An author tries to tell the story of a poor young woman called Macabeá, who despite her wretched circumstances does not seem to understand how unhappy she should be.
I picked this book because I read a review by someone else on Goodreads that said this is a bit like if Sybil Trelawney from Harry Potter wrote a book, though I will argue after reading that Lispector, unlike Trelawney, knows exactly what she’s about. (The other thing I know about Lispector is that she wrote a book in which the only real action occurs when the protagonist eats a cockroach, but that’s neither here nor there.)
This book is hard to really dig into because it’s a very short book and there’s not much of a plot – just an exploration of the life of Macabeá as it slowly takes shape under the hand of the writer. You sort of glide along, watching this author try to work at it in fits and starts, and almost without noticing Macabeá begins to form there in front of you, the story gaining some sort of life, if not vitality, and then –
It’s often humorous and often melancholy, and those two emotions feed into each other and are often the same thing in different skins. It’s an exploration of futility, but strangely I did not find myself demoralized at the end of the story. Some people have complained about Lispector’s unusual sentence structures and grammatical, but I found it really very readable, and appreciated that the translator preserved her original intent. I will have to read this book again.
