartais šaudavo mintis ir nustebusi ji svarstydavo: kodėl anksčiau taip nepagalvojau? (p. 47) So it seems as if Lispector more or less sleepwalked through the preparation of her book for publishing, allowing others to make all the important decisions. But when we realise that she had written the book over a very short period while working full-time as a journalist, studying for a law degree, and obeying the conventions of 1942 Brazilian society by getting formally engaged - then we are less surprised. When did she sleep, never mind make decisions about her book?has it ever occurred to you that a dot, a single dot without dimensions, is the utmost solitude? A dot cannot even count on itself, as often as not it is outside itself.” She remembered her husband, who possibly wouldn’t recognize her in this idea. She tried to remember what Otávio looked like. The minute she sensed he had left the house, however, she transformed, concentrated on herself and, as if she had merely been interrupted by him, continued slowly living the thread of her childhood, forgetting him and moving from room to room profoundly alone. From the quiet neighborhood, from the distant houses, no sounds reached her. And, free, not even she knew what she was thinking. Near to the Wild Heart is Clarice Lispector's first novel, written from March to November 1942 and published around her twenty-third birthday. The novel, written in a stream-of-consciousness style reminiscent of the English-language Modernists, centers around the childhood and early adulthood of a character named Joana, who bears strong resemblance to her author: "Madame Bovary, c'est moi", Lispector said, quoting Flaubert, when asked about the similarities. The book, particularly its revolutionary language, brought its young, unknown creator to great prominence in Brazilian letters and earned her the prestigious Graça Aranha Prize. As with most good novels that invent a set of parameters to define the use of language, to say nothing of the dazzling images that flood the reader's consciousness, Near to the Wild Heart, too, cannot be stripped down to its plot and content. Whether she's a motherless child being brought up by the absentminded father, or living at her aunt's not knowing why her father abandoned her (he's dead), or when she gets married to Otavio to escape the terror of happiness (i.e. love) that's eating her from the inside, every stage in Joanna's life is a reflection painfully embedded in the memory of things past and future, gyrating their way out of the momentary present. It is the singular continuation of the intolerable agitation of the soul which is captured in a dynamic image that ironically bespeaks a sharper state of dejection, exhaustion, and ennui just when her life's path is laid out clearly ahead of her ( Clearly? Really? Joanna seems to be asking) Che cosa si ottiene quando si è felici, dopo che si è felici che cosa succede, cosa viene? Essere felici serve a raggiungere che cosa?