"From what was once a sleepy colony to its tumultuous experimentation with bureaucratic-authoritarian regimes, has now thrived into what is today the eighth largest economy and is projected to become the fourth largest by 2040."

During her lifetime, Lispector, a catlike blond beauty with movie-star magnetism and an indefinably foreign accent, enjoyed an enormous succès d'estime in Brazil. Her fiction, which combines jewel-like language, deadpan humor, philosophical profundity and an almost psychotically lucid understanding of the human condition, was lauded for having introduced European modernism to a national literature felt to be pretty parochial.