, Fragments of Stars. IMS Clarice Lispector, 2021. Disponível em: https://site.claricelispector.ims.com.br/en/2021/12/01/fragments-of-stars/. Acesso em: 06 January 2026.
The writer Ana Maria Machado had an unusual and emotional episode with Clarice Lispector. This happened in 1975. After having read an article by Ana Maria, published that very day in the Jornal do Brasil, about the birthday of the writer Roland Barthes, Clarice, who did not know her personally, insistently asked her for help to organize what in two years would be the book The Hour of the Star. At the end of the day, after some tension-filled twists and turns, the young Ana Maria went to visit the admired Clarice Lispector, of whom she was a fan. She returned home stunned by the encounter and wrote, in the heat of the moment, the draft of a text that would be kept for more than 40 years. The text was finally published in 2020, with minor changes, in Serrote magazine. In this video, produced by the IMS Literature Coordinator’s Office, the story of this encounter – and its outcome – is told by Ana Maria Machado herself, who reconstructs that “strange” day and makes emotional comments about the meeting between the two. Finally, she visits the Clarice Lispector collection, held by the Moreira Salles Institute (IMS), and reviews the manuscripts of The Hour of the Star, the same ones that decades earlier Clarice herself had shown her, scattered in a box, in supplication.
Ana Maria Machado recounts her emotional encounter with Clarice Lispector in 1975.
Written in the 1950s, during the period in which she lived in Washington, The Mystery of the Thinking Rabbit was the first children’s book written by Clarice Lispector.
The word “unfamiliar” is used by Clarice Lispector in several of her works. To be precise, in the original Portuguese, Clarice employed the neologism infamiliar, which is not in the dictionary, though it cannot be affirmed that the author is the source of this term in Brazilian literature. Nonetheless, by mentioning the word “unfamiliar” at least sixteen times, whether in novels, short stories, or chronicles, the author makes this unique signifier an object of greater attention.
[...] throughout all of Clarice’s work there is a dazzling – almost primordial, inaugural, Edenic – vision of gender, of the man-woman division. One notes a frightened fascination that there is a male-animal-man in the world, as we read, for example, in the short story “The Buffalo,” and also in another story about phantasmic and monstrous masculinity titled “The Dinner”.
The numerous commentators who not only in Brazil but also throughout the world investigate Clarice Lispector’s work encounter several aspects to highlight in her multifaceted writing.1 From the fruitful tension between transcendence and contingence to the profound and refined attention to the human condition, one can encounter an immense variety of dimensions in her body of writings.
