Clarice Lispector Goes Supernova

On the flattening and the selling of the female writer lifestyle

I first encountered Clarice Lispector at a basement show in Montreal. It was 2012 and I was your typical angry and bookish undergrad doing a semester abroad, if driving from Maine to Quebec qualifies as “abroad.” I was desperate to meet writers who worked outside of the strict and staid conventions I’d found at college so far. I wanted to know writers who pushed boundaries, experimented, and wrote with a visceral and political passion. So, I was over the moon when an acquaintance invited me to a night of avant-garde readings. It took place in Mile End — the go-to neighborhood for the city’s English-speaking bohemian set.

I was richly rewarded in that basement. Laura Broadbent read an early draft of Interviews, which included long passages from The Hour Of The Star, the final and most famous novel by Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector. I was electrified. I ran out and bought a copy the next day, tearing through the novel in one afternoon.

Reading The Hour Of The Star felt like unlocking the door to a gilded room. Like I’d learned a new language, fluently and all at once. The story, told by a journalist, follows the obscure and difficult life of Macabéa, an economic migrant living in Rio de Janeiro after leaving Brazil’s rural northeast. Unlike books about poor characters I’d read up to this point, Macabéa was no plucky hero. She didn’t “overcome” poverty through her smarts and work ethic. Nor was she the romantic waif of a Victorian novel, whose poverty cannot conceal her fragile beauty and spotless moral character. No, Macabéa was dull-witted and unremarkable. Her struggles were in vain. Her life stayed poor and precarious.