“Can’t you see that this is like a child being born? It hurts. Pain is exacerbated life. The process hurts. Coming-to-be is a slow and slow good pain. It’s the wide stretching as far as one can go. And your blood thanks you. I breathe, I breathe.” (56)”
Lispector, a Brazilian, wrote Água Viva (1973) in Portuguese and had strict instructions for the translator: not even a comma should be moved. She wanted her dream-like syntax preserved in the translation. She is attempting to write the instant, not write about it. There is no plot, or character, or anything that you expect in literature. Samuel Beckett attempted this in his amazing The Unnameable, but in his attempt to write about nothing he found that characters and events emerged from language itself.
There are some repetitions in this text, motifs and images that provide uncertain mooring. Lispector is not writing to moor us in safe, tidy prose, but rather to throw us into the slipstream of language to mimic the experience of the instant, which exists, paradoxically, simultaneous with its passing, its recollection, and its representation. This plenitude is not to be feared or mourned but experienced and enjoyed.
“Truth be told the silence between them had been more perfect like that. But what was the point...Just bodies living. No, no, it was even better like that: each with a body, pushing it forward, eagerly wanting to live it. (181)”