The Pain of Pleasure in Clarice Lispector's "An Apprenticeship or the Book of Pleasures"
Unlike Eve, when she bit the apple she entered paradise.
“Lóri would sometimes feel a longing so enormous that it was like hunger.”
“With me you’ll speak your whole soul, even in silence. One day I’ll speak my whole soul, and we won’t run dry because the soul is infinite. And besides we have two bodies which will be a joyful, mute, deep pleasure for us.”
A few months ago, I read my first Lispector, and I couldn’t help but share two quotes from this book. I don’t know what to say except that reading it felt like a meeting with my soul. Or maybe not a meeting, a meeting sounds too formal. A union? A gathering?
The most tender parts of my soul were reflected back to me in Lispector’s pages. Things that are so obvious inside of me which Lispector expresses so simply yet so eloquently. She truly does write as if she invented writing.
An Apprenticeship or the Book of Pleasures paints a tender tale of love. Lóri, a primary school teacher, falls in love with Ulisses, a professor of philosophy. They are both afraid of loving and being loved.
But to explain it this way dilutes the potency of the story and of Lispector’s writing. When it comes to An Apprenticeship, I say forget about plot—it’s the essence of the book that matters.
Even though I read An Apprenticeship or the Book of Pleasures months after we finished the final manuscript of Tender Philosophia, it is in its DNA, for I crave and I hunger like Lóri for the things I thought were too good for me.
This review was originally part of “8 Tender & Philosophic Reads” on Tender Philosophia’s Substack, as promo for my and Jonna Leine’s debut poetry book, Tender Philosophia. Tender Philosophia comes out on December 5!!!
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