Rich with visions, miraculous horses, and linguistic ecstasy, The Besieged City stars Lucrécia. Clarice Lispector's heroine is a materialistic girl free of the burden of thought: "Behold, behold, all of her, terribly physical, one of the objects."

"The object--the thing," Lispector once remarked, "always fascinated me and in a certain sense destroyed me. In my book The Besieged City I speak indirectly about the mystery of the thing. The thing is a specialized and immobilized animal."