The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector

Wiping away her own tears she tried to sing what she heard.  But her voice was as crude and out of tune as she was.  When she heard it she started to cry.  It was the first time she'd ever cried, she didn't know she had so much water in her eyes.  She cried, blew her nose no longer knowing what she was crying about.  She wasn't crying because of the life she led: because, never having led any other, she'd accepted that with her that was just the way things were.  But I also think she was crying because, through the music, she might have guessed there were other ways of feeling, there were more delicate existences and even a certain luxury of soul.

Clarice Lispector's novella The Hour of the Star is a tough little nugget: Ostensibly, it tells the story of a poor woman named Macabea in Rio de Janeiro who lives a pretty brief and unremarkable life.  Macabea is poor, and the poverty is sort of the point.  It's the poverty not only that keeps her eating nothing but hot dogs, but also that keeps her from understanding that you might live not eating hot dogs every day.  She ends up with a bitter man named Olimpico, not dreaming that she might leave him for someone who treats her well, or even that such a man might exist; in the end, he's the one that leaves her.  In the end end she is--and I guess I'll say "spoiler alert" if anyone plans on actually tracking down this little book--she's hit by a car and dies.  As she's leaving a fortune teller.

On the way there, Lispector offers up a convincing but spare sketch of what poverty does to the human psyche.  Much of it is funny and nicely observed:

When she was a girl she'd seen a house painted pink and white with a yard where there was a well and everything.  It was good to look inside.  So her ideal became this: to have a well just for her.  But she didn't know how and so she asked Olimpico:

--Do you know if you can buy a hole?

But Macabea is only half the story, maybe less than half.  The other major character is the narrator, himself from the rural northeast of Brazil, like Macabea.  We don't know what his name is, or how he knew her, but we do know that he feels immense pressure to get her story right, to tell it convincingly.  The first thirty pages or so--and this book is only about eighty pages long--feature the narrator obsessing about his task, trying to dispel his own doubts, fretting over the success of the story he's putting off.  Lispector's style, already so elliptical, evokes similar frustration in the reader:

To draw the girl I have to get a grip on myself and to capture her soul I have to feed myself frugally with fruits and drink iced white wine because it's hot in this cubbyhole I've locked myself into and from which I'm inclined to want to see the world.  I've also had to give up sex and soccer.  Not to mention that I avoid all human contact.  Will I someday return to my former way of life?  I very much doubt it.  I now see that I forgot to mention for the time being I read nothing for fear of polluting the simplicity of my language with luxuries.  Since as I said the word has to resemble the word, my instrument.  Or am I not a writer?  Actually I'm more of an actor because with only one way to punctuate, I juggle with intonation and force another's breathing to accompany my text.

There's a whole Notes from the Underground thing going on, but the narrator isn't a misanthrope; in fact, he's a kind of humanist who can't live with the idea of not telling the story in the right way.  Buy why Macabea?  The question, maybe, is the point: why not Macabea?  Why shouldn't a poor girl, both unattractive and dim (as the narrator tells us), have her story told as faithfully as anyone else?

Beyond that, I didn't quite "get" this novella.  Its peripatetic and incomplete qualities are surely intentional, but the distance they create make me feel a little at sea.  Something closer to realism might have told me about Macabea's life, but here the story really becomes about the narrator, and the very modernist anxiety about whether or not it is impossible to put the truth into words.  Still, I think I understand why Lispector's cult has grown: there's a breathtaking bravery in the way she strings words and sentences together, not really caring if the connection is clear.  The writing itself can be staggeringly fresh, but I'm not sure it made me want to wade into that 700-page collection of her short fiction that everyone raves about.