Hello Gentle Reader
Other titles for Clarice Lispector’s last novel, to be published while she was still alive, are:
“It’s All My Fault,”
“Let Her Deal with It,”
“The Right to Scream,”
“As For the Future,”
“Singing the Blues,”
“She Doesn’t Know How to Scream,”
“A Sense of Loss,”
“Whistling in the Dark Wind,”
“I Can’t Do Anything,”
“Accounting of the Preceding Facts,”
“Cheap Tearjerker,”
“Discreet Exit through the Back Door,”
(All thirteen titles appear throughout this short pique novella.)
Clarice Lispector is an interesting character, person and author; a Ukrainian by birth and a Brazilian by upbringing. Clarice Lispector was born in the Ukraine and as an infant immigrated with her family to Brazil. If one were to look at any one of her pictures they will see the exotic upbringing of the temperate country of Brazil. Her face had the appearance of a cat cautiously watching every step a person makes. Every movement observed, and gesture scrutinized. She had high cheekbones that amplified her wide eyes that could be compared to that of a deer, but took on the appearance of a cat because of her high arching eyebrows, gave her more a predatory beauty than the homely appearance of subservient prey. With lips small and properly proportioned to her pointed chin, she had the appearance of an eastern European woman, but there was no denying her Brazilian adopted country. Even Gregory Rabassa an American translator had remarked on her stunning beauty and her unique writing style:
“Flabbergasted to meet that rare person [Lispector] who looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf.”
Her early life was marked by economic difficulties and personal tragedies. When her family first arrived from Europe they had lived in the banal and rural land of Northeast Brazil and lived in the city Maceió in the Coastal sate of Alagoas. Her mother’s health deteriorated and the family moved to another city Recife. The Lispector family continued to suffer economically and Clarice’s mother finally died aged forty two. From there Clarice went to school, and gained admission to Ginásio Pernambucano the then most prestigious secondary school in the State of Pernambuco. In the year nineteen-thirty five the Lispector’s once again uprooted themselves and moved to Rio de Janeiro. It is there that the family finally settled into Tijuca famous for the Tijuca Forest the largest urban forest in the world. In nineteen-thirty seven the soon to be famous author and the Giantess of Brazilian letters entered the Law School of the University of Brazil. It was in this year of nineteen-forty that her beloved father died, after a gall-bladder surgical procedure. It was in law school that Clarice Lispector decided to peruse or to at least continue her literary endeavours – or at least to satisfy that itching need to write. She began work as a journalist, for the official government press service; and then she transferred to the important newspaper “A Noite.” In this time of her life, Clarice met a younger breed of Brazilian writers. She would eventually overshadow them all. One of them was Lúcio Cardoso, a prolific writer, and who Clarice Lispector who had a romantic interest in. Cardoso however was a homosexual, and her romantic inquiries, were forced to search elsewhere.
It is then at law school that she met Maury Gurgel Valente who entered the Brazilian Foreign Service, and from there and for the next few years of her life, Clarice would be both a writer, and a diplomat’s wife. Though she grew increasing bored and increasingly dreaded being a diplomats wife and finally in nineteen-fifty nine, she left her husband and returned to Brazil.
“The Hour of the Star,” is my first glimpse and taste of Clarice Lispector. From my understanding the author had no real formal training at writing. No creative writing classes. No writing seminars. Even from the introduction by Colm Tóibín “A Passion for the Void,” that one is informed that she didn’t even read others to educate herself on writing. Colm Tóibín makes it quite clear where Clarice Lispector’s true and genuine genius for writing and literature as a whole came from an almost primitive source; by quoting Elizabeth Bishop (who had translated some of the stories by Clarice Lispector such as “The Smallest Woman in the World,”) Colm Tóibín remarks on the primitive power that Bishop had noticed early on, but also the basic knowledge of art and writing itself. It becomes clear after reading through the introduction, that Clarice Lispector was unreliable, complicated, and fleeting. An ethereal ghost who could cast an opalescent shadow. Someone who was more then met the eye. With a description of the author, it brings to mind this almost mystical being. Though she would most likely be reluctant to accept this or outright refuse such a carbon copy concept of herself. For she was an evanescent being, fading in and out. Always transient and temporal, the author herself would not be described as something physical or dealing with the physical world. Much like her novels and pieces of work, the description of the author come to mind of someone far more interested in the interior life and the emotional landscape.
