The Hour of the Star is narrated by the cosmopolitan Rodrigo S.M., whose story concerns 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 cannot avoid the realisation that for all her outward misery, Macabéa is inwardly free.
My Review
This is genuinely one of the strangest things I have ever read.
The Hour of the Star is less than a hundred pages long and contains almost no plot. The narrator, a cosmopolitan male writer named Rodrigo, spends a significant portion of the book talking about himself and his struggles to tell Macabéa’s story before we know much about Macabéa at all. She is a typist from the rural Northeast living in a Rio slum, underfed and unloved, who loves Coca-Cola and Marilyn Monroe and has no particular idea how miserable her circumstances are. Rodrigo finds her both repellent and fascinating. Lispector finds her, through him, endlessly interesting.
The prose is unlike anything I have read before, and apparently that strangeness is not a translation artefact. It sounds this way in the original Portuguese too. Literary conventions were not something Lispector felt particularly bound by, and you feel that on every sentence. There is something genuinely, uncomfortably alive about the writing, even when I found the narrator irritating and the structure deliberately resistant.
My problem is that the resistance mostly worked against my investment rather than deepening it. I could feel the weight of what Lispector was doing, the way she uses Rodrigo’s condescension to expose something real about how the comfortable look at the poor, the way Macabéa’s unknowing freedom becomes its own kind of critique. I understood it. I just did not feel it land the way I suspect it should.
Three stars, and I suspect this is a book that would reward a second reading more than most. I am not sure I will give it one, but I am not ruling it out either.