Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
"In less than one hundred pages, Clarice Lispector tells a brilliantly multi-faceted and searing story." Jesse Larsen
Synopsis
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.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.
Synopsis
The Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector's consummate final novel, may well be her masterpiece.
About the Author
Clarice Lispector (1925-1977) has come to be considered the most important woman writer in contemporary Brazilian letters. The author of seven novels and short-story collections as well as children's books, her translated work — into Czech, Spanish, French, German and English — has gained her a strong international reputation.