Kalliope's Reviews > A Hora da Estrela

Interstellar Heap of Dust

Sim.

This is how Clarice Lispector chose to finish her book: with the same word as Joyce did. His famous Yes. But she began with it too. For as she says in her opening line, everything in the world began with a Yes.

And so she unfolds her story. Or lets her male narrator unfold it. Several barriers are thus created between her and us and her story – his story. And the Hour of the Star, not one of those in heaven, but the Star as a celebrity, is the title for the story of someone who is as notorious as a speck of dust.

The banality of the fable is not matched by the sophistication of the novella. This short fiction reads like an astute laboratory on writing. Defending simplicity of language and reminding that the basic element of writing is the word, Lispector’s narrator recognizes that writing is an effort in self-knowledge. This is what we then ask. What did she find when building the writing self--when she is writing about another. An object. (view spoiler)[ A ação desta história terá como resultado minha transfiguração em outrem e minha materialização enfim em objeto. (hide spoiler)]

The speck of dust is a woman who does not acquire her name, Macabéa, for several pages. She first is a lassie from the northeast, a nordestina. She was first also a girl with no name. For the first year in her life she was not named, and she preferred to remain unnamed to being incorrectly named and wrongly identified. Ah, identities forged by words.

May be that is why words are tiring and Lispector’s narrator, afraid of words and literature, seeks silence since writing is a way of whiling away one’s life until the end arrives.

And so it does for Macabéa: her celebrity moment, her hora da estrela.

The final affirmative however does not close the narration. It waits for an answer.

As open and loose as interstellar dust.