PositiveMusic & LiteratureIt is a book that, on first appearance, occupies an odd place in the author’s oeuvre: devoid of much of the \'interiority\' of her more famous works and stylistically anomalous ... Rather than being a novel of interior reflection and the formation of consciousness through a relation between inner and outer selves, The Besieged City instead takes the form of a novel constructed from reciprocally reflective relations between objects ... the atmosphere that surrounds The Besieged City is one of continual reverberation and trembling. Tremulousness courses through The Besieged City like a cold stream, a structural and textual force. Lispector’s prose lilts and sways, its rhythm shakes at once with closeness and distance. The sensory power Lispector is able to draw from her sentences is here given free rein and the descriptive character of the text is wild with excess, seeking to imbue everything simultaneously with solidity, material presence, and transience, fluidity ... This novel’s peculiar, equivocating sense of time and space strikes an uncomfortable note between loose, fast-flowing movement and inertia ... It would ultimately be disingenuous to rank The Besieged City among Lispector’s finest work ... However, it stands more as a kind of creative misstep, the pursuit of a particular facet of the author’s work to its shivering endpoint.
