So very strange: A Brazillian feminist luminary writing through a somewhat pompous, depressive middle-aged male narrator, himself penning (obsessing over) the merciless story of an sickly, impoverished typist who faces her station and inevitable fate with an odd acceptance somewhere between grace and lack of imagination. So much is going on in its mere 90 pages that I'm going to have to dive back in tomorrow when I'm more awake to let it sink in a bit more fully. 
 ... 
 And one subway ride later: 
 On second pass, this is a somewhat different book. Before, the nested narrators kept me watching Lispector's hidden hands for something tricky. But now I realize that she and her avatar Rodrigo (however much he might stall and talk circles around the story) are both bitterly in earnest here. They are interested in their impoverished typist subject because she embodies an ideal that is very real to them. Like a hermit embracing emptiness in the desert, except she never had any belongings to cast off and so simply accepts the emptiness already all around her. She is given nothing and seizes all of it. And so, apparently, could we. And this would be a good thing. An ambitious philosophical portrait, perhaps.