She’s popular among critics internationally as well: Routinely compared to Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov, and James Joyce, Lispector is hailed by many literati as Brazil’s greatest contemporary writer. Benjamin Moser, her biographer and champion in the English-speaking world, who’s also the editor of the new collection, is often quoted as saying she’s the most important Jewish writer in the world since Kafka.

Clarice Lispector, left, with her sons (New Directions)

Part of Lispector’s aura of intrigue comes from her beauty, glamour, and strange public persona. Of Eastern European-Jewish origin, she was transplanted to Brazil as a small child.

In his biography of Lispector, Why this World, Moser paints her as a person full of contradictions. He writes:

She herself once wrote, “I am so mysterious that I don’t even understand myself.” “My mystery,” she insisted elsewhere, “is that I have no mystery.”

Still, he adds, “To general bemusement, she insisted that she was a simple housewife, and those who arrived expecting to encounter a Sphinx just as often found a Jewish mother offering them cake and Coca-Cola.”

Lispector was in fact a housewife (though hardly a simple one). For 16 years she was married to a Brazilian diplomat, with whom she had two sons, and she never considered herself a professional writer. (Despite that, she wrote nine novels along with her 80-plus short stories, and worked as a fashion journalist.)

Her personal style added to her mystique: Writing about her in 2005, Gregory Rabassa said, “I was flabbergasted to meet that rare person who looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf.”

It would be unfair to think Lispector’s association with beauty and fashion matter only because she is a female writer. In her work, they function as a kind of intentional opaqueness. As Stephanie LaCava writes for the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Throughout her work, as Moser notes in his biography, there are moments when makeup and beauty figure as the real, the solid, in the category of knowable. These seeming superficialities are actually conduits or tools, masking—protecting—the unknowable soul; they are links to sanity.

In her only television interview, Lispector is visibly uncomfortable, nervously smoking, giving the sense that her famous air of glamour is a kind of armor, barely concealing underlying anxiety.

In Brazil, Lispector’s work is required reading on the national university entrance exams called Vestibular, similar to the French baccalauréat. So why hasn’t she caught on in the rest of the world? Moser says the answer lies in the quality of previous translations, which he considers not up to snuff. He’s spent the last 12 years trying to revive interest in her, leading efforts to have her works re-translated. From 2011 to 2012 he edited or translated new versions of five of her novels (blurbed by the likes of Jonathan Franzen, Orhan Pamuk, and Colm Tóibín), and he’s currently working on the last four.