fascinada con esta autora desde La bella y la bestia, Y si los cuentos de ese libro, cuya publicación fue póstuma, me introdujeron al extraño mundo de Clarice Lispector, La hora de la estrella terminó de convencerme y ahora quiero quedarme a vivir allí.
Parece un mundo ordinario, en donde vemos vivencias ordinarias de gente ordinaria, pero hay algo que no lo es: la forma de contarlo.
Lispector toma un hecho y lo trata de adentro hacia afuera, de modo que uno se cruza con pensamientos ajenos, profundos y superficiales.
La historia comienza con un escritor que está contando la historia de Macabea, una muchacha ingenua y algo exasperante que trabaja como dactilógrafa, es pobre y proviene del nordeste de Brasil, lo cual la hace un “bicho raro” en Río de Janeiro.
Mientras el autor reflexiona sobre su propia creación, nos muestra las dificultades que surgen frente a Macabea y que ella no esquiva.
Porque es una no persona, no se percibe, no es, A todo esto hay que sumarle a un novio con aires de Napoleón Bonaparte, una compañera de trabajo que no le deseo a nadie y la posesión de una lamentable incapacidad para interpretar una simple conversación.
Es una novela de lo más curiosa, porque la voz del autor personaje narrador está todo el tiempo interviniendo y opinando a veces bien, a veces mal de Macabea y de su triste vida.
También es bastante autorreferencial y hace girar la trama sobre sí mismo, algo que hace que el lector se olvide algunas veces de la muchacha.
Y con razón, porque según él, Macabea “ni se daba cuenta de que vivía en una sociedad técnica donde ella era un tornillo del que se podía prescindir”.
Sin piedad. Comentarios como estos abundan, y uno no sabe si debe odiar al narrador o darle la razón.
Lispector es una escritora maravillosa y me alegro de haber encontrado que alguien me empujara a leerla de una buena vez.
Si bien en La bella y la bestia su escritura me pareció más fragmentaria, esta novela no pierde la identidad al ser más homogénea los otros son cuentos, así que era de esperar que los ritmos fueran distintos e íntima.
Además, Lispector también vivió en el nordeste como Macabea y utiliza la experiencia para contrastar dos regiones en un sentido muy amplio de la palabra que, al parecer, tienen pocas cosas en común.
Y sé que las comparaciones son odiosas, pero me hizo acordar a Virginia Woolf en algunos puntos.
No lo comento acusando una copia ni nada por el estilo, simplemente es una semejanza que se me cruzó por la cabeza mientras leía, porque a la vez las dos son muy diferentes.
Me atrevo a decir que La hora de la estrella no es lo mejor de esta autora porque espero más en sus otros trabajos.
Me recomendaron muchísimos todos, para ser sincera y yo acepté encantada porque Lispector fue una sorpresa.
Por lo pronto, recomendaría esta novela para cualquiera que quiera empezar a conocerla o que ya la conoció, sin distinciones.
Yo ya la anoté entre mis próximas relecturas,
Reseña en sitelinkClásico desorden A to Z around the world personal challenge B is for Brazil
As you can see, my challenge is progressing badly together with my reading in general.
Due to life I did not have the time or the mood to read anything for the pastweeks and I also made a swift disappearance from here.
I hope I'm back to reading and to GR but I can't be sure,
I finished The Hour of The Star three weeks ago and I waited for the inspiration to hit me so I can write a meaningful review.
As that did not happen a few mumbling words will have to do,
When I first started this novella I was sure I was going to hate it.
I don't really like pretentious writers who do their best to sound complicated and confuse the reader.
However, as I progressed, I discovered that I warmed up to the author and the writing.
“All the world began with a yes, One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born, But before prehistory there was the prehistory of the prehistory and there was the never and there was the yes.
It was ever so. I dont know why, but I do know that the universe never began,
Make no mistake, I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort, ”
As you can see, even the writer/narrator tells us she has problems with simplicity.
What we have here is a "wordy" and philosophical narrator who sets out to tell the story of a poor girl from North of Brasil but while doing so talks a lot more about himself, his reason for writing and the struggle to create a story.
In the narrators's own words: “The story, I determine with false free will will have around seven characters and I am obviously one of the more important.
” this statement is contrary to his goal in the novel which is to tell the story of the girl as humbly as possible.
It is almost comical how the narrator starts to write about the girl then comes back to his struggles as writer and back to the story.
There is no plot to be found here, not really, but I found myself sucked in and looking forward to see where the narrator takes me.
it was different reading experience,
Published two months before the death of its author, this upsidedown fairy tale, at the same time that it registers Macabéa's weak life, composing an exterior, explicit narrative, also questions are ironic and expose the perplexities of contemporary fiction.
Through an authornarrator, Rodrigo SM intends to capture the feeling of perdition of the face of a Northeastern woman seen at random on the street in Rio de Janeiro.
