The Woman Who Killed the Fish [Hardcover]

That woman who killed the fish unfortunately is me, begins the title story, but if it were my fault, Id own up to you, since I dont lie to boys and girls. I only lie sometimes to a certain type of grownup because theres no other way. Enumerating all the animals shes lovedcats, dogs, lizards, chickens, monkeysClarice finally asks: Do you forgive me? Lispector should be on the shelf with Kafka and Joyce. Betterthan Borges. Readers will delight in this short collection of luminous, laugh-out-loud stories from the late Brazilian cult writer Lispector&Though the author wrote these stories for her son when he was a child, and they often contain magic and lack in explanations, their small delights nonetheless rank high among Lispectors impressive body of work. In between the lines of these spellbinding worlds, she offers indelible glimpses of the way people live and dream. Even amid the silliest of scenarios are glimmers of the beauty of the everyday: Thats how life went on. Gently, gently. This is one to savor.? Bought pets, animals must either conform to our anthropomorphic lens or, as uninvited natural creatures, remain too repellent to merit our sympathy. The title storys sly narrator implicates both herself and the reader, by justifying the fatal neglect of her sons fish on her all-consuming work as a fiction writer. A writer of formidable modernist pedigree, it is something of a relief to find her working in a chatty, mischievous mode and concerned with that most storybook of subjects, the intimate life of animals. The Brazilian writers work has had a recent public resurgence; we have been wowed as we discover or rediscover her writing by her seemingly pragmatic approach to the page, and by her characters, who appear confident in themselves and their thoughts even though, perhaps, they really arent.