Hour of the Star     by Clarice Lispector, Translated by Giovanni Pontiero Original title: A Hora da estrela Original language: Portuguese Published by Carcanet Pub. Date: February 14, 1992 Pub. Place: UK Format: Paperback, 96 pages ISBN: 0856359890 List Price: £5.95 Not available for ordering Published by New Directions Publishing Corporation Pub. Date: 1992 Format: Paperback, 96 pages Dimensions: (in inches): 0.29 x 8.03 x 5.41 ISBN: 0811211908 Edition: REISSUE List Price: $8.95 Buy online from Amazon.com for $8.95

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The great Clarice Lispector’s last book, published in the year of her death in early middle age. Her respected translator Giovanni Pontiero said she ’narrates from within’; a way of suggesting her astonishing ability to create intimacy with her readers, not through the gossipy divulgation of real or faked personal trivia, but an intimacy based on mastery of what she is saying combined with heart. Heart that is not just that engaging Brazilian humanness but, in her tenderness for children, animals, hurt souls there is something of her Jewish background too.

Hour of the Star, the story of poor Macabéa, a girl with no real talents, accomplishments or gifts — except her ability to accept humility and humiliation as if they were entirely natural things — is Clarice’s testament for many reasons. Partly because it hits that fundamental question in Brazil and elsewhere; Do you care? Also because in it she succeeds so well with her ideas about writing and her ideas about life, about women’s lives, about Brazil. In Macabéa, immortalized in a brilliant film directed by Suzana Amaral, she has created a character whose life was a kind of opposite to her own — Lispector herself was a successful writer and the beautiful, cosmopolitan wife of a diplomat — and she has used her sympathy and writerly talent in a marvellous piece of observation and creation.

Hour of the Star begins with a dialogue with the reader so that when the ’facts of the case’ (as Macabéa’s life and past is revealed) become known, the trust previously created makes them rebound in the reader’s thoughts. Clarice Lispector does not write from a great distance but whispers in your ear and Macabéa, who is at one extreme of the human condition where ’sadness was a luxury’ reaches us as all the more human for that.

Reading the book is not a sad experience as it is often appallingly funny; all Macabea’s conversational tidbits and world-view are supplied by ’Radio Clock’, a downmarket FM station that intersperses a constant stream of time announcements with the kind of desperate ’interesting facts’ only Radio DJs know. Hour of the Star is quite possibly the best Brazilian book ever translated into English, appalling, delightful, accessible but radical and brilliantly accomplished.

[Macabéa is talking to her unpleasant, dismissive boyfriend, Olímpico]

’When she realized that her remark about the animals displeased Olímpico, she tried to change the topic of conversation:

"On Radio Clock they used a word that worried me: mimetism."

Olímpico eyed her disapprovingly:

"That’s not a nice word for a virgin to be using. Why do you have to keep on asking questions about things that don’t concern you? The brothels in the Mangue are full of women who asked far too many questions."

"Is the Mangue a district?"

"It’s an evil place frequented only by men. This won’t sink in, but I’m going to tell you something. A chap can still get a woman on the cheap. You’ve only cost me a coffee so far. That’s your lot. I won’t be wasting any more money buying you things. Is that clear."

Macabéa thought to herself: he’s right. I don’t deserve anything from him because I’ve wet my knickers.’ p55