"I write because I have nothing else to do in the world: I was left over and there is no place for me in the world of men. I write because I'm desperate and I'm tired, I can no longer bear the routine of being me and if not for the always novelty that is writing, I would die symbolically every day. But I am prepared to slip out discreetly through the back exit. I've experienced almost everything, including passion and its despair. And now I'd only like to have what I would have been and never was."
The Hour of The Star is the first book I finished this year and I think I have found my favorite book of the year on the first week of the first month. I highlighted passages almost on every page on the first half of the book. I am in awe with how Lispector wrote the interiority of her characters, how she could translate her feelings and thoughts into words. And how I could find myself in the many words she strung into sentences gave a bewildering feeling. The passage above reminds me of what I wrote about writing some time ago. If only I possessed a small tiny amount of capacity to write so beautifully.
I fell even deeper into admiration when I read the afterword. I have known that her writing is something special before I read any of her books but I had never read about her political activities, although of course this book displays her deep empathy for the marginalized people. Reading her son's words about her gave me the same exact feeling as when I was reading Simone de Beauvoir's The Woman Destroyed. It's this feeling of yearning to belong to a family that stands on the right side. It strangely gave me two kinds of longing.
First is a longing to have parents I could respect. I was raised by parents who believe and act like they belong to the upper class although they weren't one. They look down on certain people. They care so much about their image. I suffered the consequences of this way of living. Reading both Lispector and Beauvoir, also Ernaux (and also seeing Susan Sarandon's political side), made me wonder what it's like to have parents who understand how the world works, who know which sides to defend, who see injustice instead of perpetrating one. Not guided blindly by religion for the sake of one's own benefit.
Secondly it also somehow gave me a longing of passing them down to someone. To have a unit of my own that believes in doing the right thing. Strange because I don't actually desire children. But seeing children who were taught the right thing and are able to continue their parents' values is beautiful.
***
I have to put here at least some quotes from the book:
"She didn't think about God, God didn't think about her."
"When I prayed I achieved an emptiness of soul - and that emptiness is all I can ever have. Besides that, nothing."
"Who hasn't ever wondered: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?"
"And I want to accept my freedom without thinking what so many do, that existing is something for fools, a case of madness. Because that's what it seems like. Existing isn't logical."
"She spent the rest of her day obediently playing the role of being."
"If I think about it: who isn't a fluke in life. As for me, I've only escaped from being just a fluke because I write, which is an act that is a fact. That's when I enter in contact with inner powers of mine, I find through myself your God. Why do I write? What do I know? No idea. Yes, it's true, I sometimes think that I'm not me, I seem to belong to a distant galaxy because I'm so strange to myself. Is this me? I am frightened to encounter myself."
"I have no social class, marginalized as I am. The upper class considers me a weird monster, the middle class worries I might unsettle them, the lower class never comes to me."
"Because there's the right to scream.
So I scream."
"I'll miss myself so bad when I die."
***
