An Apprenticeship
ALSO BY CLARICE LISPECTOR
AVAILABLE FROM NEW DIRECTIONS
Água Viva
The Besieged City
A Breath of Life
The Chandelier
The Complete Stories
The Foreign Legion
The Hour of the Star
Near to the Wild Heart
The Passion According to G. H.
Selected Crônicas
Soulstorm
Copyright © 1969 by the Heirs of Clarice Lispector
Translation copyright © 2021 by Stefan Tobler
Afterword copyright ©2021 by Sheila Heti
Originally published as Uma aprendizagem ou o livro dos prazeres.
Published by arrangement with the Heirs of Clarice Lispector
and Agencia Literaria Carmen Balcells, Barcelona.
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
First published clothbound by New Directions in 2021
Manufactured in the United States of America
Design by Erik Rieselbach
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lispector, Clarice, author. | Tobler, Stefan, 1974– translator. |
Heti, Sheila, 1976– writer of afterword. | Moser, Benjamin, editor.
Title: An apprenticeship, or, The book of pleasures / Clarice Lispector ;
translated from the Portuguese by Stefan Tobler ;
afterword by Sheila Heti ; edited by Benjamin Moser.
Other titles: Aprendizagem. English | Book of pleasures
Description: First edition. | New York : New Directions, 2021.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020043515 | ISBN 9780811230612 (hardcover) |
ISBN 9780811230674 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Man-woman relationships—Fiction. |
Psychological fiction.
Classification: LCC PQ9697.L585 A8713 2021 | DDC 869.3/42—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020043515
New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin
by New Directions Publishing Corporation
80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011
Contents
Note by Clarice Lispector
AN APPRENTICESHIP
Afterword by Sheila Heti
Landmarks
Cover
Note
This book demanded a greater liberty that I was afraid to give. It is far above me. Humbly I tried to write it. I am stronger than I.
C.L.
the origin of spring or the necessary death in the middle of the day
, being so busy, she’d just come from the grocery shopping that the maid had rushed because she was shirking more every day, though she only came in to get lunch and dinner ready, she’d dealt with a few things on the phone, including one awfully difficult call to the plumber, she’d gone to the kitchen to put away the groceries and place the apples, which were her best food, in the fruit bowl, despite not knowing how to arrange fruit, but Ulisses had hinted at the future possibility of for example making the fruit bowl look pretty, saw what the maid had left for dinner before leaving, because lunch had been terrible, meanwhile she’d noticed that the small terrace which was a perk of her ground-floor apartment needed to be washed, got a call inviting her to a charity cocktail party for something she hadn’t quite understood but which was related to her primary school, thank God it was the holidays, gone to her wardrobe to choose a dress that would make her extremely attractive for the meeting with Ulisses who’d already said that she had no fashion sense, remembered that as it was Saturday he’d have more time because he wasn’t teaching at the University’s summer school on Saturdays, thought about what he was becoming for her, about what he seemed to want her to know, supposed that he was just wanting her to live without pain, he’d once said that he wanted, when someone asked her name, for her not to say “Lóri” but to be able to reply “my name is I,” since your name, he’d said, is an I, wondered if the black-and-white dress would do,
then from the very womb, like a distant quivering in the earth that hardly knew itself to be a sign of the earthquake, from the uterus, from the tensed heart came the gigantic tremor of a powerful, shaking pain, from the whole body a shaking — and with subtle grimaces of face and of body at last with the difficulty of an oil ripping open the ground — came at last the great dry sob, a wordless sob without any sound even for herself, the one she hadn’t suspected, the one she’d never wanted and hadn’t foreseen — rattled like the strong tree that is more deeply shaken than the fragile tree — at last pipes and veins were burst, then
she sat down to rest and was soon pretending that she was a blue woman because the dusk later on might be blue, pretends she’s spinning sensations with threads of gold, pretends that childhood is today and silver-plated with toys, pretends that a vein hadn’t opened and pretends that from it in whitest silence scarlet blood isn’t pouring, and that she isn’t pale as death but this she was pretending as if it really were true, amidst the pretending she needed to speak the truth of an opaque stone so it could contrast with the glinting green pretending, pretends that she loves and is loved, pretends that she doesn’t need to die of longing, pretends that she’s lying in the transparent palm of the hand of God, not Lóri but her secret name that for the time being she still can’t enjoy, pretends she’s alive and not dying since in the end living was no more than getting ever closer to death, pretends she doesn’t drop her arms in confusion when the threads of gold she’s been spinning get tangled and she doesn’t know how to undo the fine cold thread, pretends she’s clever enough to undo the knots of ship’s rope that were binding her wrists, pretends she has a basket of pearls just in order to look at the color of the moon since she is lunar, pretends that she closes her eyes and beloved beings appear when she opens her eyes moist with gratitude, pretends that everything she has isn’t pretend, pretends that
