Placenta Book — Patrick Autréaux
On Água Viva by Clarice Lispector
“Regarding Água Viva, you will hear it said that it is a meditation or incantation, a road which follows a seemingly hazardous logic: I follow the tortuous path of roots bursting the earth. Lispector is not content with unconscious associations; she has decided to permit what is created when mastery is abandoned, allowing that which has taken the words’ bait to emerge. The book is one which writes writing itself, she said; one which massages the place of transition where language makes what is a stranger appear; one which recognizes the intimate familiarity of a thought that comes from the body, and, at the same time, betrays an intuition that we are perpetually alienated from what is so familiar to us …”
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My translation of Patrick Autréaux’s ‘Placenta Book: On Água Viva by Clarice Lispector’ is now up at AGNI Magazine.
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Patrick Autréaux is a French writer, living between Paris and Cambridge, Massachusetts. The view of illness as an inner experience informs his first cycle of writing, ending with Se survivre (Survive; Verdier, 2013). He is the author of dozens of books and articles in French. His new novel, L’Epoux (The Husband) will be published by Gallimard in Spring 2025. Dans la vallée des larmes is available in English as In The Valley of Tears published by UIT Books, and his essays have appeared in Socrates on the Beach (Issue 9), Asymptote, and 3AM Magazine. Recently, Pussyboy (Verdier, 2021), a novel about an erotic passion, was translated to Spanish and published by Canta Mares.