Clarice Lispector, Turgenev, Edward Louis

I have had Clarice Lispector's The Chandelier in continuo for many weeks. I like to have her around, interspersed with other reading. The last ten pages are overlaid by Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, read up at the pond, beside the reservoir and at night, finished a day or two ago, now replaced by Edouard Louis' A History of Violence, which has been in the house for a week or so, giving off some strong issues and flavours none of which appeal.

Sandie said that the way I live and read and write will only register after I'm dead. Not sure how comforting or accurate that might be. So I weave books around my sensibility where others weave goals, teams and aspirations. So?

What is language doing for these writers, this reader? How dependent are we? How involved how absent how urgent the tale? Clarice is the most urgent/dependent/absent; she has the least tale, the most setting of private dials. How do I deal with the world, what are the terms for my survival? What happens is less than what I make of it, how I weave it in words that in turn weave me. 

No tree, no rock, nakedness up the horizon of erased mountains; her heart was beating superficially and she was hardly breathing as if in order to live it was enough to look.

Turgenev's familial Russian decrepitude, I know as I begin to read, I expect these characters in these relations in nineteenth century rural Russia, with authorial pieties all observed: plenty fathers, plenty sons, mothers dead or otherwise meek, some crocky aunts and eccentric uncles living on lapsed or creaking country estates, a sense of roundedness by tale's end, some dead, some married, and Turgenev our author resembling one of his own uncles, à la fin. A peaceful, comfortably foreign past.

Edouard Louis, feu Eddy Bellegueule, is hardly older than Clarice Lispector when she wrote The Chandelier, but his history of violence is a mass of influences while she, like Bazarov the nihilist/natural scientist who dies of typhus at the end of Fathers and Sons, springs from her own source.

The influences of Bellegueule/Louis are the bootstraps of his rescue. He has read Bourdieu, and Faulkner, he attracts issues and issues attraction. He is at the centre of 21st century concern. Saleable. Recountable. Translatable. His author photo looks like someone I know. I read the first chapter with the most fairness I could muster.

Eddy & Clarice make an interesting couple, each as self-preoccupied as the other, one of them plain as the Daily Mail, the other rhapsodic/self-examining. Here they are, side by side.

It was then that she experienced all the way to the end whatever it was whose foreboding had already worried her at the edge of the plateau. With a contained joy, flashing and fine, she was in the meadow ...  you understand? she was asking herself confused, her dark eye watching to the rescue of the whitened mountains.

I looked down at my shoes like I was a moron too (I tried to go back to sleep, I wanted to sleep, but my body hurt too much). And he says to me, I hated everyone, I know it's crazy, Clara, but that morning I woke up hating everyone (and I thought: How can you hate them?).

Take your pick.