The Hour of the Star [Paperback]

Narrated by the cosmopolitan Rodrigo S.M., this brief, strange, and haunting tale is the story of Macab?a, one of life's unfortunates. Living in the slums of Rio and eking out a poor living as a typist, Macab?a loves movies, Coca-Colas, and her rat of a boyfriend; she would like to be like Marilyn Monroe, but she is ugly, underfed, sickly and unloved. Rodrigo recoils from her wretchedness, and yet he cannot avoid the realization that for all her outward misery, Macab?a is inwardly free/She doesn't seem to know how unhappy she should be. Lispector employs her pathetic heroine against her urbane, empty narratoredge of despair to edge of despairand, working them like a pair of scissors, she cuts away the reader's preconceived notions about poverty, identity, love and the art of fiction. In her last book she takes readers close to the true mystery of life and leave us deep in Lispector territory indeed.Lispector is the premier Latin American woman prose writer of this century.A genius of character and a literary magician.An artist of vivid imagination. If her work is thoughtful and poetic, distinguished by touching insight and human sympathy, it is also full of irony and wild humor.In less than one hundred pages, Clarice Lispector tells a brilliantly multi-faceted and searing story.If she does  dare I say it?  touch you, she touches you like nothing else youve ever read.I felt physically jolted by genius.This text investigates the knowledge of not knowing and the rich poverty of the inner void with stratagems of obfuscation, leaps of language, and suspensions of syntax and form that are perhaps best received by the gut.The reader finds herself in the throes of a master, rendered speechless with awe and terror.The only antidote to stupidity is an agitated intelligence constantly prowling for blank spots in ones outward seeming.This is without a doubt one of the most audacious and affecting works of fiction I've ever read.In this slim novella, Lil£$