welcome to my bookbug profile

i like "reading projects". i like thick books. i like hard books. i like books that experiment with form and structure. i like books that challenge my world view and self view. i like to read books that i don't like to read. i like to read books with references that take me down rabbit holes of peripheral information (e.g. history, events, people, places, music, film, art, etc), and tell the story of the interconnectedness of all things.

currently reading

Água Viva by Clarice Lispector 🐛
Lafayette by Harlow Giles Unger

on deck

The Collector by John Fowles 🐛
Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon
Tom's Crossing by Mark Z. Danielewski
Millard Fillmore: Biography of a President by Robert J. Rayback 📚

current bookbug book report ｢september 2025｣

Água Viva by Clarice Lispector

my book report

It’s this: dissonance is harmonious to me. Melody sometimes wears me out. And also the so-called “leitmotif.” I want in music and in what I write to you and in what I paint, I want geometric streaks that cross in the air and form a disharmony that I understand. Pure it.

AV left me with several sensations, particularly the first half of the work: a kind of terror mixed with a love of life, a sort of slow bleeding out, wanting every sensation in every instant of time to be held; like trying to drink an entire rapids while savoring every drop; personally brings to mind my times in the ocean, alone beyond the breakers, floating supine, the crashes of the waves blotting out the sounds of the public and my deteriorated vision smearing their bodies, leaving me to myself and my thoughts and sense of the infinite. Lispector makes occasional references to real time, her meditations fading in and out of her daydreams and night(insomniac?)dreams. Lispector's improvised stream and play with matter, time, and perception bring to mind Jazz and Einstein; could AV have been written without these predecessors? More imagery, Lispector's jellyfish is both the formless and the primordial, the cat eats the placenta. The structure and style also remind me of Whitman's Leaves of Grass (containing multitudes) at times, but at the same time formless (the jellyfish), with the stream of consciousness, and existential meditation, tough to pin down and define. Another novel that I recalled while reading, The Rings of Saturn (Sebald), for its meditations on identity and time. At the end Lispector loves life. AV induces sensation, waves washing over, and while I attempt to connect it to other experiences, art, or readings, it is not a kind of anything else. My reading of AV was via epub on my phone, due to the late September connection to bookbug, and I regret not reading the print version. I also suspect that the translated version leaves a gap that cannot be recovered from the Portuguese, but that is not in the cards for me. I perhaps would not have discovered Lispector without bookbug, and I am grateful for that. Lispector seems a buried literary giant, at least in the Eurocentric world.