The Hour of the Star (New Directions Paperbook) (original 1977; edition 1992)

I finished reading this book late at night, just before going to sleep, which may have been a bad idea. Whether this was directly related to my subsequent bad dreams or not I do not know for sure - but I did dream that a friend of mine had been given 91 days to live; and then I woke at 3am and faced my own mortality with all the padding torn off. All the day since has been grey and sad. If these things and the reading of The Hour of the Star aren't related, then it is something of a coincidence - because this is a cruel, bleak little book, for all its extraordinary language (and, may I say, its bright florescent cover).

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.

Our narrator, Rodrigo S.M., is writing a story about a young woman named Macabea, a typist from northeastern Brazil who has migrated to Rio; she is poor and ugly and has nothing going for her.

This novella has a postmodern flavor, with the narrator-writer being very much a part of the story, and he very conscious of his creation even when its inevitability is running away with him and he's sick of his characters. I tend to find this type of story admirable but not enjoyable (I prefer a more traditional, linear narrative that I can sink into and "believe" for a short while instead of being constantly reminded of the fact that it's a story). Words and language were so important in the short narrative that I couldn't help but wonder how much of the nuance I was missing for reading it in English. Recommended if you enjoy experimental writing. ( )

Narrated by the cosmopolitan Rodrigo S.M., this brief, strange, and haunting tale is the story of Macabea, one of life's unfortunates. Living in the slums of Rio and eking out a poor living as a typist, Macabea 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, Macabea 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. [Book Depository]

A compact yet deep metafictional narrative that magnifies a mundane woman, that digs at her being without desperation or effort, simply revealing her as is to reveal a portrait of classism, poverty, and alone-ness. All the while the narrator is trying not to betray his impartiality, his coldness, he is often endeared to or annoyed by this tragic and pitiful woman. A bare bones character study of the invisible woman that reveals the full ripeness of femininity and sensuality by showing its absence and the hidden desire for it to manifest. ( )

An animal of a human that lives among humans does not reflect as humans do, does not know that she is happy or unhappy, stubbornly she goes on. An animal of a human and the one-way relationship of the God who created her, the God who is capable of self-reflection and the God who, by creating, questions God.

"I think about Macabea's vagina, minute, yet unexpectedly covered with a thick growth of black hairs-her vagina was the only vehement sign of her existence." ( )