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"Not having been born an animal is one of my secret nostalgias," Clarice once wrote. "Maybe it's because I'm a Sagittarian, half beast." People who met her frequently compared her to an animal, often a feline: elegant, uknowable, potentially violent.



...for Joana [the main character of "Near to the WIld Heart" (Clarice's first novel, published when she was twenty-three)] is simply the most notable early instance of the embrace of an animal nature that, in Clarice Liespctor, appraoches a philosophical ideal. This is her complete refual of any anthropocentric morality.

Morality, Fernando Pessora wrote: is "the effort to elevate human life, to give it a human value." It is this attempt to cut life down to human size-- any sense that life is human or that the universe is organized to comfort humans-- that Clarice will msot famously reject in The Passion According to G. H., the monumental novel of 1964 in which the protagonist realizes her identity to a cockroach. Clarice's amorality, as she herself will come to realize, is so horrifying and absolute that taking it to its ligical end means madness...