I found this novel exceedingly difficult to read. Sure, I liked individual lines amid the stream-of-consciousness style of prose, such as the early line, “I thought that throbbing was being a person” (6). However, for the most part, I found it to be an unnecessarily redundant read. Point blank, it said a lot of nothing. I think Lispector could have easily condensed this character’s identity crisis into fewer pages, and this is certainly my preference as a reader and a writer, but she seems to be in love with her own voice for the full 189 pages, similar to both Proust and Aragon, whose novels I also could not connect with.

Due to the density of this particular style of prose, I wonder how the translation impacts the flow of the language. The narrator states, “Language is my human effort. […] The unsayable can only be given to me through the failure of my language. Only when the construction fails, can I obtain what it could not achieve” (186). Lispector obviously places a lot of care into not only language as a whole, but to the individual words that make it up, and I can only assume this reading would be significantly more fascinating in its original form (that I unfortunately cannot read).

This read like a long dissociative episode. In some ways, the narrator’s transformation into the roach (eg. “The roach was touching all of me […] And now I was starting to let it touch me” [86]), could translate to ones struggle in understanding their purpose. The narrator gives into the roach, into passion, and into a more forgiving version of herself (eg. “I want the adult who is more primitive and ugly and drier and more difficult” [164]). This isn’t a coming of age novel. However, it echoes themes of loss within oneself that appear in previous readings, such as Agostino and Bonjour Tristesse. In order for the narrator to reach any kind of peace, she must completely detach from her human form and rebuild from there (eg. “I who had thought that the best proof of the transmutation of me into myself would be putting the white paste of the roach into my mouth. And that that way I would draw near to whatever is…divine?” [175]). This leads her to her conclusion that “living is a goodness toward others” (177).

That said, I found it hard to trust this narrator, as she is all over the place. This is also a hard blog post to write since I’m struggling to wrap my head around any aspect of this narrative. Like, are any understandings G.H. reaches toward the end of the novel reliable ones since she’s quite obviously in the midst of a serious identity crisis? Can she be considered stable? Did anyone understand this read?