'Like the northeastern girl, there are thousands of girls scattered throughout the tenement slums [...] working to the point of exhaustion.'
This remark, from early on in the novel, provides evidence of the extent of hardship and poverty in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, the city that was formerly Brazil's capital city. The North-east of Brazil is famous as being the poorest, least enfranchised of all Brazil's regions. Many of its citizens leave lives of poverty on the journey to Rio, only to find hardship and difficulty at their destination. The monotonous and poverty-stricken way of life in the Rio slums is emphasized in this quotation, with the fact that there are 'thousands of girls' also emphasizing how many are suffering.
'Every once in a while she wandered into the better neighbourhoods and gazed at the shop windows glittering with jewels and satin clothes - just to mortify herself a bit.'
This quote highlights the gap between the rich and the poor in twentieth-century Brazil. The protagonist is a poor woman, living in the Rio slums and so her decision to wander 'into the better neighbourhoods' might be interpreted as an act of masochism, or self-punishment. The verb 'glittering' conjures the dazzling visual display in 'the shop windows', placing emphasis on the superficiality of wealth in so many situations.
'There was something slightly idiotic about her, but she wasn't an idiot.'
The narrator, as this quote indicates, is unsparing in their portrayal of the main character. This quote, which is comical in nature, is perhaps intended to remind the reader that, despite the rampant nature of poverty in the city of Rio de Janeiro, moments of joy do occur.
'So that's why this story will be made of words that gather in sentences and from these a secret meaning emanates that goes beyond words and sentences.'
Many of Lispector's novels, besides their plot, discuss the issue of literariness and the practice of writing. Readers know that any story has to be made up of words and that those words are organized into sentences, so the description of this by the narrator is proof of a degree of meta-literariness to the novel.
'As for the girl, she lives in an impersonal limbo, without reaching the worst or the best. She just lives, inhaling and exhaling, inhaling and exhaling.'
Angst and uncertainty of self in the wider universe are the main ideas communicated in this quote. The repetition of the clause 'inhaling and exhaling' reduces life to a very fundamental, quite medical set of circumstances. The fact that her 'limbo' is 'impersonal' maybe denotes the shared reality of many who live in the slums, stuck between poverty in the city and poverty in rural areas, from where many come originally.
