Hour of the Star
Clarice Lispector
The Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector's consummate final novel, may well be her masterpiece.
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 de Janeiro and eking out a poor living as a typist, Macabéa loves movies, Coca-Cola, and her rat of a boyfriend;
would like to be like Marilyn Monroe, but she is ugly, underfed, sickly, and unloved.
recoils from her wretchedness, and yet he cannot avoid realization that for all her outward misery,
éa 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--
them like a pair of scissors, she cuts away the reader's preconceived notions about poverty, identity,
and the art of fiction. In her last novel she takes readers close to the true mystery of life,
and leaves us deep in Lispector territory indeed.