The Hour of the Star is a book that climbed onto this year’s TBR by the Read Harder Challenge. One of this year’s tasks is to read a work of literary fiction by a BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, and/or disabled author. So, I went to books already on my radar to see if any fit the bill and sure enough Clarice Lispector’s final book did just that (Lispector was severely injured in a fire in her 40s and nearly lost her hand). It also was a book that I had intended to read for Read Harder way back in 2015 for that year’s translated book task (originally published in Portuguese) so it fit another goal of mine to pull some books from the depths of my TBR forward.
While The Hour of the Star had been languishing on lists for a decade, I don’t know that I knew what to expect. I’m glad I read the foreword by Colm Tóibín to help level-set, as well as the endnotes by translator Benjamin Moser. I don’t read a ton of literary fiction anymore so getting into the right headspace was important. Well, at least trying to get into the right headspace.
I don’t know that I got this book (thus my three-star rating). I know what its after – Lispector pits her narrator, Rodrigo, a well-to-do Rio de Janeiro resident against Macabéa her protagonist who is a poor typist from the slums who is barely surviving. He is vapid, and empty; she enjoys small pleasures and is seemingly impervious to how terribly she should view her own life. Lispector wants us to think about how we define ourselves, what happiness is, and which type of poverty is truly the worst. With Rodrigo’s present tense narration, and Macabéa’s history presented in past tense Lispector is clearly defining a divide between them and how we should approach them. This novella length work (less than 130 pages including both foreword and endnotes) is full, each sentence constructed in ways that are unexpected (something Moser notes as working hard to keep in the translation to honor the original). The writing is unequivocally good – but I’m left feeling sluggish and middle grounded by it. Perhaps Lispector isn’t for me, but I’m glad to have dipped my toes in.
Bingo Square: TBR. This book has been hanging out on my to be read list for a decade.