The Hour of the Star

New Directions Paperbook

By: Clarice Lispector

Narrated by: Melissa Broder

The Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector's consummate final novel, may well be her masterpiece.

Narrated by the cosmopolitan Rodrigo S. M., this brief, strange, and haunting tale is the story of Macabéa, one of life's unfortunates. Living in the slums of Rio and eking out a poor living as a typist, Macabéa loves movies, Coca-Colas, and her rat of a boyfriend; she would like to be like Marilyn Monroe, but she is ugly, underfed, sickly, and unloved. Rodrigo recoils from her wretchedness, and yet he cannot avoid the realization that for all her outward misery, Macabéa is inwardly free. She doesn't seem to know how unhappy she should be.

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 preconceived notions about poverty, identity, love, and the art of fiction. In her last book, she takes us close to the true mystery of life and leave us deep in Lispector territory indeed.

©1992 New Directions (P)2017 TalkingBook

Melissa Broder Sounds Amazing!

Great narration of an incredible piece of literature from CLARICE LISPECTOR. Audiobook game on point. Get this. High repeat value.

Hypnotic

This is far from a conventional narrative. Give it time — it requires so little — and you may be bewitched. I enjoyed Melissa Broder’s reading, although she did oddly pronounce a few words. Perhaps that was in the spirit of the text.

Great!

This was a really well done audiobook. The book is excellent and the narrating and and production quality are great!

This needs another reading.

For the life of me, I will never understand how they got someone to read this audiobook who is almost totally ignorant of the correct pronunciation of many of the names and terms used in the book. So many things mispronounced, culminating in “Et Tu, Broot.” Bizarre.

Many words are mispronounced

I found the book to be a bit strange but Lispector is like that. However, many words were mispronounced which I found very distracting. It took away from the overall enjoyment of the book,