"The Dinner" by Clarice Lispector. (1954) - Iréne Némirovsky and Clarice Lispector My 2015 Literary Crushes

"What matters is the magnetic love she inspires in those susceptible to her. For them, Clarice is one of the great emotional experiences of their lives. But her glamour is dangerous. “Be careful with Clarice,” a friend told a reader decades ago. “It’s not literature. It’s witchcraft.” Benjamin Moser

The Complete Short Stories of Clarice Lipsector, published August, 2015, translated by Katrina Dodson, edited and introduced by Benjamin Moser 

My Posts on Iréne Némirovsky 

My Prior Posts on Clarice Lispector 

(Iréne Némirovsky 1903 to 1942).                            (Clarice Lispector 1920 to 1977)                

"But I am still a man. Whenever they betrayed or murdered me, whenever someone leaves forever, or I lost the best of what I still had, or when I found out that I am going to die—I do not eat. I am not yet this power, this structure, this ruin. I push away the plate, reject meat and its blood"  from "The Dinner" by Clarice Lispector.

So far this year I have developed two very strong literary crushes, one began on March 15 when I read the first published short story of Clarice Lispector, "The Triumph".  Just as Benjamin Moser warned,  her stories and her life have guest a spell over me, I see the witchcraft in her work.  My other crush is on Iréne Némirovsky.  I am now reading my way through her works.  There are common traits to both women.  Both were of Eastern European Jewish heritage.  Lispector's family fled in near poverty the Ukraine to escape terrible anti-Semitic programs settling in Recife in North Eastern Brazil when Lispector was very young.  Némirovsky's family fled the Kiev area of Russia after the revolution.  Her father was very rich and they moved to Paris.  Both writers made use of the language of their home country.  You can see deeply the impact of their cultural heritage from Jewish backgrounds in their work.   Both died before they should have, Lispector of ovarian cancer and Némirovsky in a German concentration camp at age forty.  I know this is selfish, but Némirovsky wrote about a novel a year and I deeply blame the Germans  for cheating me out of thirty novels.  Lispector's mother died young as a consequence of injuries sustained when she was raped in pogram in the Ukraine.  This loss had a life time impact on her.  

I have completed my first read through of The Complete Short Stories of Clarice Lispector and posted on a few of the stories.  I predicted in March on The Threshold Short Story Forum that this book would be at least the short story in translation event of the year and massive main stream print coverage has shown I was right in my prediction.  I think many short story people will count reading her stories as a very major reading life event.  I also read her novel, many consider it her masterwork, The Passion According to G. R.  Then I read Benjamin Moser's superb biography, Why This World A Biography of Clarice Lispector which I highly recommend.  

Lispector is a very "philosophical writer", Moser has stated she is the most important Jewish  writer since Kafka.  When I first read this I thought, "please spare me the literary hyperbole" but now I agree.

Moser helped me see Spinoza, the Yiddish tradition, and medieval Kabbalism in Lispector.  

 

The Dinner" reminded me a bit of Katherine Mansfield's early story "German Meat".  Lispector greatly admired the stories of Mansfield and had a deep empathy for her troubled too short life.  As the story opens our narrator is having dinner in a restaurant.  The narrator sees a man about sixty take a table, a powerful looking man of gravity.  He orders steak.  As the narrator observes him eating, he begins to feel almost nauseous.  The man is in no way inherently disgusting.  It his too fleshly embodiment and his fixation on his food that somehow revolts the narrator.  "The Dinner" is also a socially aware story, as is all her work.  The waiter knows he is the sort of man who will tip well so he is catered too in a toadying fashion.  At the close of the story the narrator tries to rise above his own nausea at his trapped in a body angst as seen in the closing lines of the story:

"But I am still a man. Whenever they betrayed or murdered me, whenever someone leaves forever, or I lost the best of what I still had, or when I found out that I am going to die—I do not eat. I am not yet this power, this structure, this ruin. I push away the plate, reject meat and its blood".