The Hour of the Star
— 1977 —
New York: New Directions, 2011; translated from the Portuguese by Benjamin Moser with an introduction by Colm Tóibín; 77 pages; originally published as A hora da estrela in 1977
FIRST LINES
All the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born. But before prehistory there was the prehistory of prehistory and there was the never and there was the yes. It was ever so. I don’t know why, but I do know that the universe never began.
Make no mistake, I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort.
PLOT SUMMARY
This novella opens like the Prelude to the Gospel of John rendered by Samuel Beckett or James Joyce. Get the picture? This is tricky. It is also one of the most dazzling and intriguing works included here.
A simple plot summary dodges the fact that we are inside a dizzying and sometimes-puzzling world, guided by a literary voice that critics have placed beside those of Kafka and other modernist giants. The Hour of the Star is, in fact, a novel-within-a-novel, narrated by a man named Rodrigo S.M., who is writing a novel—or trying to—about a young woman:
To draw the girl I have to get a grip on myself and to capture her soul I have to feed myself frugally with fruits and drink iced white wine because it’s hot in this cubbyhole…. I’ve also had to give up sex and soccer.
The narrative shifts abruptly between Rodrigo’s struggles to write and scenes of his character, Macabéa, a poor typist who rooms with four other women in a Rio de Janeiro slum. Underfed and sickly, she lives on Coca-Cola and hot dogs. The story is comically punctuated by Rodrigo’s difficulties in telling Macabéa’s tale.
After losing a would-be boyfriend, Macabéa makes her way to a fortune-teller who will read her cards. Madame Carlota delivers the news: Macabéa’s life will change completely. That is, of course, an ambiguous prediction. Will it come true?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: CLARICE LISPECTOR
Clarice Lispector was born Chaya Pinkhasovna Lispector to Jewish parents in Ukraine on December 10, 1920. It was a violent, murderous moment in Ukraine’s history, ending in the Soviet takeover of the country. According to her biographer Benjamin Moser:
It was a time of chaos, famine, and racial war. Her grandfather was murdered; her mother was raped; her father was exiled, penniless, to the other side of the world. The family’s tattered remnants washed up in northeastern Brazil, in 1922. There, her brilliant father, reduced to peddling rags, barely managed to keep his family fed; there, when Clarice was not quite nine, her mother died of her wartime injuries.
In Recife, in northeastern Brazil, Lispector and her two sisters were raised by their father, who later moved the family to Rio de Janeiro. After reading Hermann Hesse at thirteen, Lispector decided to become a writer. Although she later graduated from a prestigious Brazilian law school—rare for women, rarer still for Jewish women—she worked as a journalist and began to publish short stories in journals.
Her first novel, Near to the Wild Heart, was published in 1943 and evoked comparisons to James Joyce, a writer Lispector had not yet read. By the time the book appeared, Lispector had married Maury Gurgel Valente, a Brazilian diplomat. For the next fifteen years, she accompanied him—later with their two sons—to a series of posts in Italy, Switzerland, England, and eventually Washington, D.C. Hating the role of the diplomat’s wife and missing Brazil, she chose to break from the life.
Separating from her husband in 1959, Lispector returned with her sons to Rio. Taking odd jobs and doing translation work to survive, she also wrote a woman’s advice column under a pseudonym. A collection of stories, Family Ties (1960), was followed by two novels, and one of these, The Apple in the Dark (1961), was released in the United States in 1967 in translation by Gregory Rabassa, a prominent American translator.
Rabassa later commented that Lispector “looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf”—a frequently quoted appraisal that appears on the book’s jacket but which, according to the New York Times, Lispector found sexist. The Times reported:
“I don’t like when they say that I have an affinity with Virginia Woolf,” Lispector also wrote in one column, adding that she had encountered Woolf’s work only after her own first novel was published. “I don’t want to forgive her for committing suicide. The terrible duty is to go to the end.”
Her next novel, The Passion According to G.H. (1964), was a journey into the landscape of the absurd, a meditation narrated by a woman who crushes a cockroach. Around this time, the American writer Elizabeth Bishop was in Brazil and became aware of Lispector’s work, which she began to translate, commenting, “—I think she’s a ‘self-taught’ writer, like a primitive painter.”
After taking some sleeping pills in 1966, Lispector fell asleep while smoking and was badly burned in a fire, nearly losing a hand. Undeterred, she continued to write fiction, a children’s book, and newspaper columns and became increasingly political, demonstrating against the Brazilian military dictatorship. In 1973, Lispector lost her newspaper job and fell back on writing and translating. The Hour of the Star was published in 1977 and, soon after, Lispector was diagnosed with inoperable ovarian cancer. Clarice Lispector died on December 9, 1977, on the eve of her fifty-seventh birthday. Her death went unnoticed by the New York Times.
In 2009, Benjamin Moser’s critically acclaimed biography, Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector—a New York Times Notable Book of 2009—drew American attention to the life and work of a writer idolized in Brazil. It was followed by new translations of her books and more attention. The Times corrected its oversight in 2020 with a belated obituary.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ IT
While The Hour of the Star is a complex story that makes certain demands of the reader, it is also a book in which you can abandon yourself. Move away from the simple desire to follow a linear narrative and get caught up in Lispector’s “color outside the lines” vision and style, reflected in the voice of Rodrigo and his character; surrender and go with the flow. Lispector works experimentally with a haunting, hypnotic flair and the story builds to a dazzling conclusion.
Lispector explores the very complexity of literary creation. But this is not an academic’s arduous musings. She takes the reader on a roller-coaster ride. It is a wild and unpredictable outing, and elements of Macabéa’s life that might seem pathetic, if not tragic, are also very funny in Lispector’s hands. In his introduction to the novella, novelist Colm Tóibín comments that the book “moves from a deep awareness about the tragedy of being alive to a sly allowance for the fact that existence is a comedy.”
WHAT TO READ NEXT
Many of Clarice Lispector’s books have been reissued in new English translations. If you like short stories, try Lispector’s eighty-six pieces published in The Complete Stories. Prefer longer work? Her first novel, Near to the Wild Heart, introduced the literary world to what one Brazilian colleague at the time called “Hurricane Clarice.” With its stream-of-consciousness techniques, the book won Brazil’s award for best debut novel in 1943 and makes a good starting point. Perhaps her other most acclaimed work is The Passion According to G.H., in which a well-to-do sculptress enters her maid’s room, sees a cockroach crawling out of the wardrobe, and, panicking, slams the door on it.
A cockroach. Yes, it is Kafka territory.