Master storyteller from Brazil - Clarice Lispector, 1920-1977
Here's an outstanding short-story you don't want to miss. Link to the story in its entirety at the bottom of my brief review.
THE SMALLEST WOMAN IN THE WORLD
French explorer Marcel Pretre comes across an African tribe of very small pygmies but is even more surprised when he presses deeper to uncover even smaller pygmies. “And – like a box within a box within a box – obedient, perhaps, to the necessity nature sometimes feels of outdoing herself – among the smallest pygmies in the world there was the smallest of the smallest pygmies in the world.”
How small? The smallest of the smallest was a woman under eighteen inches. Now that’s small! She lived high up in a treetop with her spouse and she was pregnant. We humans have always been fascinated imagining other humanoids much smaller than ourselves, for example Tom Thumb or in Gulliver’s Travels. And, of course, there is the recent archeological discovery of Homo floresiensis (Flores Man) on an island in Indonesia, an extinct species standing about three and a half feet tall. Hobbits, anyone?
Following the very human compulsion to name and categorize everything in sight, the French explorer names her Little Flower. But being so small has big dangers: in addition to disease and falling prey to various predators, these tiny pygmies are hunted like monkeys by a tribe of six footers with nets.
Once captured, they quickly are cooked up for dinner. Thus, their tiny lives are lived mostly in the treetops where they have very little language, being restricted to gestures and animal noises. Their only artistic expression is dancing to the drum while one of their tribe keeps an eye out for those net casting six footers. Again, being hunted for food is deep in our human memory – all those years in Africa as prehominid and early hominid provided sustenance for tigers, leopards, panthers and other predators.
Back home, a life-size color photo of Little Flower appears in the Sunday paper. Understanding how xenophobic we humans tend to be, the various reactions are predictable: “She looks like a dog.” “It gives me the creeps.” “She looks sad but her sadness is of an animal; it isn’t human sadness.”
Clarice Lispector continues with many penetrating, memorable insights into human nature and human psychology, even noting how some children would like to have Little Flower as their special toy, since, “To tell the truth, who hasn’t wanted to own a human being just for himself?”
The French explorer feels sick to his stomach when Little Flower does something unexpected: “She was laughing, warm, warm – Little Flower was enjoying life. The rare thing herself was experiencing the ineffable sensation of not having been eaten yet.” And Little Flower’s joy blossoms into love – not only the love of not being eaten but the love of finding the French explorer’s boot pretty, the strange love for a man who isn’t black, to laugh for love of a shiny ring.
For me, such love speaks to how, no matter how large or small, we are all at our core embodied, sensitive, aesthetic beings with a heart capable of loving darn near everything, a pretty article of clothing, a certain color of hair or movement of hands or hips. Clarice Lispector is more than a storyteller; she’s a magician.
Link to the story in its entirety: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/ar...
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