The Hour of the Star - Clarice Lispector

The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector / ISBN 9780811230049 / a 128-page hardcover from New Directions *** Clarice Lispector’s best-selling masterpiece―“her finest book” (The Nation)―now in a special hardcover edition to celebrate the centenary of her birth, with an illuminating new afterword by her son The Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector’s consummate final novel, may well be her masterpiece. 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-Cola, 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. As Macabéa heads toward her absurd death, Lispector e