By Clarice Lispector
Narrated By Melissa Broder
Length: 3 hrs and 3 mins
Release Date: 2-06-2018
Print Pub: NEW DIRECTIONS
Summary
The Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector’s consummate final novel, may well be her masterpiece. Living in the slums of Rio and eking out a poor living as a typist, Macabéa loves movies, Coca-Colas, and her rat of a boyfriend; she would like to be like Marilyn Monroe, but she is ugly, underfed, sickly, and unloved. Rodrigo recoils from her wretchedness, and yet he cannot avoid the realization that for all her outward misery, Macabéa is inwardly free. She doesn't seem to know how unhappy she should be.
Lispector employs her pathetic heroine against her urbane, empty narrator - edge of despair to edge of despair - and, working them like a pair of scissors, she cuts away preconceived notions about poverty, identity, love, and the art of fiction. In her last book, she takes us close to the true mystery of life and leave us deep in Lispector territory indeed.
The Hour Of The Star
"I felt physically jolted by genius." —Katherine Boo
“Her images dazzle even when her meaning is most obscure, and when she is writing of what she despises she is lucidity itself.”
- The Times Literary Supplement
“Lispector is one of the hidden geniuses of twentieth century literature, in the same league as Flann O’Brien, Borges and Pessoa… utterly original and brilliant, haunting and disturbing.”
- Colm Tóibín
“A truly remarkable writer.”
- Jonathan Franzen
“It is jarring and yet restorative to read a writer whose focus is so private, internal.”
- Boston Globe
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