After the entire book, I still felt like I barely knew her at all. She is the kind of character that is hard to root for, because we never really get to know her. Macabéa, put into the background of her own story, is left with a collective of stereotypes and tragedy. The entire story is told by a male narrator that insists he is in love with Macabéa (although she’s fictional) and must tell her story which is quite interesting, since he spends most of the book talking about himself instead. The Hour of the Star tells the story of Macabéa, a girl from Northeast Brazil who lives in poverty in Rio de Janeiro. I recently re-read Felicidade Clandestina and was impressed by how much I loved Clarice Lispector’s short stories, so I might have come into The Hour of the Star with high expectations, but I was sorely disappointed. Ĭategories: Literary Fiction, Classic Fiction I would be curious to see how the translation was done, but honestly, I’ve had quite enough of this book and would prefer moving on to her other stories. I’ve heard that the translated work isn’t very good, and I completely believe it – Clarice has a writing style that is probably really hard to translate in the first place. The Hour of the Star is one of the few translated books from Brazil that English-speakers have access to more or less easily, so I am reviewing here the edition I read in Portuguese. I haven’t done bilingual reviews in a while, but since I read this very popular Brazilian classic, I thought it would be worth the effort writing a double review.
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