non-romance romance, #1: An Apprenticeship, or the Book of Pleasures by Clarice Lispector
or romance, non-romance, if you prefer
One goal of this newsletter was to be able to write longform discussions in a space that was not Goodreads because I don’t like my writing being attached so directly to an Amazon product. This is a recommendation for An Apprenticeship or the Book of Pleasures by Clarice Lispector. I promise it will be related to romance novels generally!
First, some suggested pre-reads (from Born Yesterday and A Room with a View)
Paul: The idea of learning is to be bigger, not smaller
Billie: Do you think I’m gettin’ bigger?
Paul: Yes!
Billie: Glad to hear it.
Dialogue from Born Yesterday, dir. George Cukor, starring William Holden and Judy Holliday
They were close to their pension. She stopped and leant her elbows against the parapet of the embankment. He did likewise. There is at times a magic in identity of position; it is one of the things that have suggested to us eternal comradeship. She moved her elbows before saying:
“I have behaved ridiculously.”
He was following his own thoughts.
“I was never so much ashamed of myself in my life; I cannot think what came over me.”
“I nearly fainted myself,” he said; but she felt that her attitude repelled him.
“Well, I owe you a thousand apologies.”
“Oh, all right.”
“And—this is the real point—you know how silly people are gossiping—ladies especially, I am afraid—you understand what I mean?”
“I’m afraid I don’t.”
“I mean, would you not mention it to any one, my foolish behaviour?”
“Your behaviour? Oh, yes, all right—all right.”
“Thank you so much. And would you—”
She could not carry her request any further. The river was rushing below them, almost black in the advancing night. He had thrown her photographs into it, and then he had told her the reason. It struck her that it was hopeless to look for chivalry in such a man. He would do her no harm by idle gossip; he was trustworthy, intelligent, and even kind; he might even have a high opinion of her. But he lacked chivalry; his thoughts, like his behaviour, would not be modified by awe. It was useless to say to him, “And would you—” and hope that he would complete the sentence for himself, averting his eyes from her nakedness like the knight in that beautiful picture. She had been in his arms, and he remembered it, just as he remembered the blood on the photographs that she had bought in Alinari’s shop. It was not exactly that a man had died; something had happened to the living: they had come to a situation where character tells, and where childhood enters upon the branching paths of Youth.
“Well, thank you so much,” she repeated, “How quickly these accidents do happen, and then one returns to the old life!”
“I don’t.”
Anxiety moved her to question him.
His answer was puzzling: “I shall probably want to live.”
“But why, Mr. Emerson? What do you mean?”
“I shall want to live, I say.”
Leaning her elbows on the parapet, she contemplated the River Arno, whose roar was suggesting some unexpected melody to her ears.
Excerpt from A Room with a View, EM Forster, after Lucy Honeychurch and George Emerson witness a murder in Piazza della Signoria
I spent the last newsletter arguing for blurred edges on the definitional boundaries of romance. This newsletter is about a non-romance book on those edges. I don’t want to run outside the stated scope of this newsletter, but I do read things that aren’t romance novels. But, for now, my angle remains decidedly “what does this have to do with romance?” and occasionally, I’ll review a book that is outside of the world of mass-market romance paperbacks, but that I think romance readers might enjoy.
An Apprenticeship, or the Book of Pleasures, by Clarice Lispector was published in 1969, first translated into English by Richard A. Mazzara in 1986 and then again in 2021 by Stefan Tobler. I read the 2021 Tobler translation.
The book, ostensibly, is about a woman considering embarking on a love affair. But whether Lóri will ever sleep with Ulisses does feel like a foregone conclusion--they are inevitable. What is preventing the inevitable is a question of readiness, both self-determined and determined by the other. Everything about the book is in the middle of things--Lóri and Ulisses already know each other and already are circling each other, romantically, when the book starts with Lóri performing chores in her apartment, considering her relationship to him. And throughout the book, Lori is thinking about herself in relation to Ulisses: what he is, what she is, how this connection feels situationally fraught, but cosmically calm.
The thing is—this would be a romance novel, I think, according to the Romance Writers of America’s definition: the love story is central the plot (insofar as there is a plot in the book) and it does end optimistically concerning that love story. But maybe this is drawing lines that impose hierarchy, which I don’t mean to do, but this is not a romance novel in the tradition of English language mass market genre fiction. To me, that is a value neutral statement. But it feels like an distinction that the discussion is owed.
The slim novel is solely set with Lóri’s perspective and the form feels initially untethered from any sort of rhythm linearity--the starts with a comma and ends with a colon and Lóri’s mind goes in and out of the present and multiple past remembrances. Chapters vary in length and focus and not much happens beyond Lóri being in different rooms where she talks to Ulisses and then considers the conversation with him.
