Book Review : The Captivating, Tragic Story of a Waif

The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector, translated by Giovanni Pontiero (Carcanet: $15.95)

“The Hour of the Star” is only one of 13 possible titles for Clarice Lispector’s ghostly and captivating account of the life and death of a Rio de Janeiro waif. Among the others are: “The Blame Is Mine,” “A Sense of Loss,” “A Tearful Tale,” “A Discreet Exit by the Back Door” and “As for the Future.”

Lispector sets down her entire list. “The Hour of the Star” is only No. 2; and choosing it is a declaration of the author’s quarrel with the act of authorship. To narrate is to narrow reality by adopting only one of an infinite number of possibilities.

Lispector, who died in 1977, was one of Brazil’s most highly regarded writers; yet to use such a term is a kind of disrespect to her artistic credo. Her art is a perpetual self-consciousness and self-questioning. It is circuitous as a matter of principle; only that which is off the path of the writer’s intention is of value. The artist goes to market to buy a pig; art is the packet of pins she brings back instead.

All this puts Lispector in a tradition different from that of many of the Latin American writers we have come to know in recent years. It is not the assertive magical realism of a Garcia Marquez. It is a kind of magical unreality; a deliberate anti-assertion. The author argues with her characters, her readers and herself. The line goes back to Tristram Shandy, but it flowered in Brazilian novelist Machado de Assis, Spanish philosopher and novelist Miguel de Unamuno and Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello.

Lower Depths

On one level, the tale of Macabea is a partly comic and wholly moving account of a nobody in Brazil’s ghastly lower depths. But Lispector tells it through a double layer of artistic protest; the first, her own, and the second, that of her narrator.

Her introduction wanders off, apparently, by dedicating the story to a number of composers, including “dear old Shumann and his beloved Clara” who “have revealed me to myself.” Lispector also dedicates it to the passing of time, to her youth, to “my years of hardship when everything was more austere and honorable, and I had never eaten lobster.” Rambling is better than defining. “I meditate without words or themes. What troubles my existence is writing.”

But Lispector is a tiger of artistic determination compared to her ineffectual and neurasthenic narrator. He starts and stops, clears his throat, disappears and returns. He announces that he will get right down to Macabea’s story and apologizes for digressing. “I shall attempt, contrary to my normal method, to write a story with a beginning, a middle and a grand finale, followed by silence and falling rain,” he writes. He warns us that his story is “plain and dark,” and worries about our undoubted disappointment.

Finally, he announces that he will go without shaving or sleeping, in order to put himself at the level of his starving heroine.

And so, grudgingly, we meet Macabea. Curiously enough, all the prefatory disclaimers and hesitations do not hamper our perception of her. They establish it. Macabea is both a wraith in the shadows of a monstrous society, and a person of passion and unforgettable identity.

She has come down from the country, works as a typist, and lives in a room with four other women. She is thin, slovenly and unwashed. Sometimes, to ease hunger, she eats paper. Sometimes, she goes out for a hard-boiled egg and immediately, out of respect for her late aunt’s warnings, develops a pain in the liver. Eating is a problem, in any case. As a child in the country, she once discovered that she had been fed fried cat. “She was convinced that she had committed a crime, that she had eaten a fried angel, its wings snapping between her teeth.”

Large Capacity

Macabea has no expectations but she has a large capacity for happiness. One day, she stays home from work, has her room to herself and revels in the unaccustomed gift of privacy. It transforms her. She goes out and picks up a young man, Octavio. It is a bold move. She arranges to be standing at the same hardware-store window he is staring at. “I love nuts and bolts,” she says. “What about you?”

It is a sort of romance. She is a waif looking for happiness; he is a waif looking for power. He struts and boasts. When they go to a butcher shop, she fantasizes about the taste of meat; his fantasy is with the butcher knives. Soon he leaves her. She is scrawny and mud-colored, he tells her, going off with her meatier friend, Gloria.

Macabea sickens and a doctor tells her she has TB. This upsets the narrator so much that he takes three days off, returning only because he misses “my Maca.” A fortuneteller predicts she will meet a rich German. She is, in fact, hit by a yellow Mercedes. As she dies, the narrator tells us, she feels herself becoming a woman. Her last words are one of the rejected titles: “As for the future.”

The Story’s Social Moral

Earlier, still at a distance from his protagonist, the narrator finds himself able to deliver the story’s social moral. “The girl embodies a truth I was anxious to avoid. I don’t know who I can blame, but someone is to blame.”

But Macabea has emerged from the story and become real; more than the narrator, more than Lispector and her meditations; perhaps more than we, the readers. Her death eclipses us.

“Macabea has murdered me,” the narrator writes.