Hour of the Star

Clarice Lispectors best-selling masterpieceher finest book (The Nation)now in a special hardcover edition to celebrate the centenary of her birth, with an illuminating new afterword by her sonThe Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispectors 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 Macaba, one of lifes unfortunates. Living in the slums of Rio and eking out a poor living as a typist, Macaba 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, Macaba is inwardly free. She doesnt seem to know how unhappy she should be. As Macaba heads toward her absurd death, Lispector employs her pathetic heroine against her urbane, empty narratoredge of despair to edge of despairand, working them like a pair of scissors, she cuts away the readers 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.