The Hour of the Star

Lispector was a Brazilian author of fiction. She was born Chaya Lispector in 1920 Ukraine to Jewish parents, Pinkhas Lispector and Mania Krimgold Lispector. When she was still an infant, the family fled Ukraine during the dissolution of the Russian empire. They relocated to the northeastern city of Maceió in Brazil’s Alagoas region. She and her family members changed their names shortly after immigrating, and Chaya became Clarice. She continued living in Alagoas with her parents and sisters until her father moved the family to Rio de Janeiro to find better work and to seek Jewish husbands for his daughters. Lispector’s mother died at age 42, and her father died at 55.

In 1937, Lispector enrolled in law school at the prestigious Law School of the University of Brazil. While earning her degree, she became interested in writing and started to work as a journalist. She first began to write for the official government press service, the Agência Nacional, and later worked for the newspaper A Noite. Meanwhile, she cultivated an interest in writing fiction and published her first short story, “Triunfo,” in Pan magazine in May 1940. In addition, she fell in love twice during this era, marrying her second love, a law school colleague and Brazilian diplomat, Maury Gurgel Valente.

During her lifetime, Lispector established herself as a crucial literary voice of her age. She published nine novels, including Near to the Wild Heart (1943), The Chandelier (1946), The Besieged City (1949), The Apple in the Dark (1961), The Passion According to G.H. (1964), An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures (1968), Água viva (1973), The Hour of the Star (1977), and A Breath of Life (1978). Her many short stories have been compiled into 10 collections, and her expansive catalog has been translated into numerous languages. In addition, she published a series of children’s books. An enigmatic figure, Lispector was known for her subversive writing style and experimental narrative forms. In Colm Tóibín’s introduction to the source text, he remarks on Lispector’s constant “need to stir and shake narrative itself to see where it might take her” (xiii). He describes her as a “bewildered and original writer” whose work has “bewildered and excited readers” for decades (xiii). Benjamin Moser, in his translator’s afterword at the close of the source text, similarly remarks on Lispector’s bold and now iconic style. Although she wrote in Portuguese, Moser asserts that her prose sounds “just as unusual in the original” as it “sounds in translation” (79). He lauds her “weird word choices, strange syntax, and lack of interest in conventional grammar” (80) as trademarks of her writing. In many ways, Lispector’s style is unique in the literary world and has inspired complex discourses about the power and possibilities of language and story. In addition to her style, Lispector is known for the complex themes and philosophical questions in all of her works. The Hour of the Star exemplifies the challenging, esoteric ideas that Lispector’s catalog consistently tackles.