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Lead book review

'She's the most important Jewish writer since Kafka!'

Clarice Lispector is revered in Brazil. Benjamin Moser's fascinating biography deserves to make her much better known here

11 January 2014

9:00 AM

11 January 2014

9:00 AM

Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector Benjamin Moser

Penguin Books, pp.479, £12.99, ISBN: 9781846147814

The Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector was a riddlesome and strange personality. Strikingly beautiful, with catlike green eyes, she died in Rio de Janeiro in 1977 at the age of only 57. Some said she wrote like Virginia Woolf (not necessarily a recommendation) and resembled Marlene Dietrich. She was ‘very, very sexy’, remembered a friend.

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