Five pages of The Chandelier by Clarice Lispector and I would close the book and put it to the side, not exhausted, but overwhelmed. The barrage of sensation and the multi-sensation of the narrator’s every moment was not, for once, a plot device — it was the various harmonies of an insistent present that our narrator Virginia suffers, and it would impress upon me a sort of unsettling rifling of my own memory: what I had neglected to feel before and even now?
I tell my friend Josh to read it, even though, I say, the translation is not good. I say this to him because he is a translator and is rather precise about it, and I knew he would see fault in it right away. (I immediately also recommended Magdalena Edwards’s tell-all of working with Benjamin Moser on the translation of this book, which explains the result to an extent.)
Except I don’t know that a “good” translation of The Chandelier is possible, and anyway it didn’t matter: nothing I’ve read before is like it. So what if the phrases are clunkily englished when, “His eyes like illuminated walls were darkening but not allowing themselves to be scaled. The way of being with her in public. As if she’d forced him to do something in the past and now it was irremediable — he was rebelling against her as against [a] family.” (107) I’m far too taken with the image of a lover’s eyes changing to something so hard and abstracted such that the other knows by this that he’s communicating to her and to the room a certain distance and a certain freedom, with the knowledge that such an attitude can be risked as she is, after all, bound to him.
***
I wish I could talk about the chandelier in The Chandelier without summery, but no, I have to preface this with:
Virginia grows up in a large house (the Farm) reminiscent of Tara after Dixie’s defeat, a former plantation or “grand house,” that now echos with forbidden wings etc. There is a chandelier at the base of the wide stairs, that Virginia-child would look at, “immobile, uneasy, seeming to foresee a terrible life.” The chandelier is not an omnipresent feature of her childhood by any means, not like the mirror in her room or her dying grandmother or her little statuettes made of mud, but it is there over the stairs, and as it is mentioned early on, you continue to see it again and again as she and others move throughout the house. It is not omnipresent, but there nevertheless, and fated. Virginia-adult returns to the Farm many years later to find the house strangely unenchanted as if utterly drained of her childhood, as if what was a living, gloomy violet was now a dried violet pressed in a book. There is a brief moment where she considers staying at the Farm and not returning to Rio de Janeiro, but she of course leaves again, and while she is on the train back she realizes suddenly that not once did she look up for the chandelier and she asks herself Had it been there at all?
Had the fated thing even existed? Was it a) the sort of thing that a child would only notice and imbue with importance, like a particularly colorful stone on a path or b) had her mind generated and held a chandelier in an imaginative fit from the light that richocted in the entryway c) was the chandelier once there but removed without ceremony or commentary d) had it dimmed e) was her memory of it so far removed from the reality of it that it was silent when she returned?
But that is actually not the question.
Had the chandelier infected her with a “terrible life.” Had the chandelier somehow bewitched her development such that Virginia-adult was perpetually in thrall to all that there was to feel without respite and without sympathy. Lispector does not provide an antidote to the malefic sway of the chandelier. Virginia is absolutely doomed to a fullness of moments that weigh to a degree that is not articulated, but evident by her stasis.
***
Another friend asked me, simply, what I was reading and I summarized The Chandelier really poorly. I said something like, “It is the horror of watching what was once an imaginative and magical child grow up to be only a lost and child-like woman.” (This is not entirely wrong.) I backtracked and tried to elevate it: a more surreal Nausea, a more existential existentialism.
Except to some extent the challenge of describing it is one and the same with describing a dream: while I can describe in detail certain scenes, what of it. The meaning is not there at all.
