<p><em>The Passion According to G.H.</em>, Clarice Lispector's mystical novel of 1964, concerns a well-to-do Rio sculptress, G.H., who enters her maid's room, sees a cockroach crawling out of the wardrobe, and, panicking, slams the door —crushing the cockroach —and then watches it die. At the end of the novel, at the height of a spiritual crisis, comes the most famous and most genuinely shocking scene in Brazilian literature…</p><p>Lispector wrote that of all her works this novel was the one that “best corresponded to her demands as a writer.”</p>