The Besieged City Clarice Lispector Johnny Lorenz Translation by Clarice Lispector, Johnny Lorenz (translation), Benjamin Moser (editor) 9780811226721, 0811226727 instant download after payment.

The city of São Geraldo eases into the twentieth century, gradually replacing horses with automobiles & small-town sleepiness with urban bustle. Not dystopia but progress, so it seems. But as São Geraldo becomes all asphalt, noise, & scaffolding, the city molds Lucrécia into what she cannot bear to be: a cog in the machine, or rather, oil for the men who build & constitute the growing capitalist machine. As Lispector describes with characteristic obliqueness, Lucrécia understands much more than she realizes: she intuits her damnation to a life of ornamental thinghood. Trapped within the trinket that São Geraldo wants her to be is the animal she is at heart: the wild horse for whom “progress” has no place. — Mandy-Suzanne Wong, Electric Literature

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7 decades after its original publication, Clarice Lispector’s 3rd novel—the story of a girl & the city her gaze reveals—is in English at last.

Lucrécia Neves is ready to marry.

Her suitors—soldierly Felipe, pensive Perseu, dependable Mateus—are attracted to her tawdry not-quite-beauty, which is of a piece with São Geraldo, the rough-&-ready township she inhabits.

Civilization is on its way to this place, where wild horses still roam. As Lucrécia is tamed by marriage, São Geraldo gradually expels its horses; & as the town strives for the highest attainment it can conceive—a viaduct—it takes on the progressively more metropolitan manners that Lucrécia, with her vulgar ambitions, desires too. Yet it is precisely through this woman’s superficiality—her identification with the porcelain knickknacks in her mother’s parlor—that Clarice Lispector creates a profound & enigmatic meditation on “the mystery of the thing.”

Written in Europe shortly after Clarice Lispector’s own marriage, The Besieged City is a proving ground for the intricate language & the radical ideas that characterize one of her century’s greatest writers—& an ironic ode to the magnetism of the material.