Too Much of Life (Penguin Modern Classics)

A TLS Book of the Year

This exhilarating collection of non-fiction sees one of the greatest twentieth-century writers meditating on the moments that make up a life

'How did I so unwittingly transform the joy of living into the great luxury of being alive?'

Between 1967 and 1977, the internationally renowned author Clarice Lispector wrote weekly dispatches from her desk in Rio for the Jornal do Brasil. Already famous for her revolutionary, interior, metaphysical novels and short stories, in her Chronicles she turned her attention to the everyday, reshaping the material of her life into profound, touching and funny, tiny revelations.

Observing the world around her, small encounters like hearing tales of the lost loves of a taxi driver, or the bitterness lurking beneath the prettiness of an old friend, become an exposition of the currents and foibles that define our lives. Everything from the meaning of cosmonauts to the new ideas, writers and artists that populate the sparkling international world of the sixties and seventies are considered and transformed into jewels of insight, delight and devastation.

Sincere and playful, exhilarating and contemplative, Too Much of Life: Complete Chronicles opens up a new way of seeing the world.

Reviews

Too Much of Life is an extraordinary collection of fragmented, essayistic, fictive thoughts ... vast, playful and volcanic