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The Hour of the Star: 100th Anniversary Edition
By Clarice Lispector & Benjamin Moser &Publisher Description
Clarice Lispector’s best-selling masterpiece—“her finest book” (The Nation)—now in a special hardcover edition to celebrate the centenary of her birth, with an illuminating new afterword by her son
The Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector’s consummate final novel, may well be her masterpiece. 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-Cola, 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. As Macabéa heads toward her absurd death, 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 leaves us deep in Lispector territory indeed.Download the free Fable app
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“This one was a bit of a miss for me. I loved Lispector’s Agua Viva, but this one took me ages to get through. The ending was a big let down too…
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I write because I have nothing else to do in the world: I was left over and there is no place for me in the world of men. I write because I’m desperate and I’m tired, I can no longer bear the routine of being me and if not for the always novelty that is writing, I would die symbolically every day. But I am prepared to slip out discreetly through the back exit. I’ve experienced almost everything, including passion and its despair. And now I’d only like to have what I would have been and never was.
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She was incompetent. Incompetent for life. She had never figured out how to figure things out. She was only vaguely beginning to know the kind of absence she had of herself inside her. If she were an expressive creature she would say: the world is outside me, I am outside me.
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Why do I write? What do I know? No idea. Yes, it’s true, I sometimes think that I’m not me, I seem to belong to a distant galaxy because I’m so strange to myself. Is this me? I am frightened to encounter myself.
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How I’d like her to open her mouth and say:
— I am alone in the world and I don’t believe in anyone, everyone lies, sometimes even when making love, I don’t think one being speaks to another, the truth only comes to me when I’m alone.
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I’ll go to where the void begins to curve, I’ll go where my breath takes me. Does my breath deliver me to God? I am so pure that I know nothing. I only know one thing: I don’t need to pity God. Or do I?
She was so alive that she moved slowly and drew her body into the fetal position. Grotesque as ever. That reluctance to give in, but that longing for the great embrace. She embraced herself longing for the sweet nothing. She was cursed and didn’t know it. She clung to a thread of consciousness and mentally repeated over and over: I am, I am, I am. Who she was, was what she didn’t know. She’d gone to seek in the very deep and black core of her self the breath of life that God gives us.”About Clarice Lispector
Clarice Lispector (1920–1977), the greatest Brazilian writer of the twentieth century, has been called “astounding” (Rachel Kushner), “a penetrating genius” (Donna Seaman, Booklist), and “one of the twentieth century’s most mysterious writers” (Orhan Pamuk).
Other books by Clarice Lispector
Benjamin Moser
General editor of the new translations of Clarice Lispector’s complete works at New Directions, BENJAMIN MOSER is the author of Why This World: The Biography of Clarice Lispector, and Sontag: Her Life and Work, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. His new book, The Upside-Down World: Meetings with the Dutch Masters, will be published in October.
Other books by Benjamin Moser
Paulo Gurgel Valente
Paulo Gurgel Valente was born in Washington, DC, in 1953, while his father was stationed in the Brazilian embassy. He has published books on economics and finance.
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