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lavenderbooks_'s review against another edition
challenging
mysterious
reflective
fast-paced
a book that just has no rating in my mind because i am mostly confused but also strangely intrigued by what this book offered. there were secret moments between me and the text where i felt so drawn and deeply understood but as a whole, i’m not exactly sure what kind of picture or message this story has created in my head.
i loved how experimental this was though and i’m always a sucker for stories that try to play a different game. this was definitely that. but i’m not exactly sure if the experiment was effective in delivering what clarice lispector wanted to give.
overall, i’m glad to have read this and finally get a taste of clarice lispector’s writing! this has got me intrigued to delve into more of her other work.
i loved how experimental this was though and i’m always a sucker for stories that try to play a different game. this was definitely that. but i’m not exactly sure if the experiment was effective in delivering what clarice lispector wanted to give.
overall, i’m glad to have read this and finally get a taste of clarice lispector’s writing! this has got me intrigued to delve into more of her other work.
caelestiore's review against another edition
3.0
Ask me any details about this book in a few months and I wouldn’t give you an answer (with heart-breaking quotes as an exception). While this book may not be the most substantial read, it's one that has managed to carve out a little niche in my heart.
“I, who symbolically die several times just to experience the resurrection.”
One thing that conflicted me was that this book has no concreteness. Forget the plot and character and world-building; this book weaves a mood. It's like listening to a drunk man speaking; diving deep into this sad, philosophical rabbit-hole that’s devoid of any real substance. A very slippery, spasmodic, stirring style of writing. Yet, I found myself compelled to see it through to the end. Maybe it was out of obligation or boredom... or maybe a masochistic appreciation for Clarice Lispector’s lyrical prose.
“But there’s the rub: this story has no technique, nor style, it lives from hand to mouth.”
Despite the ramblings, there are occasional moments of genuine insight hidden within the lines. Would I read from her again? Yes. The sickeningly saccharine prose may be too much, but I know I will crave it again.
“Make no mistake, I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort.”
“I, who symbolically die several times just to experience the resurrection.”
One thing that conflicted me was that this book has no concreteness. Forget the plot and character and world-building; this book weaves a mood. It's like listening to a drunk man speaking; diving deep into this sad, philosophical rabbit-hole that’s devoid of any real substance. A very slippery, spasmodic, stirring style of writing. Yet, I found myself compelled to see it through to the end. Maybe it was out of obligation or boredom... or maybe a masochistic appreciation for Clarice Lispector’s lyrical prose.
“But there’s the rub: this story has no technique, nor style, it lives from hand to mouth.”
Despite the ramblings, there are occasional moments of genuine insight hidden within the lines. Would I read from her again? Yes. The sickeningly saccharine prose may be too much, but I know I will crave it again.
“Make no mistake, I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort.”
babayagascrow's review against another edition
emotional
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? N/A
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.5
art_humaniser's review against another edition
4.0
"The trick is to begin suddenly, like plunging into an icy sea and bearing its intense coldness with suicidal courage"
I've always wondered what it would feel like being hit by an all-consuming story that makes you restless - may be this is the life of a fantasy author saying oh yes I began writing this story then it forced me to write because I was the host and it was the parasite.
"Yet I have no intention of adorning the word, for were I to touch the girl's bread, that bread would turn to gold — and the girl (she is nineteen years old) the girl would be unable to bite into it, and consequently die of hunger. So I must express myself simply in order to capture her delicate and shadowy existence".
But who would care about writing a mundane girl. I don't particularly enjoy reading sad stories written for the sake of melancholic porn. Even though the starlight has a miserable life I wanted to know her because she was loved by the narrator. There is no character development either but the narrator accepts her as she is and shares the girl's vulnerability with observations of her own being and of the society she is witnessing.
"Why do I write? First of all because I have captured the spirit of the language and at times it is the form that constitutes the content. I write, therefore, not for the girl from the North-east but for the much more serious reason of force majeure, or as they say in formal petitions by 'force of law'"
The enthusiasm the narrator has for the mundane tragedy without glorifying it is what makes me so at ease with the story. I'll keep this writing style very dear to my heart.
"But who am I to censure the guilty? The worst part is that I must forgive them. It is essential to arrive at an absolute zero so that we indifferently come to love or not to love the criminal who kills us. But I am no longer sure of myself: I must ask, without knowing whom I should ask, if it is really necessary to love the man who slays me; to ask who among you is slaying me. My life, stronger than myself, replies that it wants revenge at all costs. It warns me that I must struggle like someone drowning, even if I should perish in the end. If it be so, so be it."
I've always wondered what it would feel like being hit by an all-consuming story that makes you restless - may be this is the life of a fantasy author saying oh yes I began writing this story then it forced me to write because I was the host and it was the parasite.
