n Brazilian literature Lispector also "belongs among the group of twentieth-century experimental fiction writers characterized by their subversion of logic, closure, and authoritarian points of view" (Schiminovich 148).
The Hour of the Star was written the year Lispector died at the age of 52. Although she knew she was ill at the time, "she did not know she was going to die," and yet, Cixous notes, we feel throughout the book "as if something terrible is going to happen [and so] we go with misgivings from page to page" (18). It may seem melodramatic to associate the novel's tension with events in Lispector's life. But her translator, Giovanni Pontiero, reported that the book's genesis was probably related to Lispector's final illness. A short time before her illness became critical Lispector "began to experience an almost obsessive nostalgia for Recife in the North-eastern State of Pernambuco" where she grew up (Pontiero 89). She made the trip to Recife to "renew contact with scenes and locations associated with her earliest perceptions" and, at home in Rio, she began to frequent areas of the city where impoverished immigrants from the Northeast gathered, "re-enacting for a day the sights and sound of their native region" (Pontiero 90). Pontiero also notes that there is, in the novel, a very strong sense of the author's feeling that, "there but for the grace of God go I"(91).
Yet so much identification of author and character would still seem overdone if it were not for two other factors. First, the identification of author with character can be expanded to include the character of the writer Rodrigo whom Lispector interposes between herself and MacabTa, the other "girl from the North-east" as Rodrigo incessantly refers to her (22). The struggles of the writer mirror, sometimes comically and sometimes ironically, the struggles that, it seems, Lispector herself went through as a writer. As she said in another of her book...