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Many books leave you unsure of when the apex moment comes, when you transition from conflict to resolution. Lispector, after drifting in and out of surrealist musings threaded through an occasional plot point, stops and lets you know, giving you two paragraphs describing that fleeting, infinitesimal critical moment between what was and what must be:

“Between one instant and another, between past and future, the white vagueness of the interval. Empty like the distance from one minute to the next in the clock’s circle. The bottom of events rising up silent and dead, a little bit of eternity.

Just a quiet second perhaps separating one stretch of life from the next. Not even a second, she couldn’t count it in time, but long like an infinite straight line. Deep, coming from far off—a black bird, a dot growing on the horizon, drawing closer to awareness like a ball thrown from the end to the beginning. And exploding before perplexed eyes in an essence of silence. Leaving behind it the perfect interval like a single sound vibrating in the air. Be reborn later, store away the strange memory of the interval, not knowing how to mix it into life. Carry forever the small empty dot—dazed and virgin, too fleeting to allow itself to be revealed.”

Most crucially, Near to the Wild Heart is about a young woman at a crossroads, deciding to live life on her own terms, eschewing the roles she is expected to assume, insisting on the choices that are true to her core. After this critical moment we are given not a tidy resolution, but nothing more or less than a visceral experience of embracing one’s true path. The final paragraph ends:

“Throngs of warm thoughts sprouted and spread through her frightened body and what mattered about them was that they concealed a vital impulse, what mattered about them was that at the very instant of their birth there was the blind, true substance creating itself, rising up, straining at the water’s surface like an air bubble, almost breaking it . . . She noticed that she still hadn’t fallen asleep, thought she would still surely crackle on an open fire. That the long gestation of her childhood would end and from her painful immaturity her own being would burst forth, free at last, at last! No, no, I want no God, I want to be alone. And one day it will come, yes, one day the capacity as red and affirmative as it is clear and soft will come in me, one day whatever I do will be blindly surely unconsciously, standing in myself, in my truth, so entirely cast in what I do that I will be incapable of speaking, above all a day will come on which all my movement will be creation, birth, I will break all of the noes that exist in me, I will prove to myself that there is nothing to fear, that everything I am will always be where there is a woman with my beginning, I will build inside me what I am one day, with one gesture of mine my waves will rise up powerful, pure water drowning doubt, awareness, I will be strong like the soul of an animal and when I speak my words will be unthought and slow, not lightly felt, not full of yearning for humanity, not the past corrupting the future! what I say will resound fatal and whole! there will be no space in me for me to know that time, man, dimensions exist, there will be no space in me to even realize that I will be creating instant by instant, not instant by instant: always welded, because then I will live, only then will I live bigger than in my childhood, I will be as brutal and misshapen as a rock, I will be as light and vague as something felt and not understood, I will surpass myself in waves, ah, Lord, and may everything come and fall upon me, even the incomprehension of myself at certain white moments because all I have to do is comply with myself and then nothing will block my path until death-without-fear, from any struggle or rest I will rise up as strong and beautiful as a young horse.”