This is an odd book. The back cover says it “tells the haunting tale of Macabea” but it’s really more about the narrator - and the narration. The whole first quarter or so is the narrator grappling with why he's choosing to write about Macabea. There's a lot to think about here even though the book is deceivingly short.
I read a different translation of this book in college and actually didn’t realize I'd read this before until I read the forward. But it also felt like a different book - I don’t remember the narration being this jarring. Maybe I’m just too basic now, but I found the whole thing kind of offputting, actually. (As the afterword says, "No matter how odd Clarice Lispector's prose sounds in translation, it sounds just as unusual in the original").