The Besieged City

Seven decades after its original publication, Clarice Lispector’s third novel-the story of a girl and the city her gaze reveals-is in English at last. Lucrecia Neves is ready to marry. Her suitors-soldierly Felipe, pensive Perseu, dependable Mateus-are attracted to her tawdry not-quite-beauty, which is of a piece with Sao Geraldo, the rough-and-ready township she inhabits. Civilization is on its way to this place, where wild horses still roam. As Lucrecia is tamed by marriage, Sao Geraldo gradually expels its horses; and as the town strives for the highest attainment it can conceive-a viaduct-it takes on the progressively more metropolitan manners that Lucrecia, with her vulgar ambitions, desires too. Yet it is precisely through this woman’s superficiality-her identification with the porcelain knickknacks in her mother’s parlor-that Clarice Lispector creates a profound and enigmatic meditation on the mystery of the thing. Written in Europe shortly after Clarice Lispector’s own marriage, The Besieged City is a proving ground for the intricate language and the radical ideas that characterize one of her century’s greatest writers-and an ironic ode to the magnetism of the material.