Zeno's Paradise
On Clarice Lispector's "The Apple in the Dark" (translated by Benjamin Moser)
With some rare exceptions, every author has some weaker novels. Early novels where they’re still figuring out the formula, thought experiments that don’t work, missteps from a bum couple years, or even a bum couple of decades. They might not even be bad, but they’re just a cut below, and your favorite authors are the ones whose fifth and sixth best books you’d defend to the death. Point is, it happens. When a publisher starts releasing translations of a long-dead author, though, they can kind of select around those lesser ones with the benefit of hindsight, picking out the best of the best and leaving the rest… till they think they can make a buck or two off the rest. After the success of the translations of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 and The Savage Detectives, English readers have been ‘treated’ to a steady drip of new Bolaños every year or so with increasingly diminishing returns — some of them aren’t even finished novels, let alone good.1 After Magda Szabo’s The Door was a bestseller, we’ve started to slowly get the rest of her oeuvre — no misses yet, but one could be just around the corner. Clarice Lispector, the Brazilian author whose English-language popularity exploded in the last 10 years or so, has also gotten this particular treatment, with a new Lispector translation being released almost yearly, like clockwork. Her 1961 novel The Apple in the Dark is the last to be re-translated and re-released by New Directions in their Lispector series2, and you can kind of tell why they dragged their feet on it — it’s something of a mess, turgid and scrambled where her best writing is concentrated and direct. The Apple in the Dark is, broadly, a novel about people who are receiving a kind of metaphysical knowledge that they don’t have the intelligence to describe in words, rendered by someone who also doesn’t have the words to describe it. The most persistent feature of it is how often it keeps you at arm’s reach.
