"[U]nderneath Lispector's inventive, modernist style is a poignant and radical depiction of a young woman navigating a patriarchal society." — Mike Broida, PARIS REVIEW

Lispector was one of the century's greatest modernists, called "the most important Jewish writer since Kafka" (Moser). Her work has been compared to that of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, with similar (and similarly justified) superlatives: Lispector was "if Rilke had been a Jewish Brazilian born in Ukraine. If Rimbaud had been a mother, if he had reached the age of fifty. If Heidegger could have ceased being German" (Hélène Cixous, in Moser, 2).

Lispector had become famous with the publication of her first novel, NEAR TO THE WILD HEART (1943), but CIDADE was the book that "nearly killed her career" (introduction, viii) — rejected by her publisher and a number of others before Editôra A Noite finally picked it up. Lispector called it a "closed" book: "I was chasing after something and there was nobody to tell me what it was" (ix).

CIDADE follows a young woman through marriage and beyond, as the city of her youth also grows and changes around her. Written while Lispector lived in what she termed "exile" in Bern, Switzerland, and pregnant with her first child, it is unique within her broader work. "As a book about the external world, it is a singular instance" (Moser, 176). It is a work about the impact of "the object—the thing," as Lispector called it. "[It] always fascinated me and in a certain sense destroyed me. In [...] THE BESIEGED CITY I speak indirectly about the mystery of the thing." The problems its language raised for translation contributed to the astounding fact that the book's first English-language edition did not appear until 2019: "a bittersweet revelation of a missed moment in a modernist movement" (Broida).

Read more: Moser, Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector; Moser, 2019 introduction to the New Directions edition of THE BESIEGED CITY; Broida, "The Siege of Clarice Lispector," 30 April 2019, Paris Review; Rohter, "Review: Clarice Lispector's 'The Complete Stories' Sees Life With Existential Dread," 11 Aug 2015, New York Times; Garner, "Writer's Myth Looms as Large as the Many Novels She Wrote," 11 Aug 2009, New York Times.