From The Hour of the Star

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Clarice Lispector

Clarice Lispector (1920-1977) is internationally known as one of Brazil's most iconic writers and, in the words of the late Gregory Rabassa, was “that rare person who looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf.” She is not commonly regarded as a writer from Brazil's Northeast, but she spent the early part of her childhood in Alagoas and then Pernambuco, after her family immigrated to Brazil in 1922. Although she spent most of her life in Rio de Janeiro and living in world capitals as the wife of a Brazilian diplomat, her deep fascination with the culture, language, and history of the region would permeate her work and culminate in her final novel, The Hour of the Star (1977).

A hora da estrela (1977; The Hour of the Star, 2011), in a new translation by Ben Moser, is the story of Macabéa and Olímpico, impoverished refugees from Brazil’s Northeast who live in the slums of Rio de Janeiro. It is an allegory of the divide between wealth and poverty and the terrible waste of human potential when the disadvantaged are ignored. As such, this haunting late work, represented by the following excerpts (pp. 13-14; 36-39), is a tale of caution not just for Brazil, but for the modern world.