Sunday Salon

The afternoon certainly held up to the promise of the morning with rain in sheets and us wondering whether we really should be trying to harness and store this water somehow for something.
Another seventy pages of I Saw You by Julie Parsons has me deeper and deeper into the intrigue, there has been one of those fortuitous meetings of characters that will join the circle and bring everyone, both dead and alive, from their own trajectories into the same orbit and I expect the action to hot up considerably.
That's often a point when I will perversely put a book down, leaving it at a place where I'm drooling to get back to it.
Lurking in the shadows has been The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector and, having read about twenty pages I knew this was a book I needed to read in one sitting if I was going to get anything from it and so I picked that up next and have just finished it. My mind is awash with the strange and bewildering read I have just had as Clarice Lispector creates her character from nothing before the reader's eyes and starts to build up a story that she constantly informs and suggests to the reader could go many ways. This is a writer bravely and candidly offering all her uncertainties for public consumption as she searches for her direction and  transforms reality however she wishes.Less than a hundred pages long but an intense and concentrated lesson in the Art of Fiction.
I wouldn't even pretend to pronounce because I know diddly squat about Kafka, but apparently this is ranked alongside him for existential expertise.
I have been completely ambushed by this one, wasn't sure what to expect but having turned the final page I know I will be thinking about it for days before I write a word about it here.
I want to read much more by and about Clarice Lispector and I think she's going to come highly recommended once I fathom the hidden depths of what she's actually doing.