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
See also
“Love Smells Like Death”
Clarice Lispector wrote about sex only once. It was in the book A via crúcis do corpo (The Via Crucis of the Body).
LispectorFest at the University of Tennessee
Every year the University of Tennessee prepares AuthorFest, a series of activities to celebrate the work of a single author. In its second edition, AuthorFest paid tribute to Clarice Lispector.
Compact prose, poetic moves
A conversation about football and literature between Armando Nogueira and Clarice Lispector
“Me, A Witch?”
In January 1975, Clarice Lispector received an invitation letter, signed by Simón González, a Colombian businessman, politician, and mystic, inviting her to take part in the First World Congress of Witchcraft, which would be held between August 24 and 28 of that same year in Bogotá, Colombia. [...] But why was Clarice Lispector invited to the First World Congress of Witchcraft?
Book You Might Not Imagine Clarice Had
Clarice left various papers with drafts to calculate responses provided by the I Ching. Some of the questions are scribbled, such as “What’s my future in general?”
Illustration and Affect, A Conversation with Mariana Valente
Starting next May, the shelves of Brazilian bookstores will display copies of A mulher que matou os peixes (The Woman Who Killed the Fish) with a new look.