Near to the Wild Heart, Paperback

Near to the Wild Heart, published in Rio de Janeiro in 1943, introduced Brazil to what one writer called ``Hurricane Clarice`` a twenty-three-year-old girl who wrote her first book in a tiny rented room and then baptized it with a title taken from Joyce: ``He was alone, unheeded, near to the wild heart of life.``

The book was an unprecedented sensation -- the discovery of a genius. Narrative epiphanies and interior monologue frame the life of Joana, from her middle-class childhood through her unhappy marriage and its dissolution to transcendence, when she proclaims: ``I shall arise as strong and comely as a young colt.``