Well, Lispector has incredible traction with the critical community and Colm Tóibín is literally falling over himself with admiration in the preface, so obviously there are *some* people out there (and even fairly many, considering Lispector's stature in Brazilian literature) who love and admire this sort of thing. And who knows, maybe 30 years ago I'd have found it an interesting experiment. But I'm definitely in a place now where I can no longer appreciate it. Give me Barbara Pym any day of the week instead ...

It's the kind of thing I'm *supposed* to like, as a former literature professor, but to be honest it's a style that's always bored me to tears. And it's not because of a lack of plot or characters etc. It's simply because for word experimentation, I prefer to turn to poetry, which does it better because it's not also (usually) pretending to have a plot.

That's true actually -- poetry lends itself to linguistic deconstruction fairly easily; to a certain extent it even calls for it in order to break with convention. But prose ... ugh. Give me intelligible sentences (and dialogue) and I'll happily trot along; if you've sufficiently hooked me otherwise, even without much of a plot (or without much of a focus on characters, for that matter). Make your sentences sound like you've randomly assembled them from a LEGO set -- or, as Lispector does, overtly pretend this is what you've done, only to then deconstruct that pretence in turn, too -- and we part company fast. And I'm glad to hear not everybody who "is supposed to" like this sort of thing actually does! :)

I'm not surprised.