The collapse of time and shifts in verb tense and looking around and looking forward is one of the most dissociative experiences for me in a form that I generally expect to be progressive, but it moves me as the reader into that untethered space of anxiety and anticipation about the form.
Lóri’s penchant for these shifts reminded me of my favorite scene in my favorite David Lean movie. Lean is best known for his epics about One Man Against a System (see also: oh how tragic we’re British) movies: Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, and The Bridge on the River Kwai. But my favorite Lean theme is his predilection for frame narratives and collapsing of timelines.
In this scene from The Passionate Friends, Ann Todd’s character is narrating her traveling on the plane, from some undisclosed future moment. Then she narrates her breakfast in real time, in line with the action on the screen. Then she switches back to hindsight, then her hindsight is interrupted by the flight attendant speaking to present-Ann Todd who is eating her breakfast. Todd is on a plane to Switzerland to meet her husband to go on holiday, not knowing that in the adjoining room, coincidentally, is the man she had an affair with nine years ago. The rest of the movie is told episodically, go back and forth between Ann Todd’s relationship with her affair partner, who she has known romantically since her youth, and her husband, who insists that their mutual respect marriage is actually more substantive than any romance could be.
It’s an exploration of memory and affection and asking questions about desires, both romantic and the even bigger desires of self-definition and autonomy, through what passes through the mind, though it goes beyond even the wandering linearity of stream-of-consciousness.
When discussing An Apprenticeship while I was reading, I embarrassingly described Lóri and Ulisses in the “talking” stage of a relationship. I want to lie down prostrate and never get up, that feels like such a trite and millennial way of describing what is happening. But the “what is happening” is really a pretense. In 2013, Rachel Kushner (author of The Flamethrowers) wrote in Bookforum that Lispector “writes about thinking, what it’s like to think, and this task is circular, because thought, while not language, is bounded by words, its only tools for expression.”
Failing to find words in how to talk about Lispector, or at least flubbing the landing of capturing what is going on, seems to be a common experience.
Kushner again: “Like Lacan, I blame language for this problem. Probably Lispector would too. But both of them, Lispector and Lacan, would agree it’s our only recourse, and both called upon the capacities of language to an extreme degree, one building a set of psychoanalytic theories based on language, the other flexing language and punctuation in the interest of ephemeral and barely graspable truths, not because she was part of any experimental movement, but out of something more like solitary and desperate need. “This is not a message of ideas that I am transmitting to you,” she declares in Água Viva, “but an instinctive ecstasy of whatever is hidden in nature and that I foretell.” And elsewhere, “The next instant, do I make it? or does it make itself?”
In thinking exclusively in terms of romance, I’m maybe doing a disservice to Lispector here, but I hope not, since I have seen this novel talked about in terms of a response to romance or an answer to romance as a form.
I know objectively I’m not the center of the universe and this is confirmation bias and a lot of time spent in silence considering my own taste, but there is magic to me that I woke up one day and said “I want to read a Clarice Lispector book” and walked to a book store and picked up the one that seems to have the reputation that is most acutely adjacent to traditional romance novels, the genre that makes up 95% of my reading habit and 100% of my extracurricular thought.
(oh no, I’ve brought up Wuthering Heights again)
But thinking about the ethos of romance, rather than the genre parameters, I see alignment between a modernist interested in the form and failures of language and the sometimes reviled, often misunderstood tenet of romance that is miscommunication plots.
I spent a long time in the last newsletter attempting to redefine romance novels, but if I had to spend a very short time describing what makes a romance novel a romance novel it would be attempts at communication. In order for there to be a romance, there has to be a self and an other (or multiple others) and something must transpire between those bodies and minds. I also think there often an element of didacticism between characters—when communication fails, but the end goal must be a happily ever after, how do we get there? By correcting the communicative failures and that often comes through instruction or explanation (potentially leadings to more miscommunication. Ahh the distress of being a human being limited by language!)
That being central is the distinction between Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights (oh no, I’ve brought up Wuthering Heights again). Jane Eyre is mostly about Jane! It, to me, is a story of her growing up, a bildungsroman, as much, if not more so, than a romance. Wuthering Heights is all about the little filaments, strong and weak, the link Cathy and Heathcliff, whether they string directly between the tragic fated mates, or must go through other bodies to make the web. The drama occurring in Wuthering Heights being centered on Heathcliff not hearing Cathy’s full speech to Nelly feels much more romance novel than the drama centering on Rochester lying about having a first wife in his attic.
The excerpts at the beginning of this newsletter were not chosen totally at random, though I’ll admit that most of the time I read anything that I enjoy, I end up thinking about George Cukor and EM Forster. But whereas I’m currently struggling to discuss Lispector in a way that I feel captures the experience of reading her, I am always ready to discuss these two. So allow me to use them as lens and then I’ll let you go (hopefully off to go to read some Lispector).
