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4.04 AVERAGE
4.04 AVERAGE
“No matter how bad her situation, she didn’t want to be deprived of herself, she wanted to be herself. She thought she’d incur serious punishment by and even risk dying if she took too much pleasure in life. So she protected herself from death by living less, consuming so little of her life that she’d never run out.”
Read in the span of a week. The first page drew me in like no other book had before, the narrator was unusual and memorable, and it was overall a very quick read. Surprising ending, too!
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Unnervingly existential and startlingly synesthetic, this slim novel left me enraptured. Lispector presses against the outer edges of form, shattering not only the fourth wall but the architecture of narrative itself—acknowledging the book as product while recasting it as subjective oracle. What results is less a story than an act of transmission, a text that interrogates writing, perception, and epistemological reality on a molecular scale.
Books are meant, perhaps, to make the mortal immortal, and Lispector achieves this paradox by foregrounding the deterministic insignificance of her characters—and, by extension, of us all. She depersonalizes the real in order to reveal the strange transcendence of futility: the fragile beauty lodged in striving, the quiet glory of being small in an incomprehensibly vast design.
Books are meant, perhaps, to make the mortal immortal, and Lispector achieves this paradox by foregrounding the deterministic insignificance of her characters—and, by extension, of us all. She depersonalizes the real in order to reveal the strange transcendence of futility: the fragile beauty lodged in striving, the quiet glory of being small in an incomprehensibly vast design.
Bea was pathetic but what today's teens would call real.
Lispector’s Hour of the Star is such a strange, glittering little thing—barely over hundred pages, yet it expands and contracts like a universe. Reading it feels like being caught in a philosophical monologue and an act of storytelling at once.
I loved (and hated) how self-conscious the narration is. Rodrigo S.M., the supposed “author” within the book, keeps interrupting himself, questioning his own right to narrate, his motives, even the mechanics of writing. It’s exhausting in a way, but also exhilarating—like being invited into a room where creation itself is happening in real time.
Macabéa, the protagonist, is one of the loneliest figures I’ve ever encountered in fiction. She is poor, fragile, invisible to almost everyone around her. And yet Lispector doesn’t sentimentalize her. She presents Macabéa as unbearably ordinary, almost blank, and the tragedy is that even her ordinariness cannot protect her from the world’s violence. Reading her life unfold, I felt torn between wanting to reach for her and realizing that the text denies me that comfort.
What makes the book so brilliant (and so maddening) is the way it’s constantly shifting between intimacy and distance. Rodrigo tries to “give voice” to Macabéa, but the act itself feels parasitic, exploitative even—raising all kinds of questions about power, class, and who gets to tell whose story. In a way, Lispector preempted so many of today’s debates about representation, but she did it with a sharp, slippery irony.
Emotionally, it hit harder than Tsushima’s Child of Fortune. While Tsushima drained me with monotony, Lispector unsettled me with her sudden jolts of lyricism, her fractured tenderness, her insistence that literature is as much about its failures as its successes.
I finished the novella feeling bruised but strangely grateful. It doesn’t give you catharsis. It gives you rupture—and sometimes rupture is more honest than closure.
I loved (and hated) how self-conscious the narration is. Rodrigo S.M., the supposed “author” within the book, keeps interrupting himself, questioning his own right to narrate, his motives, even the mechanics of writing. It’s exhausting in a way, but also exhilarating—like being invited into a room where creation itself is happening in real time.
Macabéa, the protagonist, is one of the loneliest figures I’ve ever encountered in fiction. She is poor, fragile, invisible to almost everyone around her. And yet Lispector doesn’t sentimentalize her. She presents Macabéa as unbearably ordinary, almost blank, and the tragedy is that even her ordinariness cannot protect her from the world’s violence. Reading her life unfold, I felt torn between wanting to reach for her and realizing that the text denies me that comfort.
What makes the book so brilliant (and so maddening) is the way it’s constantly shifting between intimacy and distance. Rodrigo tries to “give voice” to Macabéa, but the act itself feels parasitic, exploitative even—raising all kinds of questions about power, class, and who gets to tell whose story. In a way, Lispector preempted so many of today’s debates about representation, but she did it with a sharp, slippery irony.
Emotionally, it hit harder than Tsushima’s Child of Fortune. While Tsushima drained me with monotony, Lispector unsettled me with her sudden jolts of lyricism, her fractured tenderness, her insistence that literature is as much about its failures as its successes.
I finished the novella feeling bruised but strangely grateful. It doesn’t give you catharsis. It gives you rupture—and sometimes rupture is more honest than closure.
challenging
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
emotional
funny
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
dark
reflective
sad
medium-paced
something this short holds so much.
on invisibility, on girlhood, on poverty, on denied desires. clarice tells it in this broken, hesitant voice that feels like watching someone breathe for the last time. i’ll keep returning to it.
on invisibility, on girlhood, on poverty, on denied desires. clarice tells it in this broken, hesitant voice that feels like watching someone breathe for the last time. i’ll keep returning to it.