A woman visits a zoo and feels “caged by the shut cages.” A girl considers her “daydreaming sharp as a crime.” And as a matriarch turns eighty-nine, her son cuts the cake “as though the first shovelful of dirt had been dug.” Welcome to the startling, kaleidoscopic, and thoroughly mesmerizing world of Clarice Lispector, where more than a “superficial attention” can break something. The Complete Stories (New Directions, $28.95) offers eighty-five unique “state[s] of feeling” as Lispector views life from deep within the passions of women, men, girls, boys, and even a chicken. There’s no such thing as a truly objective, omniscient narrator here; even in the stories related in the third person, the perspective is firmly grounded in one psyche—the nearest we come to an outside view is seeing how social rules and conventions exert pressure on individual subjectivities. Often uncertain how they should behave, what they should want, what they dare express, these characters parse their every emotion and physical sensation. From the Proustian anatomy of waking in the early “The Triumph,” through the diligent wives who, “having no other resources…[are] reduced to profundity,”  to the  woman out to ruin the reputation of God, Lispector’s charged prose delivers frissons of the surreal while never losing track of the real, conveying, often with a startling humor, the full “danger of living.”