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The Hour of the Star

by Lispector, Clarice
The Hour of the Star

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  • Synopses & Reviews

ISBN13: 9780811219495
ISBN10: 0811219496
Condition: Standard


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From Powells.com

25 Women to Read Before You Die

The writers your life won't be complete without.


Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments

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

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

Review

"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." Vanity Fair

Review

"A genius of character and a literary magician. Lispector is the premier Latin American woman prose writer of this century.In less than one hundred pages, Clarice Lispector tells a brilliantly multi-faceted and searing story." Jesse Larsen

Review

"A truly remarkable writer." Saturday Review

Review

"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

Review

"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." Vanity Fair

Review

"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." Jeff Brewer Critical Mob

Review

"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." Saturday Review

Review

"A truly remarkable writer." The New Inquiry

Review

"Lispector is the premier Latin American woman prose writer of this century." The New York Times

Synopsis

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

About the Author

Clarice Lispector (1925-1977), the author of such works as Near to the Wild Heart, The Hour of the Star, and The Passion According to G. H., is the internationally acclaimed novelist and short-story writer from Brazil and the subject of Benjamin Moser's magisterial biography Why This World.Series editor Benjamin Moser, who contributes afterwords for all four of these new translations, is the author of Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, due out in paperback from Oxford University Press in May 2012. He also just completed a new translation of Lispector's The Hour of the Star.The Irish author Colm Tóibín's most recent novel, the bestselling Brooklyn, won the 2010 Costa Fiction Award.

5 1

What Our Readers Are Saying

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Average customer rating 5 (1 comments)

`
Book Keeper , March 11, 2012
Take Borges, Kafka, or Calvino; mix in Woolf and Duras �" add an all-consuming passion �" and you will have Clarice Lispector. A Brazilian writer who looks like Marlene Deitrich. This book carried me away from the real world; down and through labyrinths of emotion from tears to joy and back again. She gives you everything, doesn't hold back, she doesn't just "tell" a story, she grabs you by the throat and submerges you into her world completely. Erotic, intuitive, magical her style is utterly refreshing! This book was a life changing experience in ways I haven't experienced since reading Virginia Woolf. I can't say enough good stuff about it, nor can I wait to read another by her!!

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Product Details

ISBN:
9780811219495
Binding:
Trade Paperback
Publication date:
11/09/2011
Publisher:
NEW DIRECTIONS
Pages:
128
Height:
.30IN
Width:
5.20IN
Thickness:
.25
Illustration:
Yes
Copyright Year:
2011
Author:
Clarice Lispector
Author:
Colm Toibin
Intro:
Colm T?ib?n
Intro:
Colm Tib-N
Author:
Benjamin Moser
Subject:
Literature-A to Z

Ships free on qualified orders.
Add to Cart
$8.95
List Price:$12.95
Used Trade Paperback
Ships in 1 to 3 days
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