“The Hour of the Star,” is noted specifically as not being autobiographical. In many ways, it can be taken as a meditation on mortality, and the inevitable curtain call, that all of us face as mortal beings. This short novella is the last novella that Clarice would have published during her lifetime. It is a novella about the intolerable beauty of the most unbearable banal ugliness. A nameless innocence back dropped against an anonymous misery. The novella is written in an interesting way. With a modernistic bent, that allowed for the character and narrator Rodrigo S.M. to consciously refer to the novella as a work of fiction to the reader. This is also something rather interesting, in the novella itself. It’s a modernist piece of work, but it also deals with poverty and the marginality of society. Truly it is something interesting, in itself. How the high art, almost secluded modernist world comes to meet the difficult and rough life of the poverty and outer edged inhabitants of Brazil.
This novella deals with Macabéa a poor typist, and one of life’s unfortunates. She is someone who has caught the eyes of the narrator, and haunted him to the point where he feels he must capture the character herself. Writing about her insignificant life. The reason for Rodrigo S.M. to write about Macabéa is because of her inwardly freedom. Despite the poor circumstances, the wretchedness of her life, she is free. Free from her marginalized life. Unconcerned with her poverty. Almost childlike in every whimsical fibre of her body; she is in short a strange character. As the narrator states with great conviction of his own thoughts of her own inferiority:
“I know there are girls who sell their bodies, their only real possession, in exchange for a good dinner instead of a bologna sandwich. But the person I’m going to talk about scarcely has a body to sell, nobody wants her, she’s a virgin and harmless, nobody would miss her.”
Yet our delirious and obsessive narrator cannot help but notice that even though Macabéa is the contempt of everyone else, she is not hindered or hurt by this prospect. She is quite like a white butterfly. Fluttering about air headed, an unconcerned with others problems. She has few and small pleasures, like drinking coke-cola, painting her toe nails, and looking in the mirror and imagining herself as Marilyn Monroe. This is however the charm of Macabéa, as a transient and almost formless character. She could be anyone on the street, herself. Just a compliant face, that happens to be there. This in my theory is what drives Rodrigo S.M. into such an obsession. Though the novella was written in a sombre manner, fragmented and full of wonderings and meanderings and is not considered by any means a traditional novel, it is safe to say in theory that the novella is testament, to the undying will of the human spirit or at least of the optimism of the soul. Macabéa is poor and disenfranchised, yet does not understand how unhappy this should make her. Our narrator and observer as well as casual conversation partner Rodrigo S.M is bleak and urbane character, lacking any real human spirit and is empty and hollow; left only as an observer. Together though one can certainly see the anonymous misery of both their lives. There despair’s are compared and contrasted, and together they move like a parallel chorus of a song, remaining the same in their interval.
“As for the girl, she exists in an impersonal limbo, untouched by what is worst or best. She merely exists, inhaling and exhaling, inhaling and exhaling. Why should there be anything more? Her existence is sparse.”
And this existence that survived on the simple gestures of inhaling and exhaling was furtherer concreted in her understanding of reality:
“She believed in everything that existed and in everything non-existent as well. But she didn’t know how to embellish reality. For her, reality was too enormous to grasp. Besides the word reality meant nothing to her.”
This is what makes Macabéa childlike in her apathy. Her life was not concerned with reality, she was not concerned with reality – she was more concerned with the obscurity of the day-to-to-day life. This obscurity is where Rodrigo takes us as a read. In his own words: “[…] obscurity was her earth, obscurity was the inner core of nature.” This is what makes this novella grand though is that it does not depict the life of either the narrator or his subject Macabéa – at least not traditionally. It’s more concerned with the capricious nature of life as a whole. It’s a grand mystery and obscure. Even with its sombre eccentrics of the author Clarice Lispector it is full of glimmering and reluctant optimism even if it is coated in a mournful tone. But also painfully aware of the void of life itself, and with it she leaves behind a philosophical musing in the first paragraph of this novella:
“All the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born. But before prehistory there was the prehistory of prehistory and there was the never and there was the yes. It was ever so. I don’t know why, but I do know that the universe never began.”
And one understands the world as forever progressing and changing. Never truly existing because it never truly began or agreed to begin; it is than that one understands that it is not only Macabéa who is a “music box that was slightly out of tune,” but the whole world is made up of a cacophonous chorus of yeses and lives slightly out of tune. This is the beauty and mystery of life. It does not shun one reality or truth though – tragedies and horrible aspects of life happen to all of us; and everyone else to varying degrees is indifferent to these tragedies; because in the end, the tragedy happens only to us. The tragedy can only affect the individual on the most personal level. The tragedy has no sense of morality or immorality – it is amoral and unappreciated but also careless and heedless to the suffering it causes. It is this unbiased cruelty that allows for justice in a chaotic form. Equality in suffering.
Thank-you For Reading Gentle Reader
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read
*And Remember: Downloading Books Illegally is Thievery and Wrong.*
M. Mary
