On “The Passion According to G.H.” by Clarice Lispector

Maybe "G.H." was just the first book out of many possible candidates to ring true for me that childish melody: "oneness." Something akin to a secular conception of a non-intelligent great big unity. I thought I had understood that idea before—for years prior to reading "G.H." I had already told friends I was a Buddhist. So I was already susceptible to a certain brainwash. And yet "G.H.," those images, that allegory and those shades of class and racial detail, and revisiting certain phrases to see what new mental images open up, and it's always the same old thing, the same empty desert—it all succeeded in putting me in a trancelike state.

I liked Lispector's desert quite a bit more than the abyss I had recognized from Nabokov's famous words ("The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness"). Here the desert was open, a trancelike state and one of no longer striving to get out of the chasm: nothing more, nothing less. And maybe a trancelike state that planted only the seeds of nothing: I don't feel any more bonded with strangers, for instance, and I still kill cockroaches.

Useless truths from a useless universe.

But maybe I do feel more bonded to strangers? I don't know: it's a coin-toss. And maybe the oneness of the Universe would have always gnawed at me anyway, as a self-deceiving Buddhist, just from reading enough Instagram captions. Maybe. Your review gave me something entirely different than this book today—it gave me pleasure. I laughed with sincere pleasure and recognition, even as I saw something I loved be critiqued.

And maybe this is how all critiques should be: a little source of pleasure for the one being destroyed.

Just to lighten the intrusion.

A STICK OF DYNAMITE IN THE AMERICAN ELITE was built to be demolished, made to be destroyed, designed to be defused.

All I ask is that your critiques produce the sincere laughter of authentic pleasure and authentic recognition. There’s no use in destroying poor carbon copies of the thing itself: poor carbon copies can only be used to renarrativize the thing itself, if the thing itself has no clear melody.