"Yet I have no intention of adorning the word, for were I to touch the girl's bread, that bread would turn to gold — and the girl (she is nineteen years old) the girl would be unable to bite into it, and consequently die of hunger. So I must express myself simply in order to capture her delicate and shadowy existence".
But who would care about writing a mundane girl. I don't particularly enjoy reading sad stories written for the sake of melancholic porn. Even though the starlight has a miserable life I wanted to know her because she was loved by the narrator. There is no character development either but the narrator accepts her as she is and shares the girl's vulnerability with observations of her own being and of the society she is witnessing.
"Why do I write? First of all because I have captured the spirit of the language and at times it is the form that constitutes the content. I write, therefore, not for the girl from the North-east but for the much more serious reason of force majeure, or as they say in formal petitions by 'force of law'"
The enthusiasm the narrator has for the mundane tragedy without glorifying it is what makes me so at ease with the story. I'll keep this writing style very dear to my heart.
"But who am I to censure the guilty? The worst part is that I must forgive them. It is essential to arrive at an absolute zero so that we indifferently come to love or not to love the criminal who kills us. But I am no longer sure of myself: I must ask, without knowing whom I should ask, if it is really necessary to love the man who slays me; to ask who among you is slaying me. My life, stronger than myself, replies that it wants revenge at all costs. It warns me that I must struggle like someone drowning, even if I should perish in the end. If it be so, so be it."
millimil1enary's review against another edition
reflective
sad
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Loveable characters? Yes
4.0
jiscoo's review against another edition
4.25
feels very similar to a breath of life, but just a bit more grounded, more refined
infinimata's review
5.0
I'm going to paraphrase a line from Penny Rimbaud. I'm not sure if I like "The Hour Of The Star" for the same reason that I'm not sure if I like Lispector herself: she's far too demanding to be liked. But I do know that I love her, and this book, because there's been nothing quite like it, or her, before or since.
One description and critique of Clarice Lispector is that she was to literary fiction what Gramma Moses was to art: self-taught and idiosyncratic to a fault. This means her work pays out very variable dividends indeed. Her novel "The Passion According To G.H." made me roll my eyes with the way it turned the goofiest of molehills into the most domineering and existential of mountains. But I couldn't deny there was a psychological truth at play in the story. Many of our lives are indeed ruled by the tiniest, most subjective, and inexplicable of things. "Star" might well be the best place to start with Lispector, if only because the book is short enough to read in a single setting, and pays out the highest of those dividends.
"Star", the last work Lispector wrote before she died in 1977, gives us a male narrator -- clearly not Lispector, but also clearly sharing qualities with her -- who struggles with himself to write about Macabéa, a woman who may or may not exist. Macabéa is a pathetic figure on the margins of society who doesn't know how pathetic she truly is, and so has a measure of fool's happiness. She's happy when blowing her nose on the hem of her skirt, happy when she eats nothing but hot dogs and Coca-Cola, happy when her thuggish boyfriend treats her like dirt and eventually dumps her. With that last, maybe just the fact she can talk to someone, anyone, and be heard and seen is bliss enough, such that being dumped is for even its own kind of joy. Her life is one of, to use Harlan Ellison's phrase, acceptance on the lowest possible level.
The narrator then offers us the possibility of what might break her happiness, and it's not what you think. To kill off someone like this would be a mercy, perhaps, but a mercy for whom -- the author, or for her, or for us? Why is it a good thing to know a human being -- even one living a pathetic life, even a fictional one, or even one fictional twice over (a fictional creation by a fictional narrator) -- has been given a merciful release?
"Star" brings to mind another, longer, cheekier and more acerbic -- but less ultimately powerful -- work of metafiction, Gil Sorrentino's "Imaginative Qualities Of Actual Things". In that book, the narrator (maybe it's Gil, maybe not) writes about the various hilarious and insufferable Art People types in his social circles, some of whom may exist and some of whom ("Anton") are billed in advance as being fictions that "Gil" doesn't quite know what to do with. But Sorrentino's aim there was to be more cheeky than penetrating.
So much of Lispector's work seems to do nothing more than spin in place and find universes in its navel, although I contend that's one of the reasons to bother with her work in the first place. With this story, though, and with the best of her other work, she introduces something more than just aesthetic metaphysics: what does our compassion for others mean in this world? What does it mean that our heart might go out to Macabéa, or that we might laugh at her, when she doesn't even exist?
Except that she does, in some sense, exist. The world teems with millions of Macabéas, all as anonymous as she, all as unloved and unnoticed. But she was lucky enough to come to our attention through the narrator, to be seen at last and not just ignored like coffee gone cold (to use Lispector's own imagery). We can only love people in the specific, not in the abstract, so if we are to have any love of wretched humanity it has to necessarily include people like Macabéa, or her awful boyfriend, or the duplicitious co-worker who steals him away from Macabéa, and the ridiculous fortune-teller who figures into the story's climax, and so on.
