Soulstorm.

• Author: Mujica, Barbara

Soulstorm, by Clarice Lispector (English translation by Alexis Levitin, New York: New Directions, 1989). Clarice Lispector (1925-1977) has long been considered Brazil's most important woman writer. The thirty pieces that comprise Soulstorm were originally published in Portuguse in 974 as two separate volumes--A Via Crucis do Corpo (The Stations of the Body) and Onde Estivestes de Noite (Where You Were at Night). The new English edition includes a brief introduction by Grace Paley, as well as an afterword by the translator.

These are not really stories, but fantasies, nightmares, myths and sketches that recreate a state of mind. They depict a disorderly world in which men and women are caught off guard by unexpected events or even by processess that, although perfectly natural, seem totally illogical.

True to its title, Soulstorm reveals the storms that rage in the souls of ordinary people. There is nothing exceptional about Lispector's characters. They are beauticians, secretaries, cabaret dancers, housewives. But within their souls reigns the turbulence caused by a subtle awareness of life's immutable truths. Aging, mortality, solitude, passion, fear--the primordial realties of human existence lacerate these unexpectional souls, causing constant turmoil.

Most of Lispector's characters are women, many of them in their seventies and eighties. These elderly individuals are not obsessed with death, but with life. Dona Candida Raposo, the octogenarian protagonist of "Footsteps," is so filled with the desire for pleasure that she goes to a gynecologist to find out how to deal with her problem. When she finds the solution, "silent fireworks" are the result. In "But It's Going to Rain," Maria Angelica de Andrade, aged sixty, takes a nineteen-year-old lover. Lispector explores the souls of going women and finds them filled with passion, for love--the life-force--operates as long as there is life. Yet, these are not happy tales. Lispector's elderly protagonists feel mocked by life; in their eyes, love at sixty or eighty is ridiculous and shameful. And still, to their mortification, they cannot stop loving.

What Lispector conveys so forcefully is that the aging woman--often treated in literature as a marginal being--is in essence no different from anyone else. For these women, as for Lispector's younger protagonists, love is always tinged with sadness. All these characters are caught between conflicting impulses: the desire to love and the desire to...