Overview
The Besieged City’s Lucrécia is unlike any of her heroines—mute and unreflective, she may have no inner life. And its plot resembles no other Lispector narrative: small town gal marries rich man, sees the world, and lives happily ever after.
That said, there are miraculous horses, linguistic ecstasy, catty remarks, minor characters’ visions, music from unknown sources. But centrally, there is Lucrécia, the heroine free of the burden of thought, who “leaned over without any individuality, trying merely to look at things directly.” As Lispector’s biographer Benjamin Moser writes in his introduction: “Lucrécia is vain and pretentious, content to remain on the surface. Lucrécia—there it is in her name—is lucre, just another one of the porcelain knickknacks in her mother’s sitting room: ‘Behold, behold, all of her, terribly physical, one of the objects.’ Her ambitions are material, and she is the most insolently superficial woman Clarice ever portrayed.”
And yet, with this astonishing writer, a fascination with superficiality pulls the reader into very deep waters. As Lispector remarked: “The object—the thing—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.”
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