The ending Lispector chose for this story is not about Macabéa, but the narrator -- what he does because he knows he is not up to the job of looking such saintly idiocity in the face (or the brutishness of her boyfriend, etc.) and saying an unreserved yes to it. No, not even up to that job for a fictional character -- which makes us wonder, what would he do with the real thing? Unless Macabéa was, in fact, a real person in the narrator's life, witnessed at arm's length or in composite. The story is, at bottom, about him more than her, but also about how she matters more in the end than he does.
Postscript: I haven't seen the film adapted from the story, but I have to wonder if it could even begin to approach the story's real meaning. The Joyce Carol Oates short story that inspired the film "Smooth Talk" is nothing like the resulting film, even if it's a fine film on its own. But it's still not the same story by a light-year.
One description and critique of Clarice Lispector is that she was to literary fiction what Gramma Moses was to art: self-taught and idiosyncratic to a fault. This means her work pays out very variable dividends indeed. Her novel "The Passion According To G.H." made me roll my eyes with the way it turned the goofiest of molehills into the most domineering and existential of mountains. But I couldn't deny there was a psychological truth at play in the story. Many of our lives are indeed ruled by the tiniest, most subjective, and inexplicable of things. "Star" might well be the best place to start with Lispector, if only because the book is short enough to read in a single setting, and pays out the highest of those dividends.
"Star", the last work Lispector wrote before she died in 1977, gives us a male narrator -- clearly not Lispector, but also clearly sharing qualities with her -- who struggles with himself to write about Macabéa, a woman who may or may not exist. Macabéa is a pathetic figure on the margins of society who doesn't know how pathetic she truly is, and so has a measure of fool's happiness. She's happy when blowing her nose on the hem of her skirt, happy when she eats nothing but hot dogs and Coca-Cola, happy when her thuggish boyfriend treats her like dirt and eventually dumps her. With that last, maybe just the fact she can talk to someone, anyone, and be heard and seen is bliss enough, such that being dumped is for even its own kind of joy. Her life is one of, to use Harlan Ellison's phrase, acceptance on the lowest possible level.
The narrator then offers us the possibility of what might break her happiness, and it's not what you think. To kill off someone like this would be a mercy, perhaps, but a mercy for whom -- the author, or for her, or for us? Why is it a good thing to know a human being -- even one living a pathetic life, even a fictional one, or even one fictional twice over (a fictional creation by a fictional narrator) -- has been given a merciful release?
"Star" brings to mind another, longer, cheekier and more acerbic -- but less ultimately powerful -- work of metafiction, Gil Sorrentino's "Imaginative Qualities Of Actual Things". In that book, the narrator (maybe it's Gil, maybe not) writes about the various hilarious and insufferable Art People types in his social circles, some of whom may exist and some of whom ("Anton") are billed in advance as being fictions that "Gil" doesn't quite know what to do with. But Sorrentino's aim there was to be more cheeky than penetrating.
So much of Lispector's work seems to do nothing more than spin in place and find universes in its navel, although I contend that's one of the reasons to bother with her work in the first place. With this story, though, and with the best of her other work, she introduces something more than just aesthetic metaphysics: what does our compassion for others mean in this world? What does it mean that our heart might go out to Macabéa, or that we might laugh at her, when she doesn't even exist?
Except that she does, in some sense, exist. The world teems with millions of Macabéas, all as anonymous as she, all as unloved and unnoticed. But she was lucky enough to come to our attention through the narrator, to be seen at last and not just ignored like coffee gone cold (to use Lispector's own imagery). We can only love people in the specific, not in the abstract, so if we are to have any love of wretched humanity it has to necessarily include people like Macabéa, or her awful boyfriend, or the duplicitious co-worker who steals him away from Macabéa, and the ridiculous fortune-teller who figures into the story's climax, and so on.
The ending Lispector chose for this story is not about Macabéa, but the narrator -- what he does because he knows he is not up to the job of looking such saintly idiocity in the face (or the brutishness of her boyfriend, etc.) and saying an unreserved yes to it. No, not even up to that job for a fictional character -- which makes us wonder, what would he do with the real thing? Unless Macabéa was, in fact, a real person in the narrator's life, witnessed at arm's length or in composite. The story is, at bottom, about him more than her, but also about how she matters more in the end than he does.
Postscript: I haven't seen the film adapted from the story, but I have to wonder if it could even begin to approach the story's real meaning. The Joyce Carol Oates short story that inspired the film "Smooth Talk" is nothing like the resulting film, even if it's a fine film on its own. But it's still not the same story by a light-year.
feastofblaze's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
funny
mysterious
reflective
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.0
prisci_reads's review against another edition
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.25