A Breath of Life

Author: Lispector, Clarice

Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)

Published on 6 February 2014 by Penguin Books Ltd (Penguin Classics) in the United Kingdom as part of 'the Penguin Modern Classics' series.

A Breath of Life is Clarice Lispector's final novel, 'written in agony', which she did not live to see published. Sensual and mysterious, it is a mystical dialogue between a god-like author and the creation he breathes life into: the speaking, shifting, indefinable Angela Pralini. As he has created Angela, so, eventually, he must let her die, for life is merely 'a kind of madness that death makes.' This is a unique, elegiac meditation on the creation of life, and of art.