The Hour of the Star (Second Edition) [Paperback]

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

Book Description

Publication Date: November 9, 2011 | ISBN-10: 0811219496 | ISBN-13: 978-0811219495 | Edition: Second Edition

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The narrative material of this short, almost weightless tale by the late Brazilian writer (19251977) is reminiscent of old-fashioned naturalism, but the intention is far from that. Macabea, a young woman from the backwoods, arrives in bewildering Rio. Homely, ignorant, without skills or experience, she lodges in a shabby tenement in a squalid red-light district. Her transient boyfriend, a strutting lout and sham, soon abandons her. After a time, Macabea is struck down by a Mercedes and killed: an obscure life, a banal death. The author's presence is continuously feltthe narrator-of-record is a mere front for itand it is here that the work goes awry. The nagging voice attempts to elevate Macabea's little life to nobility and religious significancebut to no avail. And the modish commentary on novelistic method amounts to little more than affectation.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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 )

“If she does — dare I say it? — touch you, she touches you like nothing else you’ve ever read.” (Benjamin Mosher - Vanity Fair )

“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 )

“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 )

“A truly remarkable writer.” (Jonathan Franzen )

“A genius of character and a literary magician.” (Publishers Weekly )

“Lispector is the premier Latin American woman prose writer of this century.” (The New York Times )

“In less than one hundred pages, Clarice Lispector tells a brilliantly multi-faceted and searing story.” (Jesse Larsen - 500 Great Books by Women )

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 128 pages
• Publisher: New Directions; Second Edition edition (November 9, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811219496
• ISBN-13: 978-0811219495
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.1 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #45,640 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars College assignment became my favorite book., March 14, 2002

By 

K. Levin (Oregon & Massachusetts) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Hour of the Star (New Directions Paperbook) (Paperback)

I am an avid reader with many "favorites," but for years now, this is the book I call my Favorite.

"The Hour of the Star" is special because it works on all levels. The story is compelling. We feel we know the characters and we want to know what happens to them.

But the use of words is Lispector's genius-lyrical, evocative, and perfect.

This is the book I lend to artist friends to show them a masterpiece of words. Any aspiring author will find in "The Hour of the Star" proof that-yes! One can achieve writing in its highest form.

God bless my college professor who assigned this work. It provided me with my most inspired term paper ever, and it has benefited my personal and professional life.

(Because the book is so short, I was able to spend one afternoon on the beach with my future husband, reading it to him in its entirety. At least one of us wept.)

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Hour of the Star: Clarice's remarkable sensibility, June 23, 2000

By 

Renato Pereira - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Hour of the Star (New Directions Paperbook) (Paperback)

This fantastic work analyzes the meaningless life of a pitiful character, Macabéia, who used to think that since she was alive, she had to live. Life was not something questionable for this character who would accept everything too easily. The whole story is a journey through Macabéia's existence, an everlasting search for the real significance of her living in this world. It is definitely a passionate narrative leading us into examining whether we truly know how to conduct our own lives before it's too late.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Ontological WOW!, November 8, 2009

By 

Sam A. Mawn-Mahlau (Winchester, MA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Hour of the Star (New Directions Paperbook) (Paperback)

This is really a very serious Nietzschean essay on Ontology, sans the uber-machismo but with a deft and well-meant humour, masquerading as a simple little story. Clarice Lispector, our author, is facing her death, and, working through a narrator who may or may not exist, looks into the eyes of a trod upon and anonymous young woman who may exist as an individual or a type and who may or may not be in the narrator's literal or figurative employ, and sees in those eyes her best answer to the questions of being and nothingness that so trouble the philosophical.

Set aside the Sartre, the Heidegger, the Wittgenstein, with all their big words (her narrator emphasizes repeatedly that he has banned big words). Forget about all the twisted logic used to figure out how we know about our own existence and what its purpose may be. If there is a reason, something more than pure brute instinct, for an ugly little waif from the poorest part of Brazil to exist, perhaps even to live, there is a reason for all of us to live. And so, in the midst of life in the mud, and, quite literally, death in the mud, Clarice gives us reason to live. And while she does this, she struggles to release us from the trap of a language that defines us. Each reader can figure out whether she succeeds. Success may or may not be important.

All of this is done through a style dominated by simple aphorisms (thus the Nietzschean - it's the only comparison I can think of) and a straightforward story line. No big words. Individually, her aphorisms are banal. Combined, they are profound.

Clarice Lispector weaves together metaphorical rags.

All I can say about the result: Wow.