Clarice Lispector's novel The Hour of the Star tells the story of a man who writes a novel and the story of the woman about whom he writes. The writer, who is given the name Rodrigo S. M., explains his feelings and motivations about writing the story, which he clearly identifies as fiction, of a poor, uneducated, sickly immigrant from Brazil's impoverished Northeastern region who goes to Rio de Janeiro. Her life is as nearly empty of events, relationships, and even ordinary needs as a human life can be. Yet, in the course, of the novel, the character, MacabTa, arrives at some degree of understanding--of the universe, of her existence, of god--that surpasses what her frustrated creator can achieve. While MacabTa's story is completely engrossing, it fights for space with the struggles of her intrusive narrator-creator. Both characters function as part of the author's own struggle to understand both the process of creation that drives her and the meanings of existence that trouble MacabTa so little but are, nonetheless, made clearer to her than to Lispector. The book is an exercise in authorial frustration that is also a profound meditation on the limits of human understanding.
Lispector (1925-77), one of the most significant Brazilian writers of the twentieth century, was born in the Ukraine to Russian Jewish parents who emigrated to Brazil within two months of their daughter's birth. The family settled in Recife, where Lispector spent most of her childhood, and later moved to Rio de Janeiro. Lispector earned a law degree before becoming a journalist and fiction writer. Her prize-winning books were notable for their move away from the regionalism that had dominated Brazilian fiction, but Lispector's roots were in the literary modernism of Virginia Woolf and other European writers and she became an exponent of the "nouveau roman" (new novel) with her unusual approaches to narrative. Although she was a very important figure i...