SOURCE: "Existence in Laços de família" in Luso-Brazilian Review, Vol. IV, No. 1, June, 1967, pp. 69-74.

In the following essay, Herman analyzes five stories in Laços de família, comparing Lispector's pessimistic outlook with that of French existentialist thinkers Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus.

Laços de Família, a collection of short stories by Clarice Lispector, constitutes a personal interpretation of some of the most pressing psychological problems of man in the contemporary western world. Liberty, despair, solitude, the incapacity to communicate, are the main themes that unite the separate stories into a definite configuration of the author's pessimistic perception of life. Lispector presents a series of characters, "víctimas agónicas," as Miguel de Unamuno would say, who find themselves trying desperately to maintain an equilibrium between "reality" and their own powerful imaginations. Imagination, and by implication solitude, is represented as a double-edged dagger...