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PLEASE NOTE: Due to our flood disaster 10/4, some stock may be unavailable due to loss. HOURS as of Oct 2024: Tues-Fri 11:00-5:00, Sat 11:00-7:00, Sun 12:00-5:00. Call (207)253-6808 or visit us as 661 Congress St in Portland, Maine! MABA Member.
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The Besieged City by Clarice Lispector - hardcvr
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The Besieged City by Clarice Lispector - hardcvr

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Hardcover.

Seven decades after its original publication, Clarice Lispector's third novel--the story of a girl and the city her gaze reveals--is in English at last.

Lucrécia Neves is ready to marry. Her suitors--soldierly Felipe, pensive Perseu, dependable Mateus--are attracted to her tawdry not-quite-beauty, which is of a piece with Sao Geraldo, the rough-and-ready township she inhabits. Civilization is on its way to this place, where wild horses still roam.

As Lucrécia is tamed by marriage, Sao Geraldo gradually expels its horses; and as the town strives for the highest attainment it can conceive--a viaduct--it takes on the progressively more metropolitan manners that Lucrécia, with her vulgar ambitions, desires too. Yet it is precisely through this woman's superficiality--her identification with the porcelain knickknacks in her mother's parlor--that Clarice Lispector creates a profound and enigmatic meditation on "the mystery of the thing."

Written in Europe shortly after Clarice Lispector's own marriage,
The Besieged City is a proving ground for the intricate language and the radical ideas that characterize one of her century's greatest writers--and an ironic ode to the magnetism of the material.