Hour of the Star: Clarice Lispector

Living in the slums of Rio and eking out a living as a typist, Macabea loves movies, Coca-Cola and her philandering rat of a boyfriend; she would like to be like Marilyn Monroe, but she is ugly and unloved. Yet telling her story is the narrator Rodrigo S.M., who tries to direct Macabea`s fate but comes to realize that, for all her outward misery, she is inwardly free. Slyly subverting ideas of poverty, identity, love and the art of writing itself, Clarice Lispector`s audacious last novel is a haunting portrayal of innocence in a bad world.