The Egg and the Chicken: Reading Clarice Lispector

“I pick up another egg in the kitchen, I break its shell and shape. And from this precise moment there was never an egg.”

Clarice Lispector, who would have turned 100 this year, is now considered one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. Since her death in 1977, she has become legendary in Brazil and an icon of écriture féminine in Europe. But attention is still growing worldwide for her enigmatic and excessive work, which is inhabited by animate and inanimate characters and which sounds out human inner life in all its complexity. She looks at ordinary, everyday things in such detail that the things themselves and their implicitness disintegrate before the reader’s eyes. This is also the case in the short, legendary story The Egg and the Chicken, which is this evening’s focus. In her only television interview, recorded shortly before her death, Lispector said that it was the only of her stories that had even remained a mystery to her.

In a multi-voiced and multilingual reading, the artist Hanne Lippard and the writers Ricardo Domeneck and Senthuran Varatharajah follow Lispector’s profound and often humorous reflections, which begin by looking at a regular breakfast egg and can apparently go anywhere from there. The space will be expanded with a sound performance by Lucrecia Dalt, whose musical introspections repeatedly refer to Lispector’s writing.

With Lucrecia Dalt, Ricardo Domeneck, Hanne Lippard and Senthuran Varatharajah