In reading Lispector’s books, I learn about the structure of the relationship between a human and God, between a human and herself, and between a human and the other; in this case, both the other who is just another person one has slept with and lost desire for, and the Other who holds your life’s happiness in their hands. This second Other is the elemental force that drives the life of the loving one, while the other other has no power at all and might as well not even exist. Why is life like this? How can so much importance (for the one who loves) be concentrated in a random, Other, singular individual, while diffused among the rest is nothing, and we are able to stride past them with complete indifference?

What is this Other capable of that the other other could never do? In one sense (unhappy as this is to write) the Other is the one who circumscribes our limits. With the choice of who to love, we end up in a city, with a side of the bed on which to sleep, and a certain set of friends (growing further apart from those who are not invited over because one’s partner does not like them). We watch certain shows, not others. And the Other circumscribes our limits metaphysically, too. Maybe this procedure is necessary, in order for our lives to have a form. Just as the art-impulse must take a certain form — a sculpture, a play, a novel, a dance — so does the election of a specific Other shape our blobbish life-impulse into a specific form. I am now thinking of the part of the novel where Claire writes, “Lóri had a kind of dread of going, as if she could go too far — in what direction? Which was making it hard to go . . . There was a certain fear of her own capacity, large or small, maybe because she didn’t know her own limits. Were the limits of a human divine? They were.”

All love stories must have their obstacles: religion, parents, a stone wall. The obstacle in this book is that we may be unfit for love, plain and simple: because we haven’t lived in such a way that we have let ourselves be fit for it; we haven’t even lived in such a way that we have made ourselves fit for life. For God. For sex. For anything! We slack off on the spiritual level, always. We guess no one’s going to see it. Who’s looking? Even we are not. Then someone like Ulisses comes along and says, You cannot have me until you do the difficult work of being a human that you have been putting off. (And inwardly, the man says to himself, I am also not worthy of her, and cannot have her until I make myself fit for love, too.)

Is this book a fantasy, in a way? While some writers might fantasize about a man coming along who will shower a woman in diamonds and install her in a penthouse, Clarice Lispector, the great mystic, spins a fantasy of having an explicit reason for doing the most difficult labor a person is capable of: the work of becoming an actual human being in this world. Here, the motive to do the work is to win the love of a man. (But a man is not just some guy; he represents one of the elemental forces of the universe — the masculine force that sets the difficult task in motion, of impelling the feminine force, which would otherwise sit, roundly, alone. What woman has not felt that unfortunate thing, that some man, not yet won, was “like the border between the past and whatever was to come”? Yet in a way, isn’t Ulisses asking Lóri to find the masculine force within herself, before coming to him? Or to find it in herself so she doesn’t come to him seeking it, then get bored of what she’s found, like any woman who goes from man to man, never satisfied because she’s mistaken about what she is looking for, really? Yes. Any woman wanting any sort of lasting happiness has to realize that she can — and must — be the impelling force that moves herself through the world.)