The Chandelier

Virginia Woolf said that to write about the inner life, you had to find a form that could contain its actual texture — not translate it into something more orderly and presentable, but capture it directly. Clarice Lispector’s second novel, The Chandelier, published in Brazil in 1946 and only recently available in English, is one of the most radical attempts to do exactly that.

Virgínia lives on a farm with her brother Daniel, in a world saturated with sensation and half-formed thought — a world that she experiences with a completeness and an intensity that ordinary social existence cannot hold. When she moves to the city, the collision between her inner reality and external life generates a novel of extraordinary strangeness and beauty, written in prose that is unlike anything else in the literature of its time.

For readers who have encountered Lispector through The Passion According to G.H. or Complete Stories, this is the essential early work — the novel that shows her gifts fully formed from the very beginning. For new readers, it is a profound introduction to one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers. Published by Penguin Modern Classics.