Review • The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector

The Hour of the Star is a novel full of sound. “The story will be accompanied,” the narrator tells us in an early intromission, “by the plangent violin played by a thin man right on the street corner.” His music is meant to sound like a toothache feels, unyielding and discordant. We’ll never know the content of his mute, melancholy performance, and his repertoire is impossible to determine. The novel’s opening pages read like a catalogue of modern classical music—it’s dedicated to everyone from Schumann to Schoenberg and beyond—but it’s difficult to imagine the novel being set to anything resembling an actual song. Notes, or at most phrases, might succeed one another, sketching momentarily identifiable melodies, but the underlying structure is a vague meandering of sound, set to the dull pulse of inconsistent rhythms.

There are other sounds too. Trumpets peal and herald revelations. The narrator hears a piano playing. He calls his own voice strident and syncopated. Parenthetical explosions mark the story’s most dramatic moments. The life of the protagonist, a young woman named Macabéa, unfolds against the tinny soundtrack of an ill tuned music box. She loves listening to the clock radio station, comforted by the tick-tock of time’s passing. She hears a song (from an opera by Gaetano Donizetti) that brings her to tears:

 

 

The poverty of her execution contrasts with the opulence of the original. And this cuts to the heart of what this novel, first published in English in 1986 and just reissued in a new translation, is all about: the intolerable beauty of even the most banal ugliness. Macabéa is a poor girl, originally from northeastern Brazil, who lives in Rio de Janeiro. She eats badly and works a thankless job as a semi-literate typist. She shares a room with four other women, all named Maria. Her pleasures are minimal, drinking Coke and occasionally painting her nails. She looks in the mirror and dreams of being Marilyn Monroe. Everyone around her insists on her inferiority. Her boyfriend buys her a coffee (if they charge extra for milk, he tells her, she’ll have to pay the difference), and she gets sick from the excess of sugar poured into it. They go out for a stroll, but neither of them knows how to take a walk. When he dumps her for her coworker, he tells her in parting: “You, Macabéa, are like a hair in the soup. Nobody feels like eating it.” His verdict would be shared by the narrator, who has only once glimpsed Macabéa, giving the story the air of a delirious obsession. For him, her story is exemplary, if only because she is so wretched: “I know there are girls who sell their bodies, their only real possession, in exchange for a good dinner instead of a bologna sandwich. But the person I’m going to talk about scarcely has a body to sell, nobody wants her, she’s a virgin and harmless, nobody would miss her.” Her abjection is clearly what attracted him to her in the first place, as we understand by the novel’s end: “Yes, I’m in love with Macabéa, my dear Maca, in love with her ugliness and total anonymity since she belongs to no one. In love with her weak lungs, the scraggly girl.” His love is narcissistic, no doubt, for he sees himself reflected in her poverty of self: no one would miss her, but no one would miss him either.

Macabéa is pitiable, but she does not pity herself. She assumes her existence with an utter lack of self-consciousness. The idea of donning the clothes of a stable self is foreign to her. She marches through life obediently, identifying fleetingly with what surrounds her. She is almost mute, even when she speaks. “She’d never thought ‘I am I’. I suspect she didn’t think she had the right, she was a fluke.” The narrator is half correct, for Macabéa’s resistance to assuming an identity has nothing to do with self worth. Likewise, it has nothing to do with her status as victim in an unjust economic world. Rather, she knows that identity is a mirage and randomness is the rule. The narrator almost gets this right. “A fetus tossed in the trash in a newspaper. Are there thousands like her? Yes, and who are just flukes. If I think about it: who isn’t a fluke in life.” It takes him a thousand dialectics to arrive at this conclusion, something that Macabéa knows all along.

The novel’s title hits this question of knowledge squarely on the head. Through it, Lispector casts death as a cinematic moment and, again, as a musical experience:

 

Macabéa, toward the end of the novel, leaves a fortuneteller’s house at dusk, on her way to an unceremonious death. It is the “hour of no one.” The hour of the star and the hour of the extra are one and the same.

Things just happen, in other words. There is an unknowable logic behind everything that is, and it makes no sense to us. This is why the narrator has to talk so much (about Macabéa, in part, but also about himself): to fill the void of not knowing. The world is always becoming itself, and is for this reason never fully itself. The novel’s first paragraph, one of the most beautiful passages I have ever read, puts it this way:

 

That yes exists nowhere in time. Sure, it happens at the beginning, but there is always a prologue to the beginning and many postscripts to the end. The final words of this novel, the narrator tells us, are followed by silence and falling rain. The great realm of the world outside succeeds the end of the novel, or rather it imbues it. “Meanwhile the clouds are white and the sky is all blue. Why so much for God. Why not a little for men.”

There will be no silence, however, even at the novel’s end, rather a chorus of molecules saying yes. We are left with the sounds of their assent, and also with a music that is at best a cheap rendition of the classical tradition announced in the prologue. “In the end,” the narrator says of Macabéa, “she was no more than a music box that was slightly out of tune.” That there is beauty in this cheapness is Lispector’s wager; that she makes us believe so is her achievement.

 

 

Translated by Benjamin Moser

New Directions, November 2011