Hour of the Star

[Prestidigitweeze]

Currently reading Hour of the Star (A hora da Estrela (1977)), the third and final book of the Trio triptych by the indelible Clarice Lispector, whom Elizabeth Bishop called "coy and complicated" and Hélène Cixious described as a Jewish Brazilian Rilke born in the Ukraine, Kafka conceived as a woman and a version of Heidegger "who was able to stop being German." I myself would call her the female Alfred Schnittke of Brazilian literature if I hadn't wearied of comparing her to anyone else.

Her prose is just that undulant, her depiction of protagonist Macabéa -- amid oppression and disgrace -- that symphonic.

Of Lispector, Marquez translator Gregory Rabassa said, "I was flabbergasted to meet that rare person who looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf."



She seems actually to have been the woman whom American surrealist painter Dorothea Tanning liked to depict (when Tanning wasn't painting herself). Her very personality, her essence, was a panoply of captivating masks; a vitreous vessel filled with mystery and fiction.

"This is a meditation on the last hour. The wonderful and unthinkable hour, the hour toward which we lean as though toward truth. My truth, our truth, this foreigner, this stranger, whose face we were promised at last we would see in the end."
-- Hélène Cixious, on The Hour of the Star