![]() ![]() ![]() The novel does not progress but comes to a halt, and the narrator does not tell us about the lives of the characters but about the act of writing the characters, early on swearing “that this book is composed without words: like a mute photograph. Forbidding herself any pleasures in life, she is a particularly nonexistent character, and yet her very nonexistence is also the point.Īt the novel’s start, the unusual narrator tells the reader, “I want to accept my freedom without reaching the conclusion like so many others: that existence is only for fools and lunatics: for it would seem that to exist is illogical.” As we read, we are constantly interrupted by such illocutions. She is, by all accounts of what we might consider success, an absolute failure. Macabéa, the novel’s protagonist, has no family, is from an impoverished part of Brazil, performs rather poorly at her menial job as a typist, eats only hot dogs and mortadella sandwiches, and occasionally drinks cold coffee. The absurdist, modern dictum is often cited, but what is it, really, to “fail better”? Ukrainian born, Jewish-naturalized Brazilian author Clarice Lispector wrote from the mid 1940s to the late 1970s-roughly the same temporal space as Beckett-and Lispector’s penultimate work, The Hour of the Star (1977), might be described as a novel of failure. ![]() ![]() Ry again, fail again, fail better,” wrote Samuel Beckett. “The Hour of the Star” exists in the space between doubt and affirmation, life and death. ![]()
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