The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector

In Bishop's Poems, Prose, and Letters, published by the Library of America, there are three translations from Lispector, including the astonishing story 'The Smallest Woman in the World', which has the primitive power that Bishop noted, as well as a real and artful knowingness, a sense of what can be done with tone, with paragraph endings, with dialogue, that could only belong to someone deeply literary. She's never read anything that I can discover – I think she's a 'self-taught' writer, like a primitive painter.' I suppose we are going to be 'friends' – but she's the most non-literary writer I've ever known, and 'never cracks a book' as we used to say. In June 1963, Bishop wrote again about Lispector: 'Clarice has been asked to another literary congress, at the University of Texas, and is being very coy & complicated – but I think is secretly very proud – and is going, of course. The New Yorker is interested – I think she needs money, so that would be good, the $ being what it is … but at the moment – just when i was ready to send off the batch, except for one, she has vanished on me – completely – and for about six weeks! … I am mystified … It is 'temperament', maybe, or more likely just the usual 'massive inertia' that one runs into at every turn … in the stories she has awfully good things and they do sound pretty good in English, and I was quite pleased with them.'

'I have translated five of Clarice's stories,' she wrote,'all the short ones & one longer one. In her last book, she takes us close to the true mystery of life and leave us deep in Lispector territory indeed.I n January 1963, Elizabeth Bishop wrote to Robert Lowell from Rio de Janeiro about the stories of Clarice Lispector. 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. She doesn't seem to know how unhappy she should be.

Rodrigo recoils from her wretchedness, and yet he cannot avoid the realization that for all her outward misery, Macabéa is inwardly free. 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. M., this brief, strange, and haunting tale is the story of Macabéa, one of life's unfortunates. The Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector's consummate final novel, may well be her masterpiece.

The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector