I don't know how to write about this novella (at 80 pages, it's barely a book), hence why I've put off blogging about it.  It was lent to me by Jane and I read it in a couple of hours.  I think it should have taken me longer - the curse of the speed-reader is the effort it takes to slow down when necessary.  I don't, however, feel moved to read it again.  Maybe in a year or so, but not now.

The first thing I had to get past was the oddness of the prose.  To begin with, I was grinding my teeth about the awfulness of the translation - why oh why are some books butchered by translation?  I'm never going to learn another language (or five, or ten) so I can read "in the original" but surely, in the 21st century, we can have good translations? (This is another reason why I love the Europa imprints.) Anyway, I unclenched eventually and just tried to go with it, turns out, when I read the afterword, that I was unfairly blaming the translator; Lispector reportedly engaged in significant amounts of correspondence with her editor, finally telling them that "...the sentences do not reflect the usual manner of speaking...The punctuation I employed in the book is not accidental and does not result from an ignorance about the rules of grammar." So that was me  (as well as the beleaguered editor) told.

And so to the narrative.  The Hour of the Star is narrated by a man "for a woman would weep her heart out". I was warned. The (reliable? unreliable?) narrator is Rodrigo, his aim, to "touch the invisible in its own squalor". The "invisible" girl is Macabea, the slum-orphan girl who thinks she has met the man who will raise her up from her blurry, washed out, grey world, into a world of clean lines, bright colour and happy ever afters.  Are you hearing echoes of fairy tales?  You would be right. Alas for Cinders/Macabea, Olimpico ain't no Prince Charming, but a man on the make, and the minute a better prospect comes along, in the shape of Gloria, Macabea's friend/colleague he drops Macabea like a hot brick.  Macabea is ugly, skinny, impoverished but, (hints are dropped throughout) she has a brain.  Or at least intellectual curiosity and a thirst for knowledge - if only she had been borne into another life.  As it is, her cognition is another strike against her in Charming/Olimpico's eyes. She's a terrible typist and her idea of heaven is a Coca-Cola, even though she is always hungry.  She is someone who is done to, she has no agency, no control, no self-determination. Her terrible passivity is one of the reasons I found Hour of the Star so difficult to read.

In an effort to grasp some sliver of control, Macabea visits a fortune teller, who tells her that her life will change.  She will be lifted up, exalted by a foreign man (of course!) she will have a fur coat "but you don't need a fur coat in the heat of Rio,"  "then you'll have it just to dress up!" And wealth and untold riches, never again will Macabea go hungry etc etc.  She leaves the fortune tellers "already a different person...just as you can be sentenced to death, the fortune teller had sentenced her to life".  She she steps off the pavement, Destiny enters, Macabea is struck by a Mercedes (driven by, you guessed it, a blond, foreign man), "her fall was nothing, just a shove" and she lies in the gutter, bleeding, and with onlookers doing nothing, she dies "finally free of herself and us". So lifted up by a wealthy man, in one sense, certainly.

And thus the novella ends.  Macabea is dead, our narrator "lights a cigarette and goes home".  I, as predicted, being a woman, wept my heart out.