Hour of the Star

Living in the slums of Rio and eking out a living as a typist, Macaba loves movies, Coca-Cola and her philandering rat of a boyfriend; she would like to be like Marilyn Monroe, but she is ugly, underfed, sickly and unloved. She has no future, and no sense of who she is. For her, reality is ‘too enormous to grasp.’ Yet telling her story is the narrator Rodrigo S.M., who tries to direct Macaba’s fate but comes to realize that, for all her outward misery, she is inwardly free. Slyly subverting ideas of poverty, identity, love and the art of writing itself, Clarice Lispector’s audacious last novel is a haunting portrayal of innocence in a bad world.

Translated by Benjamin Moser
With an Introduction by Colm Tibn