Family Ties by Clarice Lispector. Austin. 1972. University Of Texas Press. Translated From The Portuguese By Giovanni Pontiero. 156 pages. 0292724047. Originally published in Portuguese as Lacos de Familia.

FROM THE PUBLISHER -

   Since the publication of her first novel in 1944, Clarice Lispector has been recognized as a Brazilian writer of great talent and originality. It is generally agreed among her critics, however that her best writing is in shorter fiction, where her personal style, with its brilliant flashes of insight, works more coherently. The stories in FAMILY TIES, originally published in 1960, are among her most important contribution to Brazilian fiction, They show her preoccupation with human suffering and failure, and critics have detected in them, as in all of her work, echoes of Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and the French existentialist writers Camus and Sartre. But if her stories are concerned with the metaphysical anguish that results from the sudden recognition of the human condition, which Camus called Absurdity, the reader will find that anguish treated in an original way that reveals the complexity of the experience. The characters created by Clarice Lispector cannot be described as ‘types’, even in a psychological context. They are more appropriately seen as images of different states of mind, and this applies also to her settings, the gardens and parks in ‘Love’ and ‘The Buffalo’, the urban scenes in ‘Preciousness’ and ‘The Daydreams of a Drunk Woman’, and the jungle setting of ‘The smallest Woman in the World’; all exist outside of time and space. Lispector is a writer who is not interested primarily in the individuals and their individual contexts but in the passions that dominat3e and usually defeat them. Like Sartre and Camus, she subscribes to the acts that acts alone are important - and isolation and violence become the two salient features of human experience. CONTENTS: Acknowledgements; Introduction; Daydreams of a Drunken Woman; Love; The Chicken; The Imitation of the Rose; Happy Birthday; The Smallest Woman in the World; The Dinner; Preciousness; Family Ties; The Beginnings of a Fortune; Mystery in Sao Cristovao; The Crime of the Mathematics Professor; The Buffalo.  

Born in the Ukraine in 1925, CLARICE LISPECTOR was brought up in Recife, Brazil, and then in Rio de Janeiro. After graduating from the Faculty of Law she married, and published NEAR TO THE WILD HEART. Lispector’s gifts as a novelist were early recognized, and she became one of the half-dozen irreplaceable Portuguese-language writers of this century. She died of cancer in 1977.