And write she did, publishing novels that have earned her a place among the twentieth century's greatest writers. Eventually, Lispector was able to study at good schools and eventually decided that she wanted to be a writer. They were poor, and her mother died when she was only nine. The family all took on new names, but their early years were hard. In 1922, the family emigrated to her mother's relatives in Brazil-in Alagoas, the very state in which The Hour of the Star's protagonist is born. But she did know what it meant to be from the Northeast of Brazil and what it meant to feel permanently displaced: she was actually born as "Chaya" to a Jewish family in Ukraine in 1920, where anti-Jewish pogroms threatened her family. She even has her narrator worry about the social (and gender) inequities that make him the one writing and her the one dying.Ĭlarice Lispector didn't know that The Hour of the Star would be her last book before she died of cancer in 1977. The point is, Clarice Lispector was a smart lady, and The Hour of the Star (1977) is self-aware about the literary tradition it's working with. But you've got your struggling writer, your sickly unfortunate, and a tragic (or almost-tragic) ending. Okay, obviously there are some differences. Sound familiar? They made an opera about it. Man becomes a better person tragic, doomed woman dies. Tragic, doomed woman lives tragically, teaches man about life, the universe, and everything-especially writing.
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