Did I mention that this novel is charming? Punishing, yes, and maniacally overwritten, but a vulnerable and moving performance — with a heart-stopping payoff.

I recall the British critic Christopher Ricks once saying that in every long book lies a short one evading its responsibilities. It’s a literary prejudice I share, but in “The Chandelier” I sense something else: not a shorter, better book lurking, but Lispector’s entire body of work, in miniature, biding its time. So many of the themes, philosophical inquiries and character types that appear here will return, honed as Lispector refines her style and hardens them into the diamond-like perfection of her final books, which are narrated in jagged aphorisms — “anti-literature” she called them.

If the pages of “The Chandelier” are so thickly lacquered with description, streams of adjectives and looping repetition, it’s because Lispector is flexing, coming into her power. She’s playing, she’s practicing. These pages are full of finger exercises, arpeggios of thought and perception.

We see the stirring of her lifelong interest in piercing the veil of language to access existence itself. She tries to evoke this by slowing down the prose in “The Chandelier,” by making the reader feel its weight. In later books, she was unafraid of posing the point directly: “What am I doing in writing you? Trying to photograph perfume,” she wrote in “Água Viva.”

Her books stay peaceably indifferent to any imperatives of story — “The Passion According to G.H.,” regarded by some as her masterpiece, features a housewife staring into a closet for 200 pages. But with her later restraint, it was her sentences that began to have plots. With their topsy-turvy structure, they contain the drama and the surprise.

A few famous examples. From “The Passion According to G.H.”: “I finally got up from the breakfast table, that woman.” From the opening of her short story “Temptation”: “She was sobbing. And as if the two o’clock glare weren’t enough, she had red hair.” From the story “Love”: “Next to her was a lady in blue, with a face.”

In each, the strangeness come from a splitting — of women experiencing themselves as subject and object. This fracturing is everywhere in Lispector, and explored intensely in “The Chandelier.” Virginia, in fact, is practicing looking at everything in this particular way: “She’d see things separated from the places where they lay, loose in space as in an apparition.”

“The Chandelier” might best be understood as a bridge in Lispector’s work. But even so, it conveys a special charge, an undeniable quantity of genius — similar to what Virginia felt as she filled her hands with water, that she was “carrying in the palm of her hand a little bit of river.”