I read this book last year but never wrote about it here. Not because I didn’t absolutely love it, but because I don’t always write about the books I read. Sometimes, I feel lazy, or I don’t like the photos I take, or I don’t think I have anything particularly interesting to add.
But enough time has passed. A second reading has happened. Now, I feel like I have more to say beyond “this book broke me, it is unfair, it drove me mad, but I loved it.”
This is a novel about poverty and the quiet tragedy of life. It was written in a way that makes you feel like you are unraveling as you spin your way through the lonely and unfair life of Macabéa. I couldn’t help but think about all the lives that are just like hers.
Reading The Hour of the Star in an abstract bubble is one thing. Reading it after walking through Rio de Janeiro is another. It is impossible to ignore the deep inequality that defines the city—the stark contrast between the gleaming glamour of Leblon (or the posh parts of any city) and the sprawling favelas that spiral into the sky. Macabéa, with her empty stomach and unfair life, is not just a character. She is real. She is one of the many invisible lives who are ignored, unheard, and deemed unimportant in a world that has only grown more selfish.
Maybe that’s what makes The Hour of the Star so devastating. Macabéa’s life didn’t matter—not to the people who around her, not to the society that left her behind. And yet, through the book, she exists. We bear witness to her life, hunger, loneliness, dreams, that moment of happiness as she listened to music and danced in her room. She mattered to us. And maybe that is the only kind of justice fiction can offer—to say, if only for a moment, she was here.
Macabéa mattered.
And this, my friends, is why writing and stories matter.
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