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Those in the know about Lispector – the Brazilian public, her translators – have long hailed her as one of the most striking voices of 20th century Brazilian literature. Her work has been celebrated and even canonised in Brazil, prompting comparisons to Kafka and Fernando Pessoa. But Complete Stories marks the first time her short fiction (as opposed to her novels) has been translated into English, and the result could be a complete re-evaluation of her work.

From the first paragraph Lispector fills her work with present-tense detail so vivid as to border on the psychedelic. Adjectives are vividly and liberally used, nearly every object in a character’s field of view brimming with its own sort of life, as when she evokes sunlight that “quaver[s] on the walls like a Portuguese guitar.” Her stories are detailed maps of people’s interior experiences at the height of emotional anguish, and across a range of different characters; they are decadents, depressives or hard-headed girls, trying to make sense of a world that sneers at their irrationality while presenting them with contradictory logics by which to live. Her early work on its own would be a valuable insight into the lives of mid-century Brazilian women.

As it is, Lispector went on to produce further work, and her style continued to develop over the years, playing with internal voices to explore the irrational substrate of life, throwing off character and coherent plot where it suited. For the most part, in the place of these, she took up chickens. Chickens, for Lispector, became the perfect medium for illustrating the irrationality that defied explanation and comprehension, and which would therefore be paradoxical to try to render in words. (It would also take a very ungenerous, perhaps tin-eared reader, to presume she wasn’t aware of the humour in her choice.) In her unsettling parable of family life, The Chicken, Lispector describes a hen as: “neither gentle nor standoffish, neither cheerful nor sad, she was nothing, she was a chicken.” Like Beckett and Woolf before her, Lispector became increasingly suspicious of the language we use to express our reality, and found the best means to examine inner life and the reality of things through contradictions and blank, koan-like statements. The Fifth Story is a continued re-iteration of one (slightly chilling) domestic event, framed again and again in contexts that overlap and yet contradict each previous assessment of the action’s significance. No-one, Lispector wants us to realise, has the final say in how to interpret our lives. Even Lispector.

This tension translated into vital energy that runs through the rest of her later work. Lispector still returned to the dramatic inner monologues that had characterised her earlier stories, but with new freedom and playfulness in her sentence structure. As ever, her characters are the vivid subjects of experience on the cusp of socialisation (the children in Boy in Pen and Ink or A Tale of So Much Love) or its victims (as in The Obedient Ones). If her early work can be criticised, it is because it could be clunky and lacked the spontaneity required to bring a reader along with the caprices of passionate and egocentric characters. No such problem exists in her later work.

Lispector’s first story collection came out in 1952, her last in 1979. The benefit of Complete Stories is that it offers the reader an insight into Lispector as a developing writer, one who went to great lengths to show the suffocating effects of reasonableness and the elusive vitality of the alternative.

Complete Stories is published by New Directions, translated by Katrina Dodson and edited by Benjamin Moser.