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4.04 AVERAGE
4.04 AVERAGE
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
dark
slow-paced
This is unique. The book is about storytelling and you get to witness a miserable life in the midst of it.
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
sad
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
i can honestly say i’ve never read anything like this
Minha primeira experiência com Clarisse Lispector! Conheci essa obra por um trabalho feito em grupo na escola, eu já conhecia o final, mas não esperava como ele seria desenvolvido. Livro cru, por vezes cruel e muito emocional.
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I'm so intrigued by clarice lispector I need to read everything she's ever written
dark
funny
lighthearted
mysterious
medium-paced
Hour of the Star is the kind of book that leaves you raw, unmoored, and certain that full understanding is forever just out of reach- and maybe that is exactly the point.
This short, deceptively simple novel holds so much beneath its sparse surface. It follows Macabéa, a young, poor typist from the rural Northeast of Brazil who lives in Rio de Janeiro. She is almost painfully invisible: naive, fragile, unnoticed by the world around her. She lives in a kind of ghostly numbness, convinced she doesn’t really deserve more than the bare scraps of life.
But to say the book is only about Macabéa would be misleading. The real tension lies in the narrator, Rodrigo S.M., who constantly interrupts, confesses, and doubts himself as he tries to tell her story. He questions whether he has the right to represent her, to shape her existence through words. The novel becomes a sort of existential wrestling match- not just between writer and character, but between language and truth, visibility and erasure.
Lispector’s style is at once direct and deeply fragmented. Sentences spiral into sudden philosophical asides, raw admissions, and almost divine insights. There is an intentional dissonance: we are asked to see Macabéa’s life as insignificant, yet the act of telling it paradoxically imbues it with meaning. The narrative feels urgent and self-conscious, as though Lispector (through Rodrigo) is afraid she might fail Macabéa by trying to make her “important”.
What struck me most is how Hour of the Star interrogates the idea of identity. Macabéa barely seems to have one; she drifts through life unnoticed, unclaimed even by herself. She wants so little, asks so little, and yet Lispector makes her the center of a novel- forcing us to see someone we’d usually ignore. It is an ethical, almost spiritual act of attention.
There is also the brutal honestly in how Lispector writes about poverty, femininity, and invisibility. Macabéa is not romanticized; she is awkward, sometimes repellent, childlike, pitiful. Yet she is rendered with an odd tenderness. You sense Lispector’s simultaneous compassion and horror at Macabéa’s resigned existence.
And then there’s the ending- sudden, tragic, absurdly foretold—which feels like the cruel final joke of the universe. Macabéa’s brief moment of hope is swiftly cut down, leaving a void that feels both devastating and eerily calm.
Reading Hour of the Star feels like being caught in a quiet hurricane: small on the surface, but leaving everything inside you unsettled. It is a novel that asks you to confront the limits of empathy, the violence of storytelling, and the fragility of existence itself.
Not a comforting read, but an essential one- like looking directly into a bright light you cannot quite describe afterward, only feel.