The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector

She is as much legend as she is fact-dark, dazzling, intense, glamorous, “the sphinx of Rio de Janeiro,” “a female Chekhov on the beaches of Guanabara.” She inspires cult-like fervor in her readers. At the age of 23, she burst onto the literary scene with the publication of Near to the Wild Heart. She was born in 1920 to a Jewish family in Ukraine and as a result of anti-Semitic violence her family fled to Brazil when she was still an infant. But maybe it also reflects the way each of us feels about our own lives.Clarice Lispector is an internationally-acclaimed author widely considered to be Brazil’s greatest modern writer and called the most important Jewish writer since Kafka. This is narrator who simultaneously seems to have absolute control over his work-peering into her bedroom, diverting the narrative with ruminations-and also so little control that he can't even decide what happens at the end. She dies, and he goes off with his philosophizing and his writing. When the car hits Macabéa, he struggles with what comes next, even declaring that 'the hour has not come for the film-star Macabéa to die' (5.438). And he also doesn't seem to have complete control over his work. Not really what you expect from a narrator. He's ambivalent about his story, unsure about his ability to write it, and conflicted about his right to tell it. This kind of self-doubt and self-reflection is typical of his narrative voice. In fact, he can't even get himself started: 'I suspect that this lengthy preamble is intended to conceal the poverty of my story, for I am apprehensive' (1.23). Rodrigo claims he wants to tell the story as simply as possible, but what he has to say when he speaks to us is anything but simple. At least, he takes for granted that we're sophisticated enough to power through his philosophical spiels and his contemplations about writing. He's an affluent, sophisticated man who feels it is his duty to tell the story of this poor girl from Northeast Brazil, and apparently he assumes that his readers are similar.

He also gives us a lot of information about himself. He seems to know absolutely everything about her: her childhood, herĭreams, and even how she looks when she sleeps-even though he'sĪpparently never met her before.

When he uses first person, he's talking directly to us,Īnd usually about deep existential ideas. Into an invisible, third-person narrator telling us everything a (using 'I'), sometimes that first-person narrator seems to disappears

Although it's technically told in first-person Wants to be the narrator or the protagonist, and he definitely can't We get the feeling that Rodrigo can't decide if he

The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector