Clarice Lispector's Near to the Wild Heart is sub-par Virginia Woolf

I wasn't quite sure what to expect from Clarice Lispector's 1943 book, Near to the Wild Heart.
I can't remember where I first heard about it, but I'm pretty sure it was in the context of "overlooked masterpieces". Other reviews I came across were equally effusive and superlative in nature - the Los Angeles Times review onthe back cover puts it "on the same shelf as Kafka and Joyce", for example, and The Guardian calls Lispector "a genius", pure and simple.
In fact, James Joyce comes up quite often in reviews of the book, which is strange really, because I didn't see parallels at all (apart from the fact that the book's title is borrowed from Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a quote from which is excerpted at the start of the book). If anything, Virginia Woolf seems to me a better point of reference (or rather, sub-Virginia Woolf). Lispector's almost obsessive attention to detail could even be called Proustian, I suppose. That said, she definitely has her own, very individual, and quite innovative, voice. Her style is at times somewhat elliptical, to put it mildly, and the book moves as it progresses from reasonably straightforward language in the early chapters to much wilder, even unhinged, streams of consciousness in the second half (although not always with great success, I have to say).
Lispector was born in the Ukraine, but moved to Brazil as a baby to escape the political turmoil and Jewish pogroms in Ukraine. Her grandparents had died at the hands of the Russians, and her mother was raped and paralyzed (her mother finally died in Brazil when Clarice was just nine). It is perhaps no surprise, then, that she writes so well about the angst-ridden interior world of a very singular and precocious young girl, by turns wilful and headstrong, insecure and confused, and then a young woman experiencing the first throes of love and lust (Lispector was only 23 when she wrote the book).
There is little or no plot development in the book. What plot points there are - childhood, courtship, marriage, infideility, separation - are really just settings for the tortured thoughts and complex feelings of its main protagonist, Joana. Just a couple of excerpts:
As a young girl, infatuated with her teacher:

The teacher met her stare with raised eyebrows. What? What? he wondered with displeasure.
She held her breath.
"I can wait."
The teacher didn't breathe for a few seconds either. He asked, his voice the same, suddenly cold:
"Wait for what?"
"Until I become pretty. Pretty like 'her'."

As a young woman, in the grip of lust:

At night, alone in her room, she wanted him. All of her nerves, all of her sick muscles. So she resigned herself. Resignation was sweet and fresh. She had been born for it.

In the later chapters, the language becomes wilder and more chaotic:

Satisfaction, satisfaction. Pure sadness without hurt. Sadness that seems to come from behind the woman in pink. Sunday sadness on the quay in the port, the sailors lent to the earth. The light sadness is the realization of living.

Say what?
Although her much later novel, The Passion According to G.H., is considered Lispector's grande oeuvre, this book is nevertheless a good introduction to her writing, I guess You can see why it made such an impact in Brazil in 1943, although I'm not sure that it has held up quite so well over time. Even now, Lispector is considered something of a Brazilian literary jewel, even if she is not that well known in the rest of the world.
But I can't recommend it as a GREAT book (at least in the English translation - I can't speak for the Portuguese). I went in hoping for James Joyce, and I came out thinking "sub-par Virginia Woolf").