In the magnificent feast of Clarice Lispector's writing, her crônicas?short, vivid, off-the-cuff newspaper pieces?are the toothsome canapés she whipped up every Saturday

I am convinced that during the Stone Age, I must have been wounded by the love of some man, because a certain secret fear of mine dates from that time.

The crônica, a literary genre peculiar to Brazilian newspapers, allows writers (or even soccer stars) to address a wide readership on any theme they like. Chatty, mystical, intimate, flirtatious, and revelatory, Lispector's Saturday columns from 1967 to 1973 in Rio's leading newspaper, the Jornal do Brasil, were extraordinarily free-ranging, taking the form variously of memories, essays, aphorisms, serialized stories, and interior monologues. In every mode, her insights make one sit up and think, whether about love or children or social ills or pets or society women or writing or the nature of reality: We have accumulated things and certainties because we have neither the one nor the other.

The things I've learned from taxi drivers would be enough to fill a book. They know a lot: they really do get around. I may know a lot about Antonioni that they don't know. Or maybe they do even when they don't. There are various ways of knowing by not-knowing. I know: it happens to me too.