Clarice Lispector

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 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 leaves us deep in Lispector territory indeed.

The Hour of the Star: 100th Anniversary Edition

taylor miles hopkins

I also know about things because I'm alive. Everyone alive knows, even if they dont know they know. So you gentlemen know more than you think and are just pretending not to.

…I’ll try contrary to my normal habits to write a story with a beginning, middle and grand finale" followed by silence and falling rain.

I know splendid acdjectives, meaty nouns, and verbs so slender that they travel sharp through the air about to go into action, since words are actions, dont you agree? 

 Who hasnt ever wondered: am l a monster or is this what it means to be a person.

who am I creates a need. And how can you satisty that need? Those who wonder are incomplete.

we live exclusively in the present because it is always eternally today and tomorrow will be a today, eternity is the state of things at this very moment.

I forgot to mention that for the time being I read nothing for fear of polluting the simplicity of my language with luxuries…Or am I not a writer? Actually I'm more of an actor be cause with only one way to punctuate, I juggle with intonation and force another's breathing to accompany my texXt.

Meanwhile the clouds are white and the sky is all blue. Why so much God. Why not a little for men.

Before her birth was she an idea? Before her birth was she dead? And after her birth she would die? What a thin slice of watermelon.

The Hour of the Star: 100th Anniversary Edition quotes

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