Skip to main content

Review 29: The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector

The Hour of the Star
There are two types of experimental fiction. There’s the stuff that’s inaccessible: the ones that replace all verbs with synonyms for hedge, or only include sentences that start in the middle, end and then begin. And then there’s good experimental fiction, that actually uses experimentation to enhance, rather than obstruct, the story. The Hour of the Star is the second sort.

Written in the 1970s, Clarice Lispector’s book draws from her early life in Brazilian poverty, and perhaps even more so as a novelist. It’s a superb example of a book where the narrator is not only visible, he’s actively present and even obstructive in the telling of the story.

At first, Rodrigo S.M., the narrator, is a pompous and rather tedious being; a sort of literary Michael Winterbottom. But over time he seems to suffer a kind of breakdown as he wrestles with his own doubts, faith, the story and his main character, Macabéa. Macabéa in particular is as slippery as a Vaselined eel, dragging the story onwards to conclusions he doesn’t want.

It’s hard to separate both Macabéa and Rodrigo S.M. from Lispector herself. The former grows up in Brazilian poverty, much like the author, and the details of her life feel furnished by experience. The latter provides a running commentary on the writer’s process that feels drawn from her own life too. Emotionally, of course, neither represent Lispector (I hope, because in different ways, being either would be worse than a papercut massage), but by sharing these parts of herself, Lispector gives the writing a sense of real authenticity that’s very difficult to achieve in such as slim book.

As Rodrigo S.M. himself agonises over, there’s a really short plot to the book, so I won’t spoil it by discussing it here. But fundamentally, it’s about how the world treats people who are too broken to know they’re broken.

As well as experimenting with narrator conventions, Lispector’s writing style itself is fascinating to follow as she bends and tears standard grammatical rules. She breaks off sentences halfway through, uses punctuation oddly, has hanging adverbs with no verb to justify them – the effect is pretty mesmerising, and serves to hurl you into the narrator’s fragmented state of mind. Apparently she wrote the book on lots of different scraps of paper and then pulled them all together, and this shows – and really works.

My favourite thing about THOTS is the way she packages up insight into little sentences and scatters them through the book almost willy-nilly. A few example sentences:

Puberty came late because even weeds long for the sun.
One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born.
What can you do with the truth that everyone’s a little sad and a little alone.

This is an occasionally funny read, but mostly it’s a tragedy. Steer clear if you prefer a standard storytelling technique, but otherwise jump in.

--

This is my twenty-ninth book review of 100 to raise money for Refuge, the domestic abuse charity. If you liked this review, or just want to help out, please donate on the link below!

JustGiving - Sponsor me now!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review 1: Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall, by Anna Funder

My rating: 5 of 5 stars I am hungover and steer myself like a car through the crowds at Alexanderplatz station. How could you not love a book that begins like that? Early on in Stasiland , Anna Funder discusses the ‘puzzle women of Nuremberg’. This is a group of underfunded people (both men and women, oddly) who spend their days piecing together the scraps of documents the Stasi hurriedly shredded at the end of their regime. It feels like an apt analogy for Funder’s book itself – she carefully and brilliantly pieces together a view of what it was like to live in East Germany, and the effect it’s had on its citizens decades after the Berlin Wall was wrenched down, from snapshot interviews, research and her own experiences… despite the fact that most people she encounters would rather sweep it under the rug and pretend it never happened. I came to this book knowing that East Germany was run as a Communist surveillance state, but little else. That was no problem. ...
1 comment
Read more

Review 34: The Long Song by Andrea Levy

I’ve read a few books dealing with black slavery as part of this challenge. It’s interesting how each one looks at it through a slightly different lens, adding slightly different perspectives to the whole picture. In The Long Song , the thing that rings as much through the book as the horror and inhumanity of slavery is the sense of humour between the slaves themselves. It felt odd to laugh out loud while reading this, but there are plenty of times I did. I guess that this in itself is important – humour is an essential and universal human trait, so if we deny the slaves’ humour in recounting their stories, maybe it’s another way of denying their humanity all over again. I tried rewriting this about five times to make me sound less like a pseudo-intellectual jerksack, but this is the best I could do, I’m afraid. Anyway, TLS is set in a Jamaican sugar plantation in the early 19th century, and spans the periods just before and after slavery was abolished in the British Empir...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review 8: Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh

I sincerely believed that if there were less of me, I would have fewer problems. This pretty much sums up Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen . The titular protagonist is a sort of anti-heroine, but without the swagger that word tends to conjure. Instead, she has been raised in a loveless home, and has never had friends. She hates her town, her family and most of all, herself. Her misanthropy springs from the world’s rejection of her, rather than the other way around. Moshfegh says that she wrote Eileen as an experiment, following a paint-by-numbers guide to commercial fiction. But the Man Booker shortlisted novel comes out as anything but conventional. It’s more a masterclass in characterisation – light on plot, but heavy on unreliable narration, building Eileen’s miserable day-to-day existence up until the character slouches fully off the page. It’s a really sad and well-observed depiction of how women can internalise hatred. Eileen is disgusted by her own body. She refuses to w...
Post a Comment
Read more