Jim Fonseca's Reviews > The Hour of the Star

Poor Macabéa, a girl who has been dealt such bad cards by life. There isn't a lot of traditional plot. It's simply the story of this young woman. She never knew her parents who died of typhoid when she was two. She was raised by a stern aunt who had no real interest in her or affection for her. As a girl she would kiss the wall to get a kind of substitute affection.



This is a typical book by Lispector in the sense that it consists of intense inner monologues and streams of consciousness by her characters, but in this book, a novella of 90 pages, these features are in fairly short passages.

The book is a meta-novel in the sense that the narrator is a supposed author (a male) who is writing the book about our anti-heroine and her hard nondescript life. The fictional author explains to the reader why he is writing the novel and discusses the literary choices he makes in this story as he goes along. In the afterword we are told that Lispector frequently explored her creative process during the narration as she does in this book. Since it’s a novella, I guess we can call it a ‘meta-novella.’

At various times we hear Macabéa called 'simple-witted' and 'inept for living.' “… she did not think about God, nor did God think about her.”

The girl works as a low-paid typist and lives in a rooming house with four other young women in the Rio slums. Her typing skills are poor and she is under threat of dismissal. She has no friends and hardly any interaction even with the women she lives with.

No one ever gave her a gift in her life. She owns no warm clothing and shivers in thin clothes in winter. She is often called ugly. She is skinny, perhaps anorexic. She doesn't bathe frequently and smells. She seldom eats anything besides hotdogs and Coca-Cola. She does not know what spaghetti is. She doesn't know how to use cosmetics and she can't afford them anyway.

“…and yet it was in her nature to be happy.” She is thrilled to borrow some instant coffee and boiling water from the landlord.

We are told several times that the girl is originally from northeast Brazil. People there live hardscrabble lives, and in the past, sometimes starved. That is the poorest part of Brazil and almost everyone from that region is of mixed race. All these things are mentioned several times in the novel. “Truly she seems to have been conceived from some vague notion in the minds of her starving parents.”



The author (Lispector) was born in that region and when she wrote this book near the end of her life we are told she started making trips back to the area because she was overcome with nostalgia for where she grew up. (Not that her family was among those starving: her family sent her to college and law school.) Many of the young girls from that area became prostitutes in the big Brazilian cities.

The author’s brilliant writing shows throughout the book. You could take many philosophical nuggets that the author gives us as one-liners in the book and make them into wall posters or something that you might post on Facebook. Some examples:

“Happiness? I have never come across a more foolish word, invented by all those unfortunate girls from northeastern Brazil.”

“Everything in the world began with a yes.”

“I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort.”

“So long as I have questions to which there are no answers, I shall go on writing.”

“How does one start at the beginning, if things happen before they actually happen?”

In an afterword, the translator discusses various meanings we can ascribe to the book. I lean toward it being about the psychological consequences of poverty aggravated by perverse twists of fortune. Hour of the Star was good, but I liked her Near to the Wild Heart better, so I gave it a ‘4.’



In 1943 the author burst onto the literary stage in Brazil at the age of 23 with the publication of her first novel, Near to the Wild Heart. It won Brazil’s most prestigious literary award. I reviewed that one and have it in my favorites.

Lispector was born in 1920 in Ukraine to Jewish parents but came to Brazil as an infant. One critic called her “the most important Jewish writer since Kafka.” She died from cancer in 1977 when she was only 57.

Top photo of favelas of Brazil from panoramas.pitt.edu
Street Market, Rua do Lavradio, painting by Jader on novica.com
The author from irishtimes.com

[Edited for typos 4/21/23, 11/26/23]