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 …
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Also at mastodon.social/@alembic
Mathematician & civil servant seeking drops of truth, beauty, & compassion distilled in the human alembic .
Avid reader. Love to explore the human condition through both fiction and nonfiction. Genres of interest: fiction (classics to modern), language, history, foreign affairs, math/science/technology.
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alembic rated Thunder at Twilight: 2 stars

Thunder at Twilight by Frederic Morton
My nonfiction work A Nervous Splendor: Vienna 1888/1889 is an account of the months before and after the suicide of …
alembic rated We Have Always Lived in the Castle: 5 stars

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
Shirley Jackson’s beloved gothic tale of a peculiar girl named Merricat and her family’s dark secret
Taking readers deep into …
alembic rated Black dogs: 5 stars

Black dogs by Ian McEwan
In 1946, June and Bernard set off on their honeymoon. Fired by their ideals and passion for one another, they …
alembic rated Love After Love: 5 stars

Love After Love by Ingrid Persaud
Meet the Ramdin-Chetan family: forged through loneliness, broken by secrets, saved by love.
Irrepressible Betty Ramdin, her shy son Solo …
alembic reviewed Near To The Wildheart by Clarice Lispector
Review of 'Near To The Wildheart' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
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.”
alembic rated Who Killed My Father: 3 stars
alembic rated A Murder of Quality: 5 stars

A Murder of Quality by John le Carré
A Murder of Quality is the second novel by John le Carré, published in 1962. It features George Smiley, the …
alembic rated Remains of the Day: 5 stars

Kazuo Ishiguro: Remains of the Day (2010, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group)
Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
In the summer of 1956, Stevens, the ageing butler of Darlington Hall, embarks on a leisurely holiday that will take …

Germany by Neil MacGregor
"Germany is unlike any other country in the world. But how much do we really know about it, and how …
alembic rated The Midnight Library: 2 stars
alembic rated The story of the lost child: 5 stars

The story of the lost child by Elena Ferrante (Neapolitan novels -- book four)
alembic rated Call For The Dead: 3 stars

Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
In a country teetering on the brink of civil war, two young people meet—sensual, fiercely independent Nadia and gentle, restrained …