Joanna is beautiful but also wild and self-centred, which alienates her from others. They don’t know how to perceive her “excessive sincerity and lack of remorse.” They use words like “evil” or “unfeeling” for her; her close aunt calls her a cold viper, devoid of any love or gratitude.

Clarice Lispector, who shares much of her being with the protagonist, wrote the novel in a tiny rented room by the time she was twenty-three-year-old. She took the title from Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “He was alone, unheeded, near to the wild heart of life.” The book became a sensation in Brazil and so did she. She came to be known as “Hurricane Clarice.”

At the heart of Near to the Wild Heart is the struggle that divides Joanna: how to preserve her individuality, to remain whole, while attaching herself to other aspects of life – people, beliefs, or god – which she knows will alter her own sense of self. She is hounded with the conflict of deciding whether she is happier being solitary, or social.

She wanders through her days, first living with an uncle and then marrying a man she wants, but drifts away abandoning everything that binds her. However, it’s not these details that are important; her inner mental life is what is at the centre of the book.

Lispector is listed among the 300 women who changed the world. She achieved international fame with works that depict a highly personal, almost existentialist view of the human dilemma. In contrast to the regional or national social concerns expressed by many of her Brazilian contemporaries, her artistic vision transcends time and place; her characters, in elemental situations of crisis, are frequently female and only incidentally modern or Brazilian.

— Encyclopedia Britannica

Published in 1943. Translated from the Portuguese by Alison Entrekin, published in 2012.