[4] Some literary critics, most notably Benjamin Moser, have argued that the unhappy lives of her Jewish refugee parents, in particular the rape of her mother Mania in pogroms in the aftermath of the First World War in what is now Ukraine have cast a long shadow over her work.

Thiago Cavalcante Jeronimo argued in a 2018 essay, for example, that the rape of Lispector's mother, and its long-running emotional impact, was an "interpretive assumption" by Moser and had become "an incident 'proven without proof' by the biographer-who-fictionalizes".

[6] Earl Fitz and Elizabeth Lowe, the latter of which knew Lispector personally, were the first to translate Água Viva into English in 1989 for University of Minnesota Press.

[2] Shannon Burns has written in the Sydney Review of Books that the novel was a "marvel of lyrical expression, a musical musing" that despite its "straining Heideggerian neologisms", is "pure witchcraft.

And yet, there is a thrill in reading these breathless, fitfully coherent fragments, each deployed in a vain quest to capture the living moment of naked existence.