You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
4.04 AVERAGE
4.04 AVERAGE
challenging
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
This book is all about obsession. We follow a narrator who, after meeting Macabéa, can’t get her out of his head. Throughout the story, he flips between pitying her, mocking her, admiring her, and hating her. It’s a rollercoaster of contradiction.
I’d never read Clarice Lispector before, but my God — her writing is incredible. The way she portrays a woman crushed by society without ever having to spell it out is genius. Macabéa is a functional illiterate, and you feel it through every line — not because the narrator tells you, but because Clarice shows it so subtly and precisely.
All the people around Macabéa either take advantage of her or fake sympathy. Even in the final stretch, a fortune teller pretends to be her friend only to deceive her one last time. Macabéa lives, suffers, and dies as a forgotten figure — and that’s the point. For someone like her, the hour of the star is just one brief, blinding flash... and then it’s over.
What a stunning book. I need to read more of Clarice — immediately.
I’d never read Clarice Lispector before, but my God — her writing is incredible. The way she portrays a woman crushed by society without ever having to spell it out is genius. Macabéa is a functional illiterate, and you feel it through every line — not because the narrator tells you, but because Clarice shows it so subtly and precisely.
All the people around Macabéa either take advantage of her or fake sympathy. Even in the final stretch, a fortune teller pretends to be her friend only to deceive her one last time. Macabéa lives, suffers, and dies as a forgotten figure — and that’s the point. For someone like her, the hour of the star is just one brief, blinding flash... and then it’s over.
What a stunning book. I need to read more of Clarice — immediately.
What can we know about the lives of others? Plenty — we are fortunate enough to be able to make things up. Again I am brought to compare a book to David Foster Wallace, as Lispector offers up a striking exercise in narratorial voice. Establishing the narrator as a Benengeli figure (and specifically a man, and a petite-bourgeois man at that) is of course a rhetorical choice meant to clarify his cruelty, a condescension that manifests as faux-romanticism: in truth he is telling the story not of Macabéa but of his own superiority, of his supposed insight into the lives of those who lack insight into themselves. An incisive work of criticism-as-practice, sharply observed and eminently readable.
Ugh wow dit had ik nodig!! Dit valt onder het beste genre dat er is: boeken met een hoek af (geschreven door vrouwen ofc) - past in het rijtje van Tezer Özlü of Ingeborg Bachmann
dark
reflective
sad
medium-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
Almost feels like a prequel to Paradise Logic, might be an inpiration?
Still have only vaguely formed thoughts about this? Beautiful beautiful prose and an exploration of poverty and suffering that seems both profound and fetishistic (which is not necessarily bad, in my opinion). Knowing that this was one of Lispector's last works made me interested in the way that this work is very meta-fictional and is about the concept of writing a character who exists just to suffer and the way that Macabéa's character and life and death both feel predetermined, like something the narrator is simply learning/uncovering over the course of the novel, and like something the narrator is creating. Feels like Lispector's Tempest, a meditation on storytelling and art.
challenging
funny
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Clarice, my brain! The chaotic, stream-of-consciousness interjections from the narrator took some getting used to and overall, the pacing and narrative is very unconventional. This isn’t your typical story, and more like an experience that demands reflection. Is ignorance bliss? What’s the meaning of life… and death?
I want to read it again, now knowing what I know, and annotate more closely. It’s one of those books that probably reveals much more the second (or third) time around.
Read this if you’re up for a challenge!
“Anyways what could she do? Since she was chronic. And even sadness was also something for rich people, for people who could afford it, for people who didn’t have anything better to do. Sadness was a luxury.”
I want to read it again, now knowing what I know, and annotate more closely. It’s one of those books that probably reveals much more the second (or third) time around.
Read this if you’re up for a challenge!
“Anyways what could she do? Since she was chronic. And even sadness was also something for rich people, for people who could afford it, for people who didn’t have anything better to do. Sadness was a luxury.”
Certainly out of all the books I've read this year, this was by far the most difficult (and I don't think I could accurately rate it without several re-reads). Not sure this is a favorite, but glad I read it.