The novella’s subjects are both “coy and complicated” and forthright. So maybe the question then becomes: how does a passion for nothingness sustain a passion for justice? The Hour of the Star, like Lispector herself, is a curious and enthralling mixture of these two impulses. The risks were great, but she supported her teenage son’s participation in protests and herself took part in the important 1968 demonstration, the March of the One Hundred Thousand. Her concerns were basic, essential: access to education and the eradication of hunger. A self-described democratic socialist, she wrote and mobilized throughout the 1960s against the U.S.-backed Brazilian coup of 1964. While Elizabeth Bishop described her as “very coy and complicated,” and Tóibín describes “a sense that she was deeply mystified by the world, and uncomfortable with life itself,” Lispector was nonetheless an activist and public intellectual.
Yet Lispector did not live at a distance from historical and political life. These are not the kinds of people we consider crucial to the operations of historical and political life. What can it mean to be passionate about nothingness? And what earthly concerns might be contained in such a passion? Artists tend to have a passion for the void, as do mystics, as does anyone who struggles to accept the basic premise “I am I” and get on with their day. “Clarice,” concludes Castello, “had a passion for the void.” In it, Colm Tóibín introduces readers to Lispector by way of a secondhand anecdote, the writer José Castello’s recollection of finding the great Brazilian Jewish novelist on a street in Rio, gazing into a shop window populated by naked mannequins. “A Passion for the Void”: that’s the title of the introduction to the centennial edition of The Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector’s final novel. The Hour of the Star (Centennial Edition) by Clarice Lispector, trans.
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