Macabéa, the protagonist of Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star (1977), is one among thousands of poor young women who slip through the cracks of Brazilian society. She leaves the northeastern state of Alagoas for Rio de Janeiro, where she scrapes by as a typist, surviving on hot dogs, Coca-Cola, and cold coffee; if she is particularly hungry, she chews paper to curb her appetite. Her story is related by Rodrigo S.M., an obsessive onlooker, who feels driven to paint a picture of her life in the slums through a grim compulsion, rather than his own will.Macabéa’s experience of poverty was not unique. By 1977, the year the novel was published, Brazil had already been under a military dictatorship for 13 years — a regime that would last from 1964 to 1985. In the early years, the dictatorship oversaw an economic boom, but the rewards were concentrated in the hands of a privileged few. Wage suppression and the curtailment of workers’ rights widened inequality. While capital accumulated at the top, some 85 million Brazilians lived at or below the poverty line.1 At the same time, industrialisation in southeastern cities sparked a wave of internal migration from the impoverished northeast, as people sought better economic prospects. Class lines were sharply drawn: the wealthy withdrew into seclusion, while the poor, like Macabéa and her four roommates, crowded into crumbling tenements.2Lispector herself was no stranger to hardship. Born to Ukrainian Jews fleeing pogroms, her family eventually settled in Maceió, in Brazil’s impoverished northeastern state of Alagoas. Her father struggled economically, and her mother died when Lispector was just nine; soon after, the family relocated to Rio de Janeiro. Despite this early trauma, her exceptional intelligence secured her a place in a prestigious secondary school, an elite law school later, and a career in journalism, before her first novel in 1943.3 Her writing is a form of inquiry, introspective and searching, through which she probes the meaning of existence.The Hour of the Star is a story about a girl barely noticed by anyone, ‘in a city that’s entirely against her.’4 She follows a monotonous daily routine, from a run-down house in a seedy district of prostitutes, sailors, and warehouses, to her office job, to the docks she walks on weekends.The narrator, Rodrigo S.M., agonises over telling Macabéa’s story, delaying the act with digressions: ‘I suspect that all this chitchat is made just to put off the poverty of the story, because I’m scared.’5 He talks about meaningful representation, but is this obsession to depict her life just a means to relieve his guilt and ‘rid [him]self of the weight of not having done anything concrete to help the girl?’6 Throughout the novel, Rodrigo jumps between narrative perspectives. He shifts from a distant first-person voice (‘I have to write about this northeastern girl or I’ll choke’) to an omniscient third-person stance (‘as for the girl, she lives in an impersonal limbo, without reaching the worst or the best’).78 In this manner, he becomes both narrator and character, and the narrative jolts jarringly between immersion in Macabéa’s life and his own interior monologue, producing a structure that is fragmented and unstable.Rodrigo creates an image of Macabéa that is centred on what she lacks to emphasise her poverty. She defines herself through surface details — ‘I’m a typist and I’m a virgin, and I like Coca Cola’ — revealing her lack of self-knowledge and heightening the contrast with Rodrigo’s brooding self-awareness,9 throwing her psychological flatness into sharper relief. Macabéa ‘didn’t worry about her own future: having a future was a luxury,’ demonstrating how even this abstract concept was a luxury to her.10 Macabéa has had only three years of schooling, and her lack of intelligence is subtly portrayed. When her boyfriend, Olímpico, asks her to talk about herself, she is momentarily blank. He presses her, ‘what’s the matter? Aren’t you someone? People talk about people’, to which she responds ‘Sorry, but I don’t think I’m really people.’11 The exchange captures how deeply she has internalised the marginalisation that poverty has imposed. Her inability to answer reflects a collapsed sense of self-worth and a diminished capacity to conceive of herself as a subject. She has absorbed the idea that ‘for other people she didn’t exist.’12Through The Hour of the Star, Lispector uses the theme of poverty to interrogate the concept of existential choice. According to French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80), we gain the freedom to create ourselves through the decisions we make, rather than being defined by a pre-existing essence.13 This, he argues, is a freedom available to all — even in the most extreme conditions. Lispector challenges this view by showing how poverty and deprivation obstruct Macabéa’s ability to recognise — let alone exercise — existential freedom; she ‘didn’t even realise she lived in a technical society, in which she was a dispensable cog.’14 There are rare moments in the novel where Macabéa appears to exercise agency, most notably when she decides to visit a fortune teller. The encounter confronts her with her own devastating reality, but also, for the first time, allows a flicker of hope and ambition to surface, a brief departure from the passivity that defines her life. Lispector’s compelling insight is that existential freedom is not equally available to all. This calls into question the universalism of existentialist thought, revealing how class, history, and poverty influence, and sometimes bar, the conditions of agency.We can trace faint parallels between Lispector’s life and the novel, and speculate on its autobiographical elements. Although the use of a male narrator creates a formal distance, the question of the writer-activist is one that concerned Lispector throughout her life. In a 1964 newspaper column, she confessed: ‘I wanted to ‘do’ something to fight social injustice (as if writing weren’t doing). What I can’t figure out is how to use writing for that.’15