The World's Literature in Europe discussion

Her last novel The Hour of the Star /Clarice Lispector, trans Giovanni Pontiero (who also translated José Saramago), some people consider her masterpiece. The narrator Rodrigo S.M. ruminates about why and when to begin writing this story of a girl of northeastern Brazil, a malnourished, unfortunate, virginal, superstitious but irreligious, minimally educated, nineteen-year-old of the backlands, who takes a typist's job in Rio de Janeiro after her "sanctimonious", pleasure-forbidding aunt, who raised her, dies. Sounds depressing except that Macabéa doesn't realize how depressing it is nor how ill-prepared she is because of her inner life--a love of life, innocence, and trust. Bit by bit, the narrator Rodrigo starts slowly, a trait or two of Macabéa, examples of her few pleasures, her meditative nature, and her need for reassurance. Rodrigo says that he is more concerned with himself as a writer then with the telling the story. When he tentatively begins, his identity merges the heroine Macabéa and her unappreciative boyfriend Olimpico.

On page 28, a passage mentions the title, "Hour of the Star"

"No one would teach her how to die one day: yet one day she would surely die as if she had already learned by heart how to play the starring role. For at the hour of death you become a celebrated film star, it is a moment of glory for everyone, when the choral music scales the top notes."

The beginning of the novel is full of musical things from notation to radio clocks to composers. One of the next readings is her biography Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector. Perhaps in it, there's a clue to Lispector's relation to music.

The prior post left Macabéa with the routine of her typist's job, her shared bedsit with the four Marias, and his education from the Radio Clock. Finally, a day comes when she lies to the boss to earn herself a free day to do whatever she wants. The following day, May 7, she meets for the first time her boyfriend, to whom she compares to her favorite food "guava preserve with cheese". Olimpico has ambition to be a politician or a butcher; whereas Macabéa claims,

I don't have any worries. I don't need to be successful.

Neither of the two, however, can be said to understand the world. The music of Caruso's "La Furtiva Lacrima" causes her to weep; she doesn't need to understand the world to be affected by beautiful melodies.

The narrator Rodrigo, who started telling this narrative at a snail's pace, gets into full stride, characterizing the traits of Olimpico, Macabéa, and her workmate Glória, the latter's buxomness and attractive vitality pointing out all the more Macabéa's wraithlike, starving figure. The interactions among these three characters bring the story to a pivotal point for the star Macabéa, who would like to look like Marilyn Monroe but to whom hardly anyone pays attention:

...no one noticed she crossed the sound barrier with her own existence. For other people she didn't exist."

Rather, she has moments of mysticism when she comes into a state of grace.

Though Macabéa appears wraithlike and even ugly, she registers awareness of her body and soul, for example, from visits to a doctor and a clairvoyante toward the end. The latter is the story's climactic point. Indeed, page 75 says, "Madame Carlota...was to be the climax of her existence." Why? The clairvoyante foresees that Maca (the narrator's nickname for her) is about to have a completely different life of marriage, love, and fortune--"...until this moment, Macabéa had thought of herself as happy." When the real conclusion to her life comes, she regards it with acceptance and self-realization, the beginning to the answer of "Who am I"--"...my hour has come", "Today...is the dawn of my existence: I am born." The final scene also makes people stop to notice her where before they would have anonymously passed her.

The translator's Afterword discusses Lispector's writing, focusing mainly on this novel.