The family moved to Rio de Janeiro when she was in her teens. She grew up in northeastern Brazil, where her mother died when she was nine. Born to a Jewish family in Podolia in Western Ukraine, she was brought to Brazil as an infant, amidst the disasters engulfing her native land following the First World War. Acclaimed internationally for her innovative novels and short stories, she was also a journalist. In her last novel she takes readers close to the true mystery of life, and leaves us deep in Lispector territory indeed.Ĭlarice Lispector was a Brazilian writer. Lispector employs her pathetic heroine against her urbane, empty narrator-edge of despair to edge of despair-and, working them like a pair of scissors, she cuts away the reader's preconceived notions about poverty, identity, love, and the art of fiction. She doesn't seem to know how unhappy she should be. Rodrigo recoils from her wretchedness, and yet he cannot avoid realization that for all her outward misery, Macabéa is inwardly free. Living in the slums of Rio de Janeiro and eking out a poor living as a typist, Macabéa loves movies, Coca-Cola, and her rat of a boyfriend she would like to be like Marilyn Monroe, but she is ugly, underfed, sickly, and unloved. Narrated by the cosmopolitan Rodrigo S.M., this brief, strange, and haunting tale is the story of Macabéa, one of life's unfortunates. The Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector's consummate final novel, may well be her masterpiece.

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