Near to the Wild Heart opens with a scene of the child Joana playing in the garden, making up poems for her father. Joana's wildness and barely suppressed violence, along with her linguistic creativity, are her most notable features. She is frequently compared to animals: over the course of the book Lispector compares her to a bird, a snake, a wildcat, a horse, and a dog. She commits transgressive acts—as a child she throws a book at an old man's head, for example, and as a married woman she leaves her husband, Otávio, and greets the news of his adultery—he has made another woman, his
A Woman in Berlin from before. The chronicle ends with the narrator brooding on her relationship with Gerd. Narrator The unnamed narrator is a woman who recounts her life through eight weeks in Berlin at the end of the war. She describes herself as a thirty year old “pale faced blonde always dressed in the same winter coat”. The narrator lives alone at first in an abandoned apartment but then moves in with the widow when the Russians arrive. She was a journalist before the war that traveled to numerous countries and speaks different languages, including a bit of Russian and French. During the