Clarice Lispector’s An Apprenticeship, or The Book of Pleasures (New Directions, 2021) begins with a comma, as if the reader had stumbled upon the book mid-breath. In this new translation by Stefan Tobler of the 1969 novel, Lispector plunges us into the dreamy yet circumspect mind of Lóri, a primary school teacher, reflecting on her grocery run and her relationship with Ulisses, a university professor. While their romance loosely adopts the titular structure of an apprenticeship, the unconventional nature of that apprenticeship disorients the reader. Lóri feels a sharp sense of alienation: “her mismatch with the world was so great it was comic: she hadn’t managed to walk in step with the things around her” (9-10). Ulisses takes the role of her mentor, guiding Lóri into a new way of being “alive through pleasure” (77) into what he calls the “profound and risky adventure” of “attempting joy” (47). He insists that they cannot consummate the relationship until they have both learned what he wants to teach her, until they are both “ready.” Though what exactly he teaches her and what readiness might mean remain frustratingly opaque for both Lóri and the reader, we both must muddle through. But as Lóri knows, “‘not-understanding’ was so vast that it surpassed all understanding—understanding was always limited. But not-understanding had no frontiers and led to the infinite, to the God” (32–33). An Apprenticeship toggles between a sensuous and supersensuous relationship to opacity, to muddling-through, to not-understanding, that Lispector encourages the reader to share.
While the typical romance positions the outside world in opposition to the lovers’ union, presenting distinct challenges the two must overcome to be together, the barriers to the relationship in The Apprenticeship are more internal and more nebulous. Ulisses constructs the obstacles to their relationship himself and insists that they are necessary for their self-actualization. Lóri’s struggle to be with Ulisses thus becomes a struggle to learn how to live her own life with joy; she wonders, “was being pain? And was it only when being was no longer pain that Ulisses would consider she was ready to sleep with him?” (10). How does one learn to be alive through pleasure? The exact conditions are murky; Lóri’s journey is one taken in fog, blindly.
Lispector’s genius for defamiliarization acts as a vehicle to investigate the strangeness of what we take for granted. She writes that a “human being’s most pressing need was to become a human being” (21). We might understand Lóri’s goal in these tautological terms: the process of becoming a human being, becoming an “I.” Ulisses tells Lóri what he wants: “when someone asked her name, for her not to say ‘Lóri,’ but to be able to reply ‘my name is I’” (4). Through the delicate sensibilities of Lóri, even the most generic tropes of the romance genre become refreshingly peculiar. Lóri, a woman who “still ha[sn’t] got[ten] used to living” (78), is given to long stretches of philosophical rumination. The humdrum of life intermittently flashes through this haze: choosing a dress, going to work, playing the game of love.
Despite the uniqueness of its premise, the stakes of this novel are familiar. The love story, with its recognizable beats, provides a touchstone through which we can reflect on its less scrutable elements. In her approach to Ulisses, Lóri meticulously calculates how to dress and act, constantly deliberating whether or not to call him, and frequently anxious that he will stop waiting for her. As they’re sitting by the fire after dinner, she notices that his hand is free and “within her reach” (92) and spends a page agonizing over whether she should take it, what taking it would mean. Inherent to the romance genre is that sensual connection to not knowing: the uncertainty of the feeling, the fixation on tiny opaque moments, the will-they-won’t-they dance. In An Apprenticeship, Lispector treats this push and pull as philosophical work, necessary to undertake for one’s own self-knowledge, yet it retains the rapturous quality of romance.
To underscore the gravity of the characters’ internal journeys of self-discovery, Lispector leans into conventional motifs of myth and epic. In one scene, Lóri bites into a red apple and marvels at it: “oh God, as if it were the forbidden apple of paradise, but this time she knew good, and not just evil as before. Unlike Eve, when she bit the apple she entered paradise” (118). A major leg of her journey is a bath in the sea—standard fare for literary awakening, particularly considering that her name is short for Loreley. Ulisses glosses the mythical origins of this name as a woman from German folklore who would “seduce fishermen with her songs and they’d end up dying at the bottom of the sea” (84). However, as Ulisses remarks, he is the one seducing Lóri, not the other way around. His own name exudes meaning; he shares with his namesake a love for wordplay and cleverness. Yet while his journey is one of deferred action, Ulisses does not pursue other escapades, sexual or otherwise. As he reminds Lóri, he, too, “work[s] to get ready for [her]” (83). In service of this goal, he surprises her by telling her he will stop going to bed with other women while he waits; at her confused reaction, he tells her that she has “got the wrong idea about men: they can be chaste, Lóri, when they want to be” (84). If what is at stake in each character’s journey is pleasure, as the novel’s subtitle suggests, this pleasure comes in no small part from deferral and disorientation, from approaching the known and then receding.
Much of the novel consists of questions that Lóri and Ulisses discuss together or which Lóri poses to herself: questions such as “Could it be possible that at a certain point in life the world would become obvious?” (52). These questions are fraught, often emerging from Lóri’s struggle with feelings of nihilism and hopelessness: “She’d […] gather all her strength to stop the pain. What pain was it? Of existing? Of belonging to some unknown thing? Of having been born?” (38). Yet their pursuit, even without hope of finding an ultimate answer, produces an almost agonizing relief: “[Lóri] murmured without any modulation in her voice: I don’t understand anything. It was such an indubitable truth that both her body and her soul sagged somewhat and so she rested a little. In that instant she was just one of the women of the world, and not an I” (53). In this playfully Socratic mode of endless questioning that emerges from the certainty of not knowing, there is an erotic excess that is the source of frustration and satisfaction alike: the pleasures of tension and release.
Early in the novel, Ulisses tells Lóri (who is thinking of ending things with him) that he has learned that “we ought to live despite. Despite, we should eat. Despite, we should love. Despite, we should die. It’s even often this despite that spurs us on” (15). An Apprenticeship showcases its beautiful, bewildering lyricism to greatest advantage in the moments “despite.” Lispector punctures her rich, philosophical prose with clean, incisive lines, such as: “life isn’t a joke because in the middle of the day you die” (21). In these instances, full of abrupt yet paradoxical urgency, one feels the forward motion of the novel thrumming through its nervous tension, insisting on “despite” even as it lingers on “why.” Because so much of the novel traces Lóri’s hesitancy and doubt, the moments of her contradictory certainty become substantial and sublime.
Towards the end of An Apprenticeship, Ulisses asks Lóri why she says “the God,” as opposed to simply “God.” Lóri explains what one might have read as a simple linguistic quirk or translation choice: “Because God is a noun […] substantive like substance. There’s no single adjective for the God” (117). This conversation picks up the thread that runs through the novel, sounding out the position of the divine within the human and the relationship between the spiritual and the sensuous. Recalling the words of an apostle who had “said of us [human beings]: you are gods,” Lóri revises that claim: “‘You are gods.’ But we were gods with adjectives” (117). If there is no adjective for the God, then what does it mean to be a god with adjectives? We, like adjectives, determine ourselves and are determined by our attachments. They give us our particularity, our being—what make us an “I.” If the apprenticeship in this book is a study in how to become a human being, it is a doomed quest. Lispector decisively writes: “We’d never reach the human being inside ourselves” (117). But, as An Apprenticeship suggests, there is no reason to reach the human being inside ourselves when we might be better served by reaching the human being inside another.