Where were you at night - Commemorative Edition

The texts gathered in Onde estarestes de noite form a heterogeneous set, where it is possible to identify the tone of the chronicles that Clarice Lispector published weekly in her column for Jornal do Brasil from 1967 to 1973, collected in A Discovery of the World (1984), as well as a certain rawness and humor that brings them closer to those published at the same time in A via crucis do corpo (1974). Some of the texts, moreover, suffered a displacement, as they had already been published previously (“Esvaziamento” and “Um caso complicated”), others were extracted from novels and subjected to slight modifications, procedures that indicate the urgency that the author had to write to ensure your survival. Step by step, the narratives form a cartography of impressions, sensations, news about life in Rio, which also includes friends, emotional and artistic references – Alberto Dines, Fauzi Arap, Raul Seixas, Marly de Oliveira, Nelson Rodrigues, Roberto Carlos, Angela Pralini, a character who reappears in Um sopro de vida, and also the writer, “a certain Clarice” –, forming a series of photographic flashes that crystallize, in image, an instant in the non-stop movement of existence. In fact, the axis that links the narratives of this collection is movement. The characters are always on the move. The movement can be obstinately directed, or it can lack rudder, it can have life or death as its horizon. In any circumstance, however, there is a feeling of loneliness and a zone of silence that permeates these small pieces, which does not prevent the narrator of “The Report of the Thing” from saying: “Wake me up, Sveglia, I want to see reality ”, and continue forward. - BERTA WALDMAN, Professor of Brazilian Literature and Literary Theory – UNICAMP/USP