Ricerc@Sapienza

This essay explores the difficulties that Suzana Amaral had to face in her adaptation of Clarice Lispector’s novel A hora da estrela for the screen. The writer’s attempt at staging a real “drama of language” in order to convey the voice of the marginalized leads her to construct a complex work, sus- pended between silence and speech (“This book is silence. This book is a question”). In order to escape this testimo- nial aporia, Clarice becomes a “third” narrator who, in turn, tries to account for deprivation and marginality through non-linguistic expressions: that of music and that of the body. The director, however, is unable to avoid a homodiegetic narration that obliterates, at least in part, the complexity of the literary text.