The Besieged City     by Clarice Lispector, Translated by Giovanni Pontiero Original title: Cidade Sitiada Original language: Portuguese Country: Brazil   Published by Carcanet Press Ltd Pub. Date: December 1999 Format: Hardcover ISBN: 1857540611 List Price: $39.95, £14.95 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £14.95 Published by Carcanet Pub. Date: 1999 Pub. Place: UK List Price: £14.95 Not available for ordering

One of Clarice Lispector’s early novels but newly translated into English, The Besieged City chronicles the life and development of a small town, São Geraldo, and of a young woman, Lucretia Neves; as São Geraldo changes over the years so does she.

Lucretia seems carefree, something of a dreamer. She lives in her hometown with a kind of disgust for it, always wishing to be somewhere else. She satisfies her desire to leave for a more comfortable life by dreaming of a different world. She dreams by day and by night. She dreams of a world where objects are alive, where the external world is one with her rather than against her. She lives inside herself.

She sees only one solution to her predicament: to marry a man who can offer her wealth, jewels — who can offer her a life in a big city with hotels, cafés and theatres. For Lucretia a husband would be a saviour. Mateus Correia, a lawyer, offers her all that she wishes for and marrying him she leaves São Geraldo for the big city.

Now that she has left what she considers to be a backward town and lifestyle, she is still dissatisfied. The bourgeois life she has entered is not all that magical and soon tires her. She has to fake her happiness and appreciation. She starts to long for what she was dying to leave: São Geraldo.

The Besieged City is a story of the internal struggle of a human being trying to adjust to her predicament. Lucretia is estranged from her own life and never finds what she longs for — does she know what it is she so desires or is she a dreamer with fuzzy dreams? Her only way out is to adapt to wherever she is; in São Geraldo she is a young girl, a dreamer, an idealist, married and in the big city a young bourgeois wife, a materialist. She is a prisoner of her dreams, a prisoner of thought—processes that never allow her to reach peace.

In this novel full of rich imagery, of light, darkness, mirrors, water and Nature, Lispector takes a sceptical look at dreams and desire. She looks at marriage with a critical eye as never seeming to provide what one imagines. She writes about a woman who does not fit in anywhere, always struggling with what she wants and what she has or can have. Written with irony, it is about a woman incapable of freeing herself from her own ideas, from the desire for a safe and settled lifestyle, but who never takes her life into her own hands.

But the portrait became increasingly different from the sitter and Lucretia Neves considered it the perfect image. The face on the wall, so swollen and signified, carried the mark of destiny in that dazed expression, while she herself... Perhaps she had fallen into the routine of things and the portrait was the unattainable surface, the higher order of solitude — her own history captured for posterity by the photographer without her even noticing.