How long does it take to read The Hour of the Star?
The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector takes about 1 hour 46 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 1 hour 46 minutes
An evening's read
First published 1977. 96 pages, about 26,400 words.
4 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 2 hours 56 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 1 hour 46 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 1 hour 6 minutes |
The page count is the median across 35 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Narrated by the cosmopolitan Rodrigo S.M., this brief, strange, and haunting tale is the story of Macabéa, one of life's unfortunates. Living in the slums of Rio and eking out a poor living as a typist, Macabéa loves movies, Coca-Colas, and her rat of a boyfriend; she would like to be like Marilyn Monroe, but she is ugly, underfed, sickly and unloved. Rodrigo recoils from her wretchedness, and yet he cannot avoid the realization that for all her outward misery, Macabéa is inwardly free/She doesn't seem to know how unhappy she should be. Lispector employs her pathetic heroine against her urbane, empty narratoredge of despair to edge of despairand, working them like a pair of scissors, she cuts away the reader's preconceived notions about poverty, identity, love and the art of fiction. In her last book she takes readers close to the true mystery of life and leave us deep in Lispector territory indeed.
Subjects: Fiction, psychological, Rio de janeiro (brazil), fiction, Fiction, Brazil, Macabea, Rio de Janeiro
