The Hour of the Star was the first book chosen for PEN Reads.

*Commenters: if you would like a free copy of Clarice Lispector’s Selected Cronicas, please e-mail us.*

We just watched the movie last night. I like Jaime Manrique's observations. I just wanted to add that the film felt stage-like, like I was watching a live performance. Perhaps many novels are not suitable for the screen, or are difficult to recreate for the screen. However, Amaral's choices for this film may convince me that more novels can be adapted to film even better if they remain commited to giving this stage-like quality???

For such a short book (a novella, really), The Hour of the Star challenged me as a reader more than most other books I've read this year. Its blatant refusal to cooperate as a narrative, and its rejection of the codes and conventions typically found in fiction (very often drifting into philosophical digressions, to the point where these tangents form the majority of the text) are almost enough to throw one out of the book itself. The role of the narrator, and the writing process itself, constantly intrudes into the story, and at times I just wished that Rodrigo S.M. would shut up and get it on with it already. But Macabéa, poor Macabéa, is compelling enough in her simplicity and ugliness to keep one interested, even as she progresses toward her inevitable fate.

Also recognizing that clarity isn't reductive; it sharpens our vision and engages our understanding.

So, basically, the problem with "The Hour of the Star" is a lack of clarity.

Meaning, whether in fiction or non-fiction is conveyed by language. For instance, words may clearly convey an author's impression of Emma Bovary's eyes..even if he is confused or uncertain. Clarity of expression here is not identical with "certainty" of fact, but of what the author intends to communicate...how he sees that fact.

Perhaps we should replace the word "rationality" with clarity of communication--the effective use of language to convey an idea or feeling. Even ambiguous feelings must be framed in language that expresses that ambiguity.

I think the issue of “rationality” may have more to do with a fiction/non-fiction divide than “literate” and a “post-literate” one, as if the rationality of fiction and the "rationality of fiction" were two different orders of rationality. I’m thinking here of an article by U. Eco a few issues back in the PEN magazine, where he argues that fiction allows for certainty in a way that non-fiction doesn’t (e.g. the color of Emma Bovary’s eyes). And while the distinction between a certainty interior to fiction and one exterior to it may “complexify” our notion of rationality, the complexification in question —to pick up on a thought suggested by DeMan in his essay on the “task” of the translator—may have more to do with a human/non-human difference interior (exterior) to language.

We live increasingly in cyberspace where the image, the icon dominates. Increasingly, the term "rational" has developed a pejorative meaning...as if it constricts reality. Vagueness and lack of clarity are seen as "complexity".

Should we be worried that perhaps there is a connection here with the decline in reading? Or should we view it favorably as progress toward a more spontaneous, postliterate society?

I was more drawn by the narrator's voice than by the character of Macabea, whom I found rather simplistically drawn. And for such a thin book it took a while to get through: it was not the story that kept pulling me back but the otherworldly voice of the narrator. Still, the interplay between the narrator's surprising interventions, shifting consciousness (often having nothing to do with the story) and the character's destiny was fascinating in its way. I agree that this is mainly a story about the process of artistic creation. The arbitrary nature of Macabea's death also mirrors the arbitrary attack of cancer on the author, who wrote this as she was ailing-- isn't that right? Let's not forget that she was probably contemplating her own death while limning that of an anonymous poor office girl.

"You might even want to watch the film first before you read the book." Indeed! And how rarely one can say that. This film really is a stunning example of how adaptation can work to open the novelist's world to us.

I mistakenly credited Colm Toibin with Jaime Manrique's commentary on the film version of Lispector's book.
Sorry!

The film, "A Hora da Estrela," which was made a quarter century ago by a Brazilian NYU film school graduate, Suzana Amaral, is definitely worth seeing. It conventionalizes Lispector's book by providing a third-person perspective and a neorealist take on Macabea's misadventures in the urban jungle of São Paulo but, as Colm Toibin pointed out, it is made unforgettable by a performance of astonishing courage and Artaudian directness. Marcélia Cartaxo's Macabea is very real and very sad. As is José Dumont's Olímpico. Perhaps Amaral intuited these two oppressed characters as the crux of Lispector's purposefully oppressive book. The result is a very Brazilian take on a reality that endures there and is now also evident in most North American cities.

