The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Lispector Calls

The Hour of the Star transcends genre. How, with utter fluidity, does an apparently conventional narrative transform itself into the author's introspective confessional? And when does that slip into narcissistic myopia which then becomes therapeutic technique? Before it develops simultaneously into a romance, a feminist tract, and a pointed sociological commentary? All in 90 pages?

Clarice Lispector is difficult to keep up with simply because she writes the simplest prose with undoubtedly the highest ratio of thought to word on the planet. It takes time to digest. One can open to any page to find a dozen arresting examples:

"... The truth is always some inner power without explanation..."
"... Remember that, no matter what I write, my basic material is the word which combines with other words to form phrases and [from which] there emanates a secret meaning that exceeds both words and phrases."
"... God belongs to those who succeed in pinning him down.... Why is there so much God? At the expense of men."
"... what is fully mature is very close to rotting."
"... Death is an encounter with self."

The reader is bounced on her sea of prose like a survivor from a wrecked civilisation. With more pensees per page than Pascal, meatier aphorisms than Montaigne, contradictions and reversals to challenge the Bible, and offbeat observations to rival Borges, Poe and Kafka, if you like your fiction and your thinking densely packaged, you cannot go wrong with Lispector.

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