The Hour of the Star

The Hour of the Star is the brief, terrible, and tragic story of Macabéa, a young woman living in the slums of Rio de Janeiro. It has 12 alternative titles, It’s All My Fault, Let Her Deal With It, The Right to Scream, As for the Future, Singing the Blues, She Doesn’t Know How to Scream, A Sense of Loss, Whistling in the Dark Wind, I Can’t Do Anything, Account of the Preceding Facts, Cheap Tearjerker, and Discreet Exit Through the Back Door.

The novella is narrated by Rodrigo. Rodrigo is well-intentioned, yet self-absorbed and oblivious — a parasite who philosophizes about Macabéa’s life, aestheticises her tragedy, and gets to continue living after Macabéa doesn’t.

Lispector uses the novella to ask what it means about art that Macabéa’s devastating life can be turned into a noble literary experience for us. We are all Rodrigo; even Lispector, in using the book to raise these questions. The Hour of the Star should not be about those who benefit from Macabéa’s misery — and yet the tragedy is that it has to be.

Perhaps it is important, then, to reiterate that The Hour of the Star is the story of Macabéa: of a crushed innocence and an anonymous misery, as Lispector put it herself.