LES EYZIES-DE-TAYAC, France - In college in the 1990s, I happened upon a Brazilian writer so sensational that I was sure she must be a household name. And she was - in Curitiba or Maranhão. Outside Brazil, it seemed, nobody knew of Clarice Lispector.
My freshman year, I'd abandoned studying Chinese when our professor said it'd be 10 years before we'd be able to decipher a newspaper. I switched to Portuguese, despite zero knowledge of the language or culture.
Eventually we started reading short Brazilian works. One of these, a 1977 novella by Lispector called "The Hour of the Star," changed my life. Though its nuances were lost on me, I sensed the strange beauty in the story of a poor girl in Rio de Janeiro. The author was the book's most forceful presence, and I wanted to learn everything about her. Who was the woman who peered from the back cover like an exiled empress?
