Clarice Lispector's first novel, Near to the Wild Heart, was published in 1944, when its author was only nineteen years old. An immediate success, it became an acknowledged watershed in Brazilian literature, catapulting it into the literary arena of European modernism. Narrative epiphanies and interior monologue consciously echo James Joyce as Lispector recalls first the childhood and then the adult years of the middle-class Joana, her unhappy marriage and its dissolution.