The Certified Book Reviews: I was tangled by Clarice Lispector’s “Family Ties “

Dear Clarice, i’ve prayed for a writer like you. Only you.

I think someone on here said: “Once you’ve tasted dark chocolate, no caramel will ever satisfy you.”

And this is where my ‘Family Ties’ review starts.

Clarice is like your teenage younger brother: Impossible to understand, super intense and… kind of funny sometimes.

She’s a ride most of you won’t survive, but if you do, what a wonderful view there is at the end of the ride. You’ll be understood like no other. Believe me.

Let’s go:

This is an immediate new experience to every single person that reads it. This is a psychological dive into the human condition.

First published in 1960, it activates oppressed senses and shakens the cristalized, picture-perfect values established in society in which the book was published.

Lispector opens our eyes and our minds and creates a series of short stories with a very familiar tie, indeed.

All the stories happen with a very common ( and rather uncommon) experience: Epiphany.

By going beyond reality limits and showing the reader a manifestation of something unexpected, Clarice Lispector makes the ‘personal’ become universal, by sharing stories about the existential factors that emerge when we’re going through the undeniable and perhaps, most difficult life quest there is: survive our daily routine. As Brazilian Anthropologist Roberto Da Matta said about this book: “It’s the exotic being familiar, and what’s familiar becomes exotic“

Addressing human experiences like puberty and even discussing subjects as control, normative patterns, the female experience and masculine hierarchy, Lispector’s writing is as psychological and anthropological as they come, whilst being philosophical and socially relevant. And i haven’t even told you the best part: It’s all told by the affection layers of daily objects. Through them, the individual creates their own personal epiphany

In Family Ties, there’s something quite out of focus, that to transmit it, it’s necessary to execute the unsettling sharpness that relies in the poetical landscape, said landscape being quite crucial to the perfect exemple of an epifany. It’s the human experience summed up in a hundred pages. It’s magical and it’s ridiculously accurate. It’s Clarice Lispector.

And while the book describes ambiences in photographical accuracy, most things that are shown in the narratives are things you really have to look

in order to be able to see.

It’s life changing.

It’s almost like, in our pendular, day to day life, we find reflections of ourselves that are hidden within us. These reflections show us what or who we could have been, fighting with our current reality, giving us a chilling and new perspective of ourselves and the world around us. We’re looking at a simple picture of a daily life that goes by us, but it’s not really ours. A life that almost defines who we are, it being so engraved in ourselves.

“ I once wanted to be someone else to know what wasn’t myself . I then understood i already had been others and that had been easy. My biggest experience would be someone else’s ‘someone else’, someone that wasn’t them, and someone else’s ‘someone else’ would be me. “

- Clarice Lispector

100/100