The Hour of the Star

25 Women to Read Before You Die

The writers your life won't be complete without.

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.

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

"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

"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

"A truly remarkable writer." Saturday 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

"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

"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

"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

"A truly remarkable writer." The New Inquiry

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

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

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.