| |||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £3.95
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in The Stream of Life (Emergent Literatures) for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £3.95, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Synopsis
Discusses life, time, beauty, experience, meaning, music, and art.
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
10 of 11 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
This is surely the greatest work ever written by Clarice Lispector. In The Stream of Life Clarice is interested in capturing each fleeting instant of life, as she feels that the essence of existence is hidden in the flowing of day-by-day experience, in what might seem trivial to most people whose eyes have been blinded by custom. Her sensual writing (defined by Hélène Cixous as the best example of écriture féminine) is here displayed as a flowing of 'paintings' and 'photographs' in words, which aims at recreating a wider reality than the one we are usually aware of. Throughout The Stream of Life, animals, plants (even objects) are endowed, as it were, with a new life, their everyday life being ordinarily taken for granted and disregarded. Intuition, emotions, instincts, and dreams are specially valued and opposed to cold logic, in a writing which so much recalls Virginia Woolf's style, while keeping, however, its own originality. In her Foreword to this work (which introduces this edition), Hélène Cixous declares the impossibility of "talking about" The Stream of Life: its unconventional writing escapes definitions. Rather, one should simply immerse in its stream: a must-read, which confirms Clarice Lispector as the greatest Brazilian writer of this century and one of the greatest woman writers of all times.
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
This book is fantastic, this book is intriguing, this book is a roller coaster, this book is a white knuckle ride. This book is breath taking and inspirational and will put down all feelings of 'is my work good enough?' It will give you confidence, vision and courage. Hurrah for The Stream of Life. I defaced my first copy with loads of notes and then ordered a new copy that I want to read in one sitting, because it deserves that intensity because the intensity of life in it will blow your mind. I bought this book on the strength of the reviews written and also knew about her from the author Helen Cixous, whose literature was discovered from the Nancy Spero exhibition of art at the Serpentine Gallery in London last year, 2011. One thing leads to another and it was Helene Cixous who put me onto this fantastic book. If you love writing and write and love art and reading buy it.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
4 reviews
15 of 15 people found the following review helpful
I'm Scared That I Don't Find This All That Difficult
19 Oct 2005
Format:Paperback
And that nobody has reviewed this piece for four years and I'm only the third one ever to do it. Maybe I've read too much Joyce, Cixous, Beckett, Celan, Kristeva, et al, but I am surprised to see all the reviews on this page refer to this piece's difficulty. It's ecriture feminine along the line of Beckett's _Unnamable_. What could make more sense? Either I'm irrevocably warped or I've attained to the rhapsodic state of "it" that she so effortlessly riffs on and dances around/within--spins, hums. How could such a gem be so underappreciated in America? Shame on us. That editorial review above sums up all that's wrong with the readerly sensibility of people: "this is weird, go to her more 'accessible' stuff." As if "it" has anything to do with accessibility. Let me tell you one thing: read this, hang with her, try to get in with what she's doing. You'll get a lot more "life" from this than from reading all the reader-friendly hogwash that pours out of Creative Writing programs combined in one week. Start to try and get this stuff? We got a whole lot of liberation ahead of us . . . via jouissance! "Hallelujah!" as Lispector would say. Even when I'm scared in a world that doesn't know what to do with Lispector. She wouldn't have it any other way.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
startling and beautiful; one of my favorite books
5 April 2000
Format:Paperback
This is by no means an easy read, but it is beautiful. Lispector is often compared to Joyce; her psychological landscapes and stream of consciousness writing can be likened to his. However, Lispector's writing is thoroughly Brazilian, warm and soft, feminine, dreamlike, interior, yet unafraid of starker realities at the same time. Stream of Life, Lispector's masterpiece, poses the question, "What does it mean to be at the crux of life?" In the process of asking this question, the book's sense of time and concrete reality expands. There are no real narrative boundaries... nothing to exactly grasp on to. It is because of this that this book is difficult. But as much as it is difficult, it is rewarding. It's an intriguing work, trying to explain life while at the same time be life. It begins, "It's such an hallelujah..." and there is rejoicing. it is a book rejoicing in life, wondering at it, and hungering for more of it.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
The Continuous Stream of Being
27 July 2001
Format:Paperback
Clarice Lispector's "Stream of Life" takes her experimentations with language in "The Passion According to G.H" to an even more abstract level in this novella, if anyone can define it as such. Her fluid use of symbols and language attemps at the impossible: narrating the unspeakable. From this perspective, the reader can appreciate the apparently meaningless meandering of her words and let go of trying to understand. In her own words, "Let go of understanding. To be alive far surpasses the limits of understanding." With this in mind, I was able to enjoy my reading of this work as one who lives fully, wholly present in the company of a witch who uses words to enlighten the dark depths of our pre-historical caves. Viva Clarice!
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