This primary life breathes, breathes, breathes,
Tormented by the character that he created but that he does not know completely, the narrator collides, at every moment, with the differences of social class and gender and, particularly, in the possibilities and limitations of language, in the agony of the act of writing and in the word he establishes, reveals and hides.
الرواية الأخيرة للكاتبة البرازيلية كلاريس ليسبكتور
نص صغير يثير التساؤلات عن الحياة, الوجود, طبيعة النفس الانسانية
يحكي الراوي الكاتب عن فتاة بسيطة وحياتها المهمشة
كغيرها من الشخصيات اللامرئية في الواقع الصاخب
تعيش الفقر والضعف والخذلان, لكن بدون أحزان ولا هموم
في عالم محدود لا يتسع ولا يتغير إلا بالوصول إلى النهاية
وخلال الحكي تتداخل شخصية الراوي الذي يقول
" ما دامت تلاحقني الأسئلة ولا أجد لها أجوبة, سأواصل الكتابة", .
سرد مختلف وترجمة سلسة عن البرتغالية لماجد الجبالي
At times known as the greatest Jewish writer since Kafka, sitelinkClarice Lispector was one of the foremost Brazilian writers of theth century.
Born Chaya Pinkhasovna, her family emigrated from the Ukraine to Recife, Brazil when young Chaya was a little more than a year old.
It was in the northeastern corner of South America's largest country that Lispector found the inspiration for her life's work: writing.
sitelinkThe Hour of the Star is called by many to be her greatest work, published within a year of her death in.
Because this novella is an entry in sitelinkGreat Books By Women by sitelinkErica Bauermeister, I was intrigued to read this unique view on life and death amid the slums of Rio de Janeiro.
Lispector chooses to make Brazilian poverty, still a hot button issue today, as the focus of her last novel.
In the opening pages, it is unclear who the novel's main protagonist is, but after an opening stream of consciousness monologue, we meet Macabea, who has come to Rio from Alagoas, close to Lispector's home state of Recife.
While the Pinkhasovna family became Americanized almost immediately upon arrival in Brazil, Lispector consequently did not write about Jewish themes however, as her own mortality loomed, she created a character in Macabea, who was both Jewish and autobiographical.
Sharing my own family's Ukrainian origins, the I found the concept of a character based on the Macabees intriguing, and I was able to empathize with Macabea once I got past the surreal opening existential sequence.
Macabea was rejected from childhood, Her parents both passed away, and she was raised by an aunt who resembled an evil stepmother.
She deprived Macabea of all joys in life, physically beating to the point of sterility, As soon as Macabea came of age in Alagoas, the aunt wanted to be rid of her and sent her packing to a cramped apartment in the red light slum district of Brazil.
One could not help but feel for sorry for this protagonist: she was ugly yet did not realize it, a virgin, too poor to eat much more than Coca Cola and coffee without milk, and only got paid from her boss as an afterthought.
Macabea evokes a mixture of Cinderella, an adult Cosette, and Eliza Doolittle before she was rescued from poverty.
In a nutshell, Macabea is an ugly duckling of the world with no future as she lives in the slums of Rio, one of the world's most impoverished neighborhoods.
It would take a miracle to save this young woman who unfortunately does not realize how horrendous her existence is.
Even the other characters in this novella view Macabea as beyond salvation, Olimpico comes from the same town in northeastern Brazil and befriends her not as a boyfriend, but because he feels sorry for her bleak life.
Yet, Macabea is too dim to realize this and pins false hopes on their almost nonexistent relationship.
Adding to sorrow is that Macabea naively introduces Olimpico to her sensuous coworker Gloria and the two immediately become a couple.
Each succeeding paragraph adds to Macabea's grief, and one could almost wish that she was better off dead.
Interspersed with the prose are many asides in Lispector's own voice as an author, She apologizes to her readers that much of Macabea's story is actually her own and that she has to take breaks from creating these one dimensional characters because she has grown tired of them.
Yet, the protagonist
and author are one and the same hailing from Recife, living in pain, fighting off eventual death.
As a result I looked past the existentialism and stream of consciousness that I do not usually enjoy to find out if the end result for Macabea was death or the survival reminiscent of her namesake.
sitelinkThe Hour of the Star is my first forage into the greatest of sitelinkClarice Lispector.
For a novella, this story had to be taken in chunks because it was tough to swallow all in one sitting.
Knowing that this was published posthumously and written while Lispector was dying of cancer made me empathize all the more with her protagonist Macabea.
Despite the writing style that I am usually not fond of, I found this story to hold my attention, if not for the sorrows befalling both the lead protagonist and author.
I would be intrigued to read more of Lispector's earlier novels to get a further glimpse at her body of work, one that lead to her inclusion in an anthology of great books written by women.
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Clarice Lispector