Born Yesterday from 1950 is the story of Billie Dawn, played by effervescent Judy Holliday, longtime girlfriend to Harry Brock (Broderick Crawford) a junkyard tycoon who is in Washington D.C. to do some “business” (read: corrupt lobbying). When he attempts to court politicians, Billie Dawn embarrasses him with her lack of education, so he invites a journalist who has been hanging out around to try and class her up a little bit. The journalist, played by William Holden, is taken with Billie Dawn’s earnest interest in the world and is himself interested in taking down the corrupt tycoon.
The instructive nature of their relationship could easily wear thin, almost to a Svengali-like patronizing, but Holden’s character’s patience and affection for Billie Dawn, along with the spark that is so easily seen growing in her keeps that from really ever entering my mind when I watch it.
In An Apprenticeship, Ulisses frequently says blithely misogynistic things. Nothing violent and it is easy to dismiss the moments of misogyny as connected to the original 1969 publication date. (Though I did roll my eyes when he tells Lóri when she cuts her hair that she should have asked him first.) And at least when I was first reading the book, I thought that the “apprenticeship” referred exclusively to Ulisses’ teaching of Lóri—teaching her to be ready to accept this divine human connection. But both characters are teachers in their everyday lives and when the word “apprentice” comes up, it is in reference Ulisses’ practice of patience for Lóri: patience for her body, but also patience when she does not show up to planned meetings or is unable to even touch his hand.
The dialogue above from Born Yesterday is a joke based around assumed miscommunication by viewer that is alleviated by the end of the joke. So at the beginning of the exchange, viewer is aligned with either Paul or Billie Dawn, and then four line later, they are together, on the same side. When Billie Dawn says “you think I’m getting bigger?,” it is played as if she thinks Paul is saying her body is growing larger. He has the chance to read it this way and explain what he means, but instead he replies Yes! But instead of taking offense, Billie Dawn reveals that she gets it and viewer need not worry. She wants to and has understood Paul’s schema of communication.
In the afterword from the 2021 edition of An Apprenticeship, Sheila Heti (author of Pure Colour) writes:
All love stories must have their obstacles: religion, parents, a stone wall. The obstacle in this book is that we may be unfit for love, plain and simple: because we haven’t lived in such a way that we have let ourselves be fit for it; we haven’t even lived in such a way that we have made ourselves fit for life…We slack off on the spiritual level, always. We guess no one’s going to see it. Who’s looking? Even we are not. Then someone like Ulisses comes along and says, You cannot have me until you do the difficult work of being a human that you have been putting off. (And inwardly, the man says to himself, I am not worthy of her, and cannot have her until I make myself fit for love, too.)
Indulge me one last comparison to A Room with a View (the last of this newsletter, I will never stop comparing things to A Room with a View).
The murder in the Piazza and the aftermath is perhaps the true crux of the romance in A Room with a View. Up until this point, George is an transcendental oddity and Lucy is a missish milquetoast of a girl, only emboldened by Beethoven. I don’t think it is even clear until this point George Emerson will be Lucy’s great romance. But when she bears witness to a sudden murder between two Italian men and George Emerson scoops her up away from the pell-mell, something happens. What exactly, cannot be explicated by narrator, George, or Lucy. But their bodies are linked now, by witnessing, by embracing, by leaning on the parapet in a mirrored, magic way. And George and Lucy become inevitable.
Forster does not make either George or Lucy all that appealing as individuals. The alignment of George and Lucy is the aspiration, two people whose metaphors fit so perfectly.
Again in this scene, we have a miscommunication—Lucy not quite yet grasping what words are available in this discussion. She knows that she cannot ask George to forget the embrace or the emotions that transpired post-murder and she knows that even with the idle gossip that is her first bourgeois impulse to tamp down, things will not be settled. George can only say “I shall want to live” and Lucy can only ask “what do you mean?”
The solution to their miscommunication does necessarily not come from talking more—every time in the book that George speaks to Lucy, it seems she cannot understand him in the moment it is happening—but in their acceptance of the inescapable.
In attempting to create a pitch for An Apprenticeship, or the Book of Pleasures, my thoughts became recursive quickly. In a book that is only about 120 pages, it feels like the same thing happens over and over, though it is not feel repetitive. Lóri and Ulisses meet (or don’t meet), both feel unprepared for their relationship, but emphasize their willingness to forge ahead (or stay put waiting for the other) as they prepare to embark. But for all the circles they dance around each other, it is a spiral into a center, not a repeated lap. There must be a culmination for them. For all the missteps and errors and slippage and spiritual labor, they are rewarded with togetherness, even without a total reconciliation of their verbiage.