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.
Fragments of Stars
Footnotes
See also
Clarice’s Rio de Janeiro – by Mànya Millen
In the book Rio de Clarice, the author's pleasure in wandering the streets, forests, parks, and beaches of Rio de Janeiro, where she arrived as a 15-year-old, is evident.
The thinking literature of Clarice Lispector, a class by Evando Nascimento
The professor and writer Evando Nascimento gave a class on the work of Clarice Lispector at the IMS Rio. His talk is based on the category of “thinking literature.”
The Clarice Factor
In partnership with the Department of Humanities at Columbia University, the IMS presents the international seminar The Clarice Factor: Aesthetics, Gender, and Diaspora in Brazil.
A frame for Clarice Lispector
In the 1960s, the Spaniard Jaime Vilaseca was a carpenter in Rio de Janeiro until a fateful encounter with Clarice Lispector, for whom he had gone to make a bookcase in her apartment in the Leme neighborhood.
Clarice’s biography now has a Spanish edition
Written by Benjamin Moser, Clarice Lispector’s biography Why This World (Oxford University Press, 2009) continues to circulate around the world.
“Women Are Wild”
For the journalist Laura Freitas, Clarice’s female characters hide the germ of nonconformity – “the women are wild,” she affirms.