![]() The connection between literature and witchcraft has long been an important part of the Clarice mythology. “Be careful with Clarice,” a friend told a reader decades ago, using the single name by which she is universally known. For them, reading Clarice Lispector is one of the great emotional experiences of their lives. What matters is the magnetic love she inspires in those susceptible to her. Today, when it no longer does, questions of artistic importance are, to a certain extent, irrelevant. Then, in 1977, it would have seemed exaggerated to say she was her country’s preëminent modern writer. Her spell has grown unceasingly since her death. But it is as much in the older sense of the word that Clarice Lispector is glamorous: as a caster of spells, literally enchanting, her nervous ghost haunting every branch of the Brazilian arts. ![]() She spent years as a fashion journalist and knew how to look the part. The legendarily beautiful Clarice Lispector, tall and blonde, clad in the outspoken sunglasses and chunky jewelry of a grande dame of midcentury Rio de Janeiro, met our current definition of glamour. PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY PAULO GURGEL VALENTEĬatholic communicants are asked at Easter, “Do you renounce the glamour of evil, and refuse to be mastered by sin?” The question preserves a conflation, now rare, of glamour and sorcery: glamour was a quality that confounds, shifts shapes, invests a thing with a mysterious aura it was, as Sir Walter Scott wrote, “the magic power of imposing on the eyesight of spectators, so that the appearance of an object shall be totally different from the reality.” The connection between literature and witchcraft has long been an important part of the Clarice mythology, which endures even now, nearly forty years after her death.
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