THE APPLE IN THE DARK

by Clarice Lispector ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 22, 1967

Clarice Lispector is one of Brazil's more interesting, inventive younger novelists, highly conscious of the modern European movements, both in thought and style. Elements of Unamuno's religious meditations, Lawrence's moody sexual parables (particularly The Fox). and Kazantzakis' amorphous primitivism can be traced in her strange and puzzling drama of salvation, The Apple in the Dark. There is also a good deal of the drawn out introspective atmosphere of the nouveau roman, including unfortunate attempts at reproducing descriptive states of consciousness in the literary method borrowed from phenomenology. These formidable influences noted, it must be said that Miss Lispector's novel is overblown, overambitious, and largely heavy going. The hero, Martim, is another fashionable hunted soul in flight from a crime of passion (he shot his presumably adulterous wife) and from the absence of God in our poor world. In the backwoods he undergoes exacerbating relations with the sensual Ermelinda and the repressed Vitoria while the examination of conscience unwinds into the wee existential hours. The translation, by the man who scored with Cortazar, is flat.

Pub Date: May 22, 1967

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1967

Categories: FICTION