I would like to compose a forty-minute opera on Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star. This powerful short novel was the author’s last work and provides a moving portrait of the life of Macabéa, a poor woman from the northeast of Brazil whose existence borders on the invisible. Her experiences with love, family, work, food, and sudden death are a window into Lispector’s early life in Brazil and the voicelessness of poverty. The roles are Macabéa (mezzo); her aunt (soprano); Olímpico, the boyfriend (tenor); Glória (coloratura), her better-off coworker who ends up with Olímpico; Clarice, the author, Madame Carlotta, the seer (mezzo); and the narrator (baritone), whose masculinity and privilege serves as the mouthpiece for Macabéa’s metaphysical impotence.