![]() She says, “It matters to have committed yourself at one moment, even at great cost and disorder, and know that you have that capacity. In The Evening of the Holiday, Hazzard’s first novel, published in 1966, an elderly aunt can accept the idea of one’s life being “benevolently directed,” but she cannot imagine a life worth living that is not also earthly and messy. The island’s prolific growth of flowering plants, shrubs, and vines does the rest.” The house was built in an era of “emulative architecture” that could appear fake or inorganic but for the intervention of the Capri climate, which “through seasonal alternations of scorching and soaking, weathers any tactful, durable structure into authenticity. For example, in Hazzard’s celebrated memoir of her relationship with Graham Greene on the island of Capri, she describes the writer’s modest house in Anacapri at the north end of the island. Throughout her work, the sensitivity to environment and emotion that Hazzard values above all else leads to a certain authentic battering, which in turn creates a kind of beauty that is not possible with lives and objects that have been more gently handled. The places Hazzard is drawn to are often difficult places, which take their toll on both people and landscapes, natural and manmade. Their sentence-level mastery, their dramatic turns and high stakes, and their nuanced revelations combine to compel the reader’s passionate, sustained engagement. Her fictions are unafraid of struggle, of time, of loneliness. Vividness of experience-through love, through reading, through an arc of time-blemished marble-is the pursuit of Hazzard’s most admirable and captivating characters and of the author herself. Those who bluster forward without taking note of the present and whose ambition is for some future fame or comfort are shown to be callow, callous, and stupid. The most mediocre of Hazzard’s characters are