This book was my personal Hindenburg. At the beginning of this novel I was really intrigued Lispector’s use of language and I through exploring the contradictory nature of feelings in the modern world was really cool. Just like the Hindenburg there was a sense of majesty and aw that came along with this book. But very quickly things started taking a turn for the worse. We are faced with an author crippled by an existential dread and fear of everything. Which in itself is not bad subject matter, the world and existence is an inherently terrifying proposition in my experience. Especially in the modern age of man made horrors beyond our comprehension, but that is beside the point. The further and further I got into this novel the more I started to really dislike this writing style. I felt that the repetition and use of paradoxical phrasing really started to chafe about halfway through. A lot of it just felt unnecessary and almost started to get bland by the end of the novel. Like by the 100th page I knew that there was going to be some discussion of her fears of just existing full of contradicting statements and sentences that just in my mind diluted her work to the point where it feels almost “teenage angsty”. Like it felt like she was playing the world’s most complicated Mad Lib in which the entire message boils down to the stereotypical 9th grader that thinks nihilism makes him cool, its very much a “we live on a giant rock floating through space nothing matters” narrative. I mean maybe there is something to be said about her points but just due to the writing style I want to ridicule this book. I think this style could have worked a lot better in a much shorter novel or even in a short story with a more concise prose. All of that is not even to mention the class element of this novel. This woman’s main problem in life is that she is so well off in her penthouse that she has nothing to do. I don’t want to invalidate any mental health issues that the narrator or author might be having but for an entire novel based around a spiral of self reflection it makes it really hard to sympathize with this character. A little bit of self awareness would be cool.