Near to the Wild Heart (Perto do Coracao Selvagem).

• Author: Mujica, Barbara

Brazilian author Clarice Lispector, who died in 1977, was not only a leading novelist of her generation but also a precursor of today's feminist writers. Originally published in 1944, Near to the Wild Heart, whose title is a line from James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, was Lispector's first novel. Giovanni Pontiero's translation makes it available for the first time to North American audiences.

Written when the author was only nineteen years old, Near to the Wild Heart explores questions of identity, sex roles, and societal pressures. Joana, the book's protagonist, is a perceptive young woman in search of an authentic existence. The first part of the novel alternates between images of the child and the adult Joana, a middle-class married woman on the brink of rebellion.

Raised by her father, the little girl Joana is often left to amuse herself. Even as a child she is given more to heavy thinking than to frivolous games, and the simplest activities bring her face to face with the stark realities of life and death. Thus, looking out the window at her neighbor's chickens, "she knew that some worm or other lay squirming before being devoured by the hen that humans were going to eat." After her father's death, Juana is sent to the home of her aunt, whose theatrical displays of affection the little girl rebuffs. Unwilling to play the appreciative, loving niece, Joana provokes her aunt's wrath and is shipped off to boarding school. Her first infatuation is with a teacher, who at first seems fascinating, but whom she later describes as nothing but "a fat old man sitting in the sun."

The second part of the novel portrays Joana as a reflective woman trapped in a conventional and unsatisfying marriage. At first attracted to certain enigmatic qualities she thought she perceived in her husband Otavio, Joana soon tires of his weakness and hypocrisy, and of the mundane routine he tries to impose. Put off by Joana's coldness, Otavio seeks solace in the arms--and bed-- of his former fiancee, who becomes pregnant with his child. Looking back on her marriage, Joana begins to see it as a betrayal of self and determines to seek freedom, regardless of the consequences. She...