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Book Cover for: The Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector

The Hour of the Star

Clarice Lispector

Paperback
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78%

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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.

Book Details

  • Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
  • Publish Date: Nov 9th, 2011
  • Pages: 128
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - 0002
  • Dimensions: 7.90in - 5.20in - 0.30in - 0.25lb
  • EAN: 9780811219495
  • Categories: • Literary• Women• Jewish

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About the Author

Lispector, Clarice: - 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).
Moser, Benjamin: - 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.
Tóibín, Colm: - 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.

More books by Clarice Lispector

Book Cover for: Água Viva, Clarice Lispector
Book Cover for: The Passion According to G.H., Clarice Lispector
Book Cover for: Near to the Wild Heart, Clarice Lispector
Book Cover for: The Hour of the Star: 100th Anniversary Edition, Clarice Lispector
Book Cover for: An Apprenticeship or the Book of Pleasures, Clarice Lispector
Book Cover for: Complete Stories, Clarice Lispector
Book Cover for: A Breath of Life: Pulsations, Clarice Lispector
Book Cover for: The Apple in the Dark, Clarice Lispector
Book Cover for: Covert Joy: Selected Stories, Clarice Lispector
Book Cover for: The Besieged City, Clarice Lispector
Book Cover for: Too Much of Life: The Complete Crônicas, Clarice Lispector
Book Cover for: Almost True, Clarice Lispector
Book Cover for: The Mystery of the Thinking Rabbit, Clarice Lispector
Book Cover for: The Chandelier, Clarice Lispector
Book Cover for: Selected Cronicas, Clarice Lispector
Book Cover for: The Woman Who Killed the Fish, Clarice Lispector

What people are saying

Mentioner image for: The Paris Review
The Paris Review
@parisreview
3 years

Quarterly literary magazine founded in 1953.

“Clarice Lispector was intimate with precarity. In her preface to ‘The Hour of the Star’ she wrote, ‘I dedicate it [this book] to the memory of my former poverty, when everything was more sober and dignified and I had never eaten lobster.’ ” https://t.co/ON5PsOpJ73

twitter.com
Mentioner image for: Rachel Mennies
Rachel Mennies
@rmennies
3 years

author of THE NAOMI LETTERS @boaeditions & THE GLAD HAND OF GOD POINTS BACKWARDS @TTUPress | reviews editor @AGNIMagazine | poetry, also prose | she/her

a big day for @AGNIMagazine reviews: *two* incredible review essays are live today, both of novels in translation. first, Abby Minor asks us "What can it mean to be passionate about nothingness?" in considering Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star: https://t.co/VqqXcrCzN0

twitter.com
Mentioner image for: Ambivert
Ambivert
@itsanambivert
1 year

An ambivert, Philanthropist and Humanitarian #Student #Sportsman #nature Lover

“Everything in the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born.” --― Clarice Lispector, "The Hour of the Star."

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Praise for this book

A truly remarkable writer.--Jonathan Franzen
I felt physically jolted by genius.--Katherine Boo
Lispector is the premier Latin American woman prose writer of this century.-- "The New York Times"
A genius of character and a literary magician.-- "Publishers Weekly"
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"
In less than one hundred pages, Clarice Lispector tells a brilliantly multi-faceted and searing story.--Jesse Larsen "500 Great Books by Women"
If she does -- dare I say it? -- touch you, she touches you like nothing else you've ever read.--Benjamin Mosher "Vanity Fair"
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"
The reader finds herself in the throes of a master, rendered speechless with awe and terror.-- "The Brooklyn Rail"
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" (12/29/2011 12:00:00 AM)
This is without a doubt one of the most audacious and affecting works of fiction I've ever read.-- "Barnes and Noble Review" (4/20/2012 12:00:00 AM)
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 naif, who, along with the piquantly intrusive narrator, challenges the reader's notions of identity, storytelling, and love.-- "Vogue.com" (11/17/2011 12:00:00 AM)
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.--Charles Larson "Counter Punch" (2/24/2012 12:00:00 AM)
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.--Jeff Brewer "Critical Mob" (2/24/2012 12:00:00 AM)

What people are saying

Mentioner image for: The Paris Review
The Paris Review
@parisreview
3 years

Quarterly literary magazine founded in 1953.

“Clarice Lispector was intimate with precarity. In her preface to ‘The Hour of the Star’ she wrote, ‘I dedicate it [this book] to the memory of my former poverty, when everything was more sober and dignified and I had never eaten lobster.’ ” https://t.co/ON5PsOpJ73

twitter.com
Mentioner image for: Rachel Mennies
Rachel Mennies
@rmennies
3 years

author of THE NAOMI LETTERS @boaeditions & THE GLAD HAND OF GOD POINTS BACKWARDS @TTUPress | reviews editor @AGNIMagazine | poetry, also prose | she/her

a big day for @AGNIMagazine reviews: *two* incredible review essays are live today, both of novels in translation. first, Abby Minor asks us "What can it mean to be passionate about nothingness?" in considering Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star: https://t.co/VqqXcrCzN0

twitter.com
See more