Unlike most of us here, I found this book to be very disappointing and also very pretentious. It took real effort for me to read through this short book. Not funny, not insightful (about women, poverty, love or the writing process), not engaging. For sheer pretension it's hard to beat the paragraph that begins: "My strength undoubtedly resides in solitude. I am not afraid of tempestuous storms or violent gales for I am also the night's darkness. . . One never forgets a person with whom one has slept. The event remains branded on one's living flesh like a tattoo and all who witness the stigma take flight in horror." This is not only pretentious, it also untrue. No, I don't think it's a cunning way to define the narrator; I think it's evidence of the author's deficits.

Colm Toibin quoted from a letter Elizabeth Bishop wrote to Robert Lowell in January 1963 this observation: "Her novels are NOT good...but in the stories she has awfully good things..."
Ben Moser quotes her as writing to Lowell: "...that she was a greater writer than Borges".
Did she change her mind? Can anyone clarify this?

It seems to me that unordered emotion possesses less power to move the reader to a deeply felt response--not more. But maybe that's a thought (!) that antedates the recent "tea Party" ability to cue its listeners to murky responses.

Let's not indict English literature for lacking this talent.

It's heartening to see a biography of Lispector, whose work I've found, for some time, truly magical (even in the English translations I have to resort to). Her work has been for me a welcome challenge, writing that is not subject to the overly rational & simplistic worldview of so much Anglo-American literature that dominates what is published in the English language.

I'm with Edith...and I'm only halfway through! I mean, shouldn't the book's 13 subtitles have been a dead giveaway?

Living life in slooow mooootion...life was happy, springing through the stones...the four Marías--"María de la Peña, María Aparecida, María José y María a secas" (and just plain ol' María)...she never went to restaurants because she had the vague idea that a women who went to a restaurant had to be French and easy...she only had to see him for him to instantly become her guava and cheese...Jesus was a man just like him, but without the golden tooth..."My saintly mother died"..."Of what?"..."Of nothing. Her health just ended"...etc...

I'm reading it a bit at a time because I don't want it to end. :)

Nobody seems to have noticed how truly funny this book is (Bang). I laughed out loud at least a dozen times. Perhaps because I'm a writer, and this book is about writing,
and not really about Macabea at all, but about the writer's struggle to make something out of almost nothing.

"If I continue to write, it's because I have nothing more to accomplish in this world except to wait for death." (The Hour of the Star, p.70)

This reminds me of Derrida's comment in GLAS that to say "I am" is the same as saying "I am dead" or "I am therefore dead."

Reason and emotion always work together even in literature although not necessarily in an obvious way.
I can write as though I were confused in a way that would yield insights. If I were confused my writing might be authentic--and even moving--but it would ramble on without insight. Reason works to control the content, even if it is absent from that content.
My point: I believe that Lispector lacks (not education or talent) but the insight to control her material.

This book didn't resonate for me -- it really feels like a case where something was lost in translation (more so than usual). I didn't feel sympathy for the girl -- even feeling a bit of disdain. Perhaps then, it is the reader's reaction -- their likely antipathy -- that is really the centerpiece of this story.

Also, regarding Toibin's essay, I get the sense this all so much inside baseball -- something that is interesting to someone in the profession, but doesn't make the leap to common conversation. You see this with directors recommending obscure films, because the ones who make the recommendation understand something about the mechanics and process that the average filmgoer does not.

Many books reward a difficult or elusive narrative. I find Hour of the Star ultimately penalizes the reader.

I read this book in one sitting and felt that the writing was essential to the sotry itself; Lispector clearly wants the reader to grasp the new face of poverty - the concept that our heroine is not unique but rather simple showcases the notion that any of us could be in this place. Being forced out of my typical literary comfort zone allowed me to empathize with the Macabea's plight and question the narrator's point of view. Lispector's unique narrative pushes the reader to a new and discomforting place that forces us to recognize our own inhumanity.

I feel very happy to see Clarice's work translated into different languages, challenging foreign minds. It's interesting to observe how readers who have English as their first language usually struggle (and sometimes fight) with the way those using a romantic language as their medium can easily slip out of sequentiality and/or certain expected premises of what we define as "good fiction" and yet create great fiction. Clarice is not mysterious or (worse) obscure, she is intense. She never produced absurd or incoherent literature. She simply lived her writing like few did. Whoever appreciates the work of Virginia Woolf will have no problem understanding, and appreciating, Clarice's oeuvre.

Even those of us who don't believe in "rigid sequential logic" can still identify unsound thinking. It troubles me that I can't find the enthusiasm so many of you (and many critics) express. So...I have just read another of her books: The Passion According to G.H. Alas, that didn't help at all.

