The Besieged City by Clarice Lispector

Now in paperback, The Besieged City―Clarice Lispector’s electrifying third novel―tells of a shallow girl becoming a desirable but highly materialistic woman in a rough-and-ready town

Rich with visions, miraculous horses, and linguistic ecstasy, The Besieged City stars Lucrécia. Clarice Lispector’s heroine is a materialistic girl free of the burden of thought: “Behold, behold, all of her, terribly physical, one of the objects.”

“The object―the thing,” Lispector once remarked, “always fascinated me and in a certain sense destroyed me. In my book The Besieged City I speak indirectly about the mystery of the thing. The thing is a specialized and immobilized animal.”