The encounter of a French explorer with an African female pygmy is an occasion for Clarice Lispector to question the travel experience as knowledge of otherness and to meditate on the impossibility of deciphering the other. Unlike the commonplace of colonialist ideology, that often sustains the superiority of the largest, the author bets on the equivalence between the great and the small. Therefore, she explores a paradox that is already manifest in the title (the smallest woman is the largest in her category) and is emphasized by the literary procedures of reduction and enlargement, repeated throughout the text. Lispector’s short story aligns itself with a tradition of European philosophical literature that, from Swift to Bataille, criticizes the notion of human measure in order to affirm the complex wavering of proportions that underlies the human condition. For that, the writer can approach her minimal character to the immoderation of God.