In it, there is a type of Black Mass that features a spider as the Host, and a seriously debased Spinoza-like view of the world that would make even an unbeliever cringe. The sweep of her emotional prose cannot carry me past such twisted thoughts. Is no one else upset by this? Maybe I should try her stories.

Andre's comment about character negotiation within complex fictional fields is compelling and illuminating (also succinctly stated), among other fine observations here (thanks, Rebecca Jane).

I admire the drama inherent in the narrative structure of The Hour of the Star—perhaps this touches on the concept of internal borders—in which the subjectified characters, particularly Macabea, are ultimately inscrutable to the writer character, whose powers of description, concentration and observation are limited in a way that Lispector's are not (though they share an aversion to rigid sequential logic).

Thanks to PEN and Colm for starting the discussion!

I often think that in some modernist fiction the "absurd" has become an umbrella term that not only explains away the need for explanation, but represents itself as that very explanation.
In any case, in modernist fiction too, a distinction must be made between incoherence and the absurd--where the absurd does have significance.
I should make it clear once again that it is only this particular book of Lispector's that I am criticizing...and I do realize that we all respond differently.

What struck me as quite beautiful about this book is the way in which it delineates two distinct, well-defined characters within separate, contiguous, heterogeneous fictional fields, as if within different parts of a single mind that is not necessarily the author's.

Excellent observations, Rebecca!

I'm reading the Spanish translation by Ana Poljak and am really enjoying it. The narrator's writing mirrors the way thought works...so in that sense, it seems a bit modernist to me.

"Discúlpenme, pero voy a seguir hablando de mí, que soy mi desconocido, y al escribir me sorprendo un poco porque he descubierto que tengo un destino. Quién no se ha preguntado: ¿soy un monstruo o esto es ser una persona?" (17)

I love her take on writing as a process of discovery.

The French theorist, Helene Cixous has exciting things to say about Lispector's work in the foreword to Lispector's prose poem Aqua Viva (The Stream of Life). Of that stream of consciousness work, Cixous says Lispector does not formally construct a text with beginning, middle, end; the narrative contains, "no external borders" but many "internal borders." For me, this illuminated some of what Lispector is attempting in The Hour of the Star. Through the narrator, Rodrigo S.M., Lispector seems to be revealing what one particular writer / narrator goes through in her / his mind when attempting to tell a story in the novel form, how a narrator "enters" the mind and life of a character. Perhaps she's a puppet master who allows the strings to show and even delights in it? She is playing with border between narrator and main character.

It's not a question of her education or talent, or the value of her earlier work. In this work, which disappointed me, she seems to have a mind that's too troubled to compose clearly (as her "erratic behavior" indeed suggests.)

Sometimes, the body intuits what a doctor has yet to communicate. I know.

Una novela difícil, con un personaje sencillo, como Macabea.
La complejidad está en el narrador, ¿quizá la misma autora?.

Pienso que sí; es ella la que se plantea las preguntas sobre el mundo, los seres humanos, el amor, la simplicidad de un personaje como la joven, y el rechazo de la sencillez por el ambicioso Olímpico.

I had the impression that while Macabea's story is simple, her existence is not. It's not that the narrator was an inept writer but rather that the story he's compelled to tell is far too complex to be adequately expressed in words.

Frieda, I bet Lispector did have that view of the world. The narrator seems like a thinly-veiled Lispector, and from what I've read about her (including this Colm Toibin essay) it seems she too was also grappling with her position in a complex world. Her erratic behavior--disappearing for weeks at a time, rarely granting interviews, neglecting appointments--suggest impulsiveness in a world of uncertainty, for somebody who was content with the world would just be.

"...she’s the most non-literary writer I’ve ever known, and “never cracks a book” as we used to say. She’s never read anything, that I can discover—I think she’s a “self-taught” writer, like a primitive painter.’
I have trouble squaring this quote from Elizabeth Bishop with the Wikipedia account that states;
"While in law school in Rio she began publishing her first journalistic work and short stories, catapulting to fame at age 23 with the publication of her first novel, Near to the Wild Heart (Perto do Coração Selvagem), written as an interior monologue in a style and language that was considered revolutionary in Brazil."
She was clearly educated, literary, had read and written and published by the age of 23. The mystique about her seems over romanticized and unnecessary - the book's remarkable sensibility stands on its own.

It often reads like free association with drifting philosophical tags. Am I missing something? The writer creates a reality that he disclaims responsibility for...like the idea of a god who lacks the will or vocation for his job. Does this mirror Lispector's view of the world?