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Narrated by the cosmopolitan Rodrigo S.M., this brief, strange, and haunting tale is the story of Macabéa, one of life's unfortunates. Living in the slums of Rio and eking out a poor living as a typist, Macabéa loves movies, Coca-Colas, and her rat of a boyfriend; she would like to be like Marilyn Monroe, but she is ugly, underfed, sickly and unloved. Rodrigo recoils from her wretchedness, and yet he cannot avoid the realization that for all her outward misery, Macabéa is inwardly free/She doesn't seem to know how unhappy she should be. Lispector employs her pathetic heroine against her urbane, empty narrator--edge of despair to edge of despair--and, working them like a pair of scissors, she cuts away the reader's preconceived notions about poverty, identity, love and the art of fiction. In her last book she takes readers close to the true mystery of life and leave us deep in Lispector territory indeed.… (more)
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Set aside the Sartre, the Heidegger, the Wittgenstein, with all their big words (her narrator emphasizes repeatedly that he has banned big words). Forget about all the twisted logic used to figure out how we know about our own existence and what its purpose may be. If there is a reason, something more than pure brute instinct, for an ugly little waif from the poorest part of Brazil to exist, perhaps even to live, there is a reason for all of us to live. And so, in the midst of life in the mud, and, quite literally, death in the mud, Clarice gives us reason to live. And while she does this, she struggles to release us from the trap of a language that defines us. Each reader can figure out whether she succeeds. Success may or may not be important.
All of this is done through a style dominated by simple aphorisms (thus the Nietzschean - it's the only comparison I can think of) and a straightforward story line. No big words. Individually, her aphorisms are banal. Combined, they are profound.
Clarice Lispector weaves together metaphorical rags.
All I can say about the result: Wow.
This story is so beautiful and so sad. It's the fundamental tension between futile rage and cold comfort, and the way that push-and-pull wears you out, and the bone weariness and disgust it gives rise to in Lispector's narrator. He is telling the story of Macabea, who is young, and dumb, and
Stylistically, this is such a sweet tapestry, in the sense of warp and weft, following out the threads, flush of recognition and surprise when one manifests in a novel fashion (bang). Wow again, and specifically:
Wow, the sudden intermittent inthrust of visual objects in this progression of concepts, the nature of perceiving, and the interrelation between the human self and the vicious, necessary other. Meaning, "A narrative . . . from which blood surging with life might flow only to coagulate into lumps of trembling jelly". Meaning, "grass is so easy and simple". Meaning, "It's as good as saying a healthy dog is worth more".
Wow, the writhing of the narrator faced with the massive greyness underlying the bright Brazilian patina, the refusal of this story to be sublimated or brought to cathartic Aristotelian heel. Meaning, "But why am I bothering about this girl when what I really want is wheat that turns ripe and golden in summer?" Meaning, "How I should like her to open her mouth and say: --I amalone in the world". Meaning, "I could resolve this story by taking the east way out and murdering the infant child, but what I want is something more: I want life.Let my readers take a punch in the stomach to see how they enjoy it. For life is a punch in the stomach."
Wow, unavoidably and dismally, the obscene vividness of the glimpses into Macabea's life, and our inability to believe in her self-sustaining capability, or that she's anything but an accident waiting to happen. Meaning, "the one luxury she permitted herself was a few sips of cold coffee before going to bed. She paid for this luxury by waking up with heartburn." Meaning, "(t)his is like flying in an airplane," just before the shocking unfairness of humiliation and blood. Meaning, "as a little girl, because she had no one to kiss, she used to kiss the wall." I could cry about that last one for the rest of my life if I let myself.
The hot dogs she eats. That fucking Mercedes.
In summation? Wow.
When she woke up she no longer knew who she was. Only later did she think with satisfaction: I'm a typist and a virgin and I like coca-cola. Only then did she dress herself in herself, she spent the rest of her day obediently playing the role of being.
My experience of postmodernism is limited, but I do believe this is an example of it, with experimental (though as it repeatedly reminds us, simple and unadorned) language, and very little by way of plot. Metafictive too, being written by a male narrator - Lispector herself is a woman - who is terrified of his own story, because it brings home to him (explosion) all too plainly the emptiness and pointlessness of his own life. It's self-conscious of necessity, but done rather exquisitely for all that. This narrator has seen briefly in the street a young typist from the northeast, a girl who has no idea she's alive - a nonentity of a girl without any real thoughts, or hopes, or happiness, and who has no idea that she's even unhappy. The sight of this girl has torn the padding off the narrator's life too, and he must write her story down to purge himself of its horror.
...there are thousands of girls scattered across the tenement slums... They don't even know how easily substitutable they are and that they could just drop off the face of the earth.
The real pathos of it is that Macabea is simply a girl without any opportunities. She has an insatiable fascination with the facts she hears on Clock Radio, but no one to talk to about it. When she once hears Caruso sing on that radio, she cries, which she's never done before.
She wasn't crying because of the life she led: because, never having led any other, she'd accepted that with her that was just the way things were. But I also think she was crying because, through the music, she might have guessed there were other ways of feeling, there were more delicate existences and even a certain luxury of soul.
She collects ads and pastes them in an album. She is sensuous and doesn't know what to do with it, and sometimes kisses the wall (that last image was one of the more painful ones).
And just as soon as an experience comes which teaches her how to live, how to hope, she dies - and though this happens at the end I do not consider it a spoiler (apologies if you disagree) - because it's almost inevitable, and certainly the only possible 'happy' ending. Her death is the hour of the star. As for her life, it only serves to point to that idea of the uselessness of people's lives in general, and makes the reader feel for a time that this is practically universal. As I said, a cruel, bleak little book.
What was the truth of my Maca? As soon as you discover the truth it's already gone: the moment passed. I ask: what is? Reply: it's not.
A word on the translator - brilliant work, I think. It's always hard as a reader to know which of the good and bad is due to the translator - but it's clear that Benjamin Moser had an original text of great unusualness and difficulty to work from, and he translates it here with a blend of oddness, simplicity and power which I suspect is all there in the original Portuguese.
As a writer, I've sometimes though that it takes a lot of arrogance to believe that your thoughts and experiences are of such importance to be of interest to other people enough to read an entire book. But then I've countered that with the thought that there is something about everyone that is distinct and incredible and it is a matter of revealing it. [The Hour of the Star] is about the process of imagining someone who seems of utter insignificance, not appealing, and finding the beauty of her life. It adds another dimension to know that Lispector was dying of cancer as she wrote it and was perhaps using it as a vehicle to question or to find the meaning of her own life.
She definitely succeeds in showing meaning in the guise of seeming insignificance. I'm still not sure I wouldn't have enjoyed it more as a simple story but it is a gem of a book.
I found it very hard after reading this book to get up and go about my business. It was unsettling. I am relieved to settle back and read uncomplicated simple novels - I feel that this book was a lot of work, not because it was hard to read - in fact it was very easy to read - but because it was very hard to take. I don't think I will read more of Clarice Lispector's work in the very near future, because I am not strong enough to handle it. I hope to be able to come back to her some time in the future, though, because she has something important to say that makes me uncomfortable, and I realize this is a mark of great fiction.
The first one-third of the book features the narrator, Rodrigo S.M., telling the reader why it is so
In The Hour of the Star, Lispector has created a many-layered tapestry. It is a book that can be read on many levels: as an indictment of poverty, the process of writing, the creation of art and perhaps life itself, the meaning of being human, the idea of spirituality and/or God, the meaning of The Word (on all incarnations). For me, right now, I read it as a discussion of the process of writing and the weight of creating a fictional world that reflects reality, as much as it can.
I plan to read this again before I return it to the library because I know I've only begun to dig under the surface of Lispector's amazing prose.
But it's brilliant, and it's beautiful, and it should form a part of your mental furniture. It's fascinating in its presumptive male narrator's chill and malign distance from the heat of life that makes Macabea, the protagonist, both unfurl and wither seemingly simultaneously.
The relationships that Macabea, immigrant to the cold cruel city from the cold cruel countryside, forms are classics of naive toxicity. She's seemingly unable to judge anyone around her...even herself...on any level deeper than the most glistening surface. She's not a bright girl, she's not a pretty girl, and she's got no discernable talent for anything. She's destined to come to a bad end. SPOILER FOLLOWS And she does, under the wheels of a Mercedes (isn't that a subtle way of accusing the haves of killing the have-nots?). END SPOILER
But Lispector, the creatrix, pulls the Oz-curtain aside periodically, dropping the rudimentary and nugatory male narrator into the bin when she has something important to say: "Will I be condemned to death for discussing a life that contains, like the lives of all of us, an inviolable secret? I am desperately trying to discover in the girl's existence at least one bright topaz."
Could it be, I wonder at the end of the story, that there is no bright topaz in some lives? That the brightest sparkle in some humans is just the mineral potential of bones waiting for death to free it? Macabea, "female Maccabee" for those interested in looking for some Biblical enrichment of the tale, makes me think...unwillingly, reluctantly, but honestly...that the answer is Yes.
Anyway, Lispector is a great read for those who likes Sartre, Virginia Woolf, Kafka, etc...
Do not expect to find a conventional plot-based novel. There is much more to this books than meets the eye.
I'd long heard of Clarice Lispector, but this is the first book by her that I have read. I will be seeking more of her books to read.
Recommended. 4 1/2 stars
The Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector's name is among the many Hispanic authors Roberto Bolaño's yearning young writers -- who live only to become writers themselves – put on their lists of sacred names – and so one wants to get to know these inspirational artists. For Lispector, though The
The Hours of the Star, however, is attractively transparent in the modern way about the fiction project it embodies, and about what will happen, as the title's meaning comes early on. In lieu of a plot, the story unfolds in a series of vignettes from the protagonist's life, sparsely punctuated with the author's thoughts. Despite the squalor and apparent hopelessness in her life, the character of girl from the country the book chronicles creates in the end an effect of peculiar exhilaration.
I'm looking forward to longer works, perhaps more expressive of Clarice Lispector's full range. For now, The Hours of the Star stands as an intense meditation on a short, obscure life.
This novella has a postmodern flavor, with the narrator-writer being very much a part of the story, and he
The nature of beauty, of
Lispector often uses
This is an unusually styled book. The first character is an unnamed male narrator who is writing the story of a young impoverished woman in Rio de Janero; a woman not only living in physical poverty, but in spiritual and emotional poverty. She ekes out a daily living, living almost anonymously in the huge city and so beset by each day that she cannot imagine a future.
The male narrator steps out of his character several times to chide himself that he must not become sentimental and 'write like a woman'. There's a bit of humor, a large measure of pathos and a story line that will stick with me.
So, given that this is the best Lispector novel for me, I'm admitting defeat. I see that all of my friends love her, but I can't, I just can't. No more sentences like these for me:
"With her dead, the bells were ringing but without their bronzes giving them sound. Now I understand this story. It is the imminence in those bells that almost-almost ring. The greatness of every one."
No more sentence fragments. No more sentences about bells that sound like meat cleavers (despite the loveliness of 'almost-almost.') Is this Lispector, or her translators? I will never know. Farewell, you heavily marketed ostensible genius. Fare thee well.
And at the end of the book- there's an almost very 'reverent' note by the translator- Benjamin Moser.
While I've read some of her poetry translated and its wonderful, something tells me this must be her best book- her prima donna.