Thoughts on Clarice Lispector's final published work

The 77-page novel (call it a "novella" if you wish), The Hour of the Star, is the final work from Brazilian novelist and short-story writer Clarice Lispector, published in the the the year of her death, 1977, at age 57, now published by New Directions in a new tr. by Benjamin Moser. I wouldn't claim that this is a great work, but it's unusual and sorrowful and worth reading, though probably not the best place to start on Lispector (I haven't read a lot of her works, but would suggest starting w/ her short stories). This novel tells of the life and (possible - the ending is deliberately ambiguous) of a woman from an impoverished background in northern Brazil who settles in to Rio where she lives in cheap housing shared w/ 4 other women (we learn nothing about them in this book), works in an office setting at "below minimum wage" (hard to explain that one), and seems content with her lonely life - until she meets a young man who she falls in love w/ and then loses to a friend of hers who's much more sensual, sexual, and experienced. A typical story of love lost, in other words, except for a few key elements. First, there are strange ways in which this woman, Macabea, mirrors CL's life: both born in NE Brazil and settled into life in Rio, both seemingly of Jewish descent (CL is from a Jewish family; her character bears a name that recalls the Maccabees, though nothing is made of this fact in this novel). Yet of course the 2 are diametrically opposed as well: an urban, literary sophisticate compared with uneducated and not especially bright or curious figure. Also, CL's work is a relatively early example of postmodern narrative - at that time less central to Latin American literature, which was then focused on "magic realism" (in the wake of Garcia Marquez) or just plain magic (in the wake of Borges). CL imagines a narrator - a male one, for some reason - who intrudes at various points in the story he's writing/telling: at one point, for example, stepping aside and saying this story is too sad and demanding and he has to take a break from his writing for a few days; then, resumes the narration - 3 days later, he notes - in the next paragraph - so we are seeing not exactly a story but the creation of a story. Similarly, he wrestles, especially toward the end, w/ various plot points. And finally, it's obvious that CL was aware of her own mortality while writing this novel, which includes many speculations on the experience of death, especially death foretold by a fortune-teller; knowing, as we now do, that this was to be her last work published in her lifetime, there's a special poignancy to reading about a character so unlike the author but similarly on the verge of death: after a character in a novel dies, what's left of them? And what of an author?