The Hour of the Star

by Clarice Lispector, Benjamin Moser (Translator), Colm Tóibín (Introduction)

Overview

A new edition of Clarice Lispector’s final masterpiece, now with a vivid introduction by Colm Tóibín.

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-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, Macabéa 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811219495
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	11/09/2011
Edition description:	Second Edition
Pages:	128
Sales rank:	95,015
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

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).

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.

Colm Tóibín is currently the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman professor of the humanities at Columbia University and succeeded Martin Amis as professor of creative writing at the University of Manchester.

What People are Saying About This

Katherine Boo

I felt physically jolted by genius.

Jonathan Franzen

A truly remarkable writer.

Editorial Reviews

"A new translation of Clarice Lispector’s searing last novel, The Hour of the Star by Lispector biographer Benjamin Moser—with an introduction by Colm Tóibín—reveals the mesmerizing force of the revitalized modernist’s Rio-set tale of a young naïf, who, along with the piquantly intrusive narrator, challenges the reader’s notions of identity, storytelling, and love."

Vogue.com

"In this slim novella, Lispector uses an intricate narrative structure in order to represent a peculiar state of mind. Rodrigo, a well-off and cultured man, struggles to tell the story of the sad life of Macabéa, an unhygienic, sickly, unlovable, and an altogether "un-ideal" typist living in the slums of Rio de Janeiro. Although Rodrigo claims he's the only person who could love Macabéa—if only because she's the subject of his narrative—he really tells her story as a way to thwart his own isolation. Lispector employs odd sentence fragments and erratic grammatical choices to highlight the importance of imagination as a means for her characters to liberate themselves from their banal existences. Through Rodrigo's narrative, Lispector artfully ponders the fate of her characters, and their fears and desires, in a harsh and unforgiving cityscape. Startlingly original and profoundly sad, The Hour of the Star is a provocative work by a highly influential author who should be more widely read."

Critical Mob - Jeff Brewer

"The only antidote to stupidity is an agitated intelligence constantly prowling for blank spots in one’s outward seeming. The Hour of the Star is a romance, then, between stupidity and its neurotic observer, a restless stretching away from form, tradition, and the stupefying rules they impose on writing."

The New Inquiry

"The Hour of the Star trips up our concept of the novel.  What a story is expected to do.  How characters act.  Why writers write.  Why readers read.  It’s an experience you won’t forget."

Counter Punch - Charles Larson

"This text investigates the knowledge of not knowing and the rich poverty of the inner void with stratagems of obfuscation, leaps of language, and suspensions of syntax and form that are perhaps best received by the gut."

The Faster Times

"I felt physically jolted by genius."

Katherine Boo

"A truly remarkable writer."

Jonathan Franzen

"An artist of vivid imagination. If her work is thoughtful and poetic, distinguished by touching insight and human sympathy, it is also full of irony and wild humor."

Saturday Review

"If she does — dare I say it? — touch you, she touches you like nothing else you’ve ever read."

Vanity Fair - Benjamin Mosher

"This is without a doubt one of the most audacious and affecting works of fiction I've ever read."

Barnes and Noble Review

"The reader finds herself in the throes of a master, rendered speechless with awe and terror."

The Brooklyn Rail

★ 10/01/2014
The great author's last and arguably finest novel portrays an unskilled country girl trying to make a living in the big city, only to have her life ironically snuffed out.

Library Journal

Macabea is one of the great antiheroines of modern fiction...the literary discovery of the decade.

Vogue

"In less than one hundred pages, Clarice Lispector tells a brilliantly multi-faceted and searing story."

500 Great Books by Women - Jesse Larsen

"Clarice Lispector is the premier Latin American woman prose writer of this century. She is studied by the scholars, but has never managed to reach the reading public. The Hour of the Star could change all that."

The New York Times

"Every page vibrates with feeling. It’s not enough to say that Lispector bends language or uses words in new ways. Plenty of modernists do that. No one else writes prose this rich."

NPR - Lily Meyer

"Sphinx, sorceress, sacred monster. The revival of the hypnotic Clarice Lispector has been one of the true literary events of the twenty-first century."

The New York Times - Parul Sehgal

"This new translation of The Hour of the Star reveals the mesmerizing force of the revitalized modernist’s Rio-set tale of a young naif, who, along with the piquantly intrusive narrator, challenges the reader’s notions of identity, storytelling, and love."

Vogue - Meghan O’Grady

"Most late work has a spectral beauty, a sense of form and content dancing a slow and skillful waltz with each other. Lispector, on the other hand, as she came to the end of her life, wrote as though her life was beginning, with a sense of a need to stir and shake narrative itself to see where it might take her, as the bewildered and original writer that she was, and us, her bewildered and excited readers."

Colm Tóibín

"I’m really obsessed by this writer from Brazil, Clarice Lispector. I love her because she writes whole novels where not one thing happens—she describes the air. I think she’s such a great, great novelist."

John Waters