La manzana en la oscuridad

The Apple in the Dark, Clarice Lispector's fourth novel, is a chronicle, almost a mystical experience, of the reconstruction of a shattered self. A novel of intense human and psychological depth, it occupies a crucial place in Lispector's oeuvre and exemplifies her literary world. Martim is convinced he has murdered his wife. In a delirium of guilt and grief, he begins a flight in the middle of the night that will take him to the driest desert in Brazil, where the stones are his only interlocutors. He arrives at an isolated farm run by Vitória, a spinster afraid of living, and her obsessive cousin Ermelinda, who is terrified of death. In the stifling Brazilian summer, these three very different, yet equally dominant, characters will gradually become aware of their own isolation.