Água Viva opens Goodreads in a new tab

Agua Viva (1973) is a meditation on the nature of life and time, in which Clarice Lispector discovers a new means of writing about herself, transforming individual experience into universal poetry. It is a fictional account of a woman's attempt to escape conventional time and exist instead in a perpetually renewing instant-now. Translated by Stefan Tobler, it stands out as a particular triumph in a body of work as emotionally powerful, formally innovative, and philosophically profound as any in modern literature.