No one paid any attention to her, for she was as appetising as cold coffee."
That is brutal.
The Hour of the Star, a novel by Clarice Lispector about a girl whose life is so unremarkable that even the narrator seems unsure whether it deserves to be told.
As always, this is not going to be a book review per se, but more so a literary essay on what this book reveals about us and our culture.
So the protagonist Macabea, a girl who simply exists in the 1970s in Rio de Janeiro, a city that barely notices her.
Her life was so monotonous that, by the end of the day, she could no longer remember what had happened that same morning.
Now, while I was reading, I noticed this subtle persistence, discomfort of watching a life unfold that refuses to become meaningful in the way that we are trained to recognize.
So Maccabea does not aspire to greatness.
She does not cultivate depth.
She isn't curating an identity or chasing transformation.
She just works and eats and listens to the radio. and daydreams.
There is no traditional character arc.
Maka, however, never expressed herself in sentences.
First of all, because she was a person of few words.
She wasn't conscious of herself and made no demands on anyone.
Makka even thought of herself as being happy.
She was no idiot, yet she possessed the pure happiness of idiots.
She did not think about herself.
She lacked self-awareness."
That is a quote from the book.
We talk a lot about failure in our culture, how to overcome it and reframe it and turn it into a story of growth.
But I don't think failure is what frightens people most.
Because failure still means that you tried.
It suggests ambition.
It suggests movement.
I can never get the word suggests right, ever.
Ordinariness is something different.
It suggests that nothing noteworthy was attempted at all.
And in a world slightly obsessed with visibility and metrics and followers and constant self-presentation, living an unremarkable life can feel like fading into the background, almost as if you don't exist.
In the same way,
Now, people have always wanted to matter, But now we're constantly surrounded by the curated lives of others.
Even if you don't post, even if you seek invisibility, visibility feels inescapable.
So for instance, I recently wanted to take a dance class.
And so I went to their page to check the dates, and I saw that most of the classes were being filmed and posted.
And it just changed the atmosphere instantly.
What I wanted was an hour of simple learning and fun, and suddenly it felt performative.
And I wasn't looking to be seen.
I just wanted a space where I can go unnoticed.
And maybe that's the tension.
We want invisibility on our own terms.
We want to choose when we are seen and when we are not.
But what unsettles us about Maccabea is something different.
She is not invisible by choice.
She simply is not seen at all.
And within that structure, being ordinary can start to feel like being erased.
Maccabea, you are like a hair in one's soup.
It is enough to make anyone lose their appetite.
That sentence in the book made me lose my appetite for how cruel How cruel that was worded.
Even the narrator worries about Maccabea and seems to regard her smallness as a creative inconvenience.
There's something revealing about that frustration.
It mirrors the way we struggle to appreciate lives that don't try to stand out.
We admire people who remain obscure when it seems intentional or when it aligns with something that we find interesting.
We romanticize simplicity when it looks polished or refined and we accept anonymity when it feels like a conscious choice.
But plain, uncurated ordinariness.
A life without any clear story or purpose can feel uncomfortable because we don't always know how to make sense of it.
And humans naturally want to sort people into categories.
Magabea does not self-improve or reinvent or take productive naps.
She doesn't chase ambition.
She simply remains herself.
And that could be read as peaceful, and maybe it should, but it didn't.
Now why?
Maybe because we often tie movement to value.
We assume that a meaningful life needs to grow, to have a purpose and to end in some sort of a success.
And now maybe that's true to some extent.
I don't know, but we tend to feel uncomfortable with stillness.
You know, we might call it being stuck or falling behind, and it seems that oftentimes stillness is only accepted if it's turned into something beautiful or something interesting to look at.
You know, we say we, We want simplicity, but often what we really mean is something special.
You know minimalism with a purpose, or quiet living that photographs well.
We want things to look effortless, but still be aspirational.
And now at this point, it's important to acknowledge something obvious from the book.
Maccabea's smallness isn't purely psychological.
It's, you know, it's structural.
She grows up poor, without stability, without access to education and so on.
Yet literature is filled with characters who, you know, begin in disadvantage and transform it into something that we share.
For you know, we root for them, and perhaps the protagonist is brilliant or driven by hunger or rage or rebellion.
We expect struggle to justify itself by leading to success.
It's a very familiar arc.
On Sundays, she always woke up early in order to be able to spend more time doing absolutely nothing.
That's another quote from the book.
In our days, now with over-visibility.
We also probably compare ourselves more, or at least to a much larger scale than what's been historically even possible.
We see people that we'll never meet, whose lives are often carefully edited to deliver a certain message And, in that context, being ordinary can feel like standing still while everyone else is moving fast.
And you might even wonder if an ordinary existence is socially acceptable anymore.
Nan Maccabea's life is in some ways objectively tragic.
And we don't get the satisfaction of witnessing her triumph.
But maybe the discomfort that we feel isn't really about Maccabeus' life, but rather about how we have come to measure value.
In a world focused on progress and visibility, simply existing without any ambition can feel strange.
But that unease probably says more about us than her.
Most lives are in fact quiet and most stories never reach outside your immediate circle.
And Lispector shows that a life doesn't need to be big or dramatic to exist.
And even though Maccabea's life doesn't scale in the way that we wanted for her, Her life still counts and it is, in many ways, complete.
And yet we often forget that.
I want to end with a quote from the book that I think speaks a thousand words about her.
She rarely spoke, but she loved sounds.
