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A review by ube_cake
The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector
5.0
"For now Macabeá was nothing more than a vague feeling on the dirty cobble stones. I could leave her lying on the street and simply not finish the story. But no: I'll go on to where the air runs out, I'll go to where the great gale leaps away howling (...)"
Clarice Lispector's 1977 novel "The Hour of the Star" is a story within a story, of an author (Rodrigo S.M.) who sketches out, in Cezanne-esque brush-strokes, the life of Macabeá: from her birth in poverty to her untimely death.
Though the novel reads like a stream of unedited drafts annotated with oft-tangential commentary, I am of the opinion that it is, in fact, Lispector's ars poetica. Here, she pulls back the proverbial curtains to reveal what it means to create with the power of words. With Rodrigo as her mouthpiece, she asks questions on the obligations of a writer, the relationship between them and their creations (playing around with the Pygmalion myth), and whether an author is fit to tell their tale. The last point being especially relevant in the current age: exploring realities that aren't ours (e.g. not belonging to the same race/ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status) and running the risk of turning representations into spectacles.
To interpret this novel is to confront the fact that it was the last to be published in Lispector's lifetime (though not the last to be written). By virtue of her death from ovarian cancer at the age of 57, we are forced to see this as a work from her "late period". However, as one reads the pages of this novel, filled with blood-red living prose so different from her previous works, one can get the sense of a Lispector entering a new period, a Lispector being reborn ["(...) in the agony of pleasure that is death. I, who symbolically die several times just to experience the resurrection."]. God knows what else she could have written, and what else the world missed out on, after this and her "Breath of Life".
As if guided by premonition, she writes: "For at the hour of death a person becomes a shining movie star (...)".
Following her untimely death, Clarice Lispector is survived by her many works of fiction (this ranking to be amongst her finest) that continue to captivate readers and influence authors around the world. Do not walk, run and get this book: it's amazing.
Clarice Lispector's 1977 novel "The Hour of the Star" is a story within a story, of an author (Rodrigo S.M.) who sketches out, in Cezanne-esque brush-strokes, the life of Macabeá: from her birth in poverty to her untimely death.
Though the novel reads like a stream of unedited drafts annotated with oft-tangential commentary, I am of the opinion that it is, in fact, Lispector's ars poetica. Here, she pulls back the proverbial curtains to reveal what it means to create with the power of words. With Rodrigo as her mouthpiece, she asks questions on the obligations of a writer, the relationship between them and their creations (playing around with the Pygmalion myth), and whether an author is fit to tell their tale. The last point being especially relevant in the current age: exploring realities that aren't ours (e.g. not belonging to the same race/ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status) and running the risk of turning representations into spectacles.
To interpret this novel is to confront the fact that it was the last to be published in Lispector's lifetime (though not the last to be written). By virtue of her death from ovarian cancer at the age of 57, we are forced to see this as a work from her "late period". However, as one reads the pages of this novel, filled with blood-red living prose so different from her previous works, one can get the sense of a Lispector entering a new period, a Lispector being reborn ["(...) in the agony of pleasure that is death. I, who symbolically die several times just to experience the resurrection."]. God knows what else she could have written, and what else the world missed out on, after this and her "Breath of Life".
As if guided by premonition, she writes: "For at the hour of death a person becomes a shining movie star (...)".
Following her untimely death, Clarice Lispector is survived by her many works of fiction (this ranking to be amongst her finest) that continue to captivate readers and influence authors around the world. Do not walk, run and get this book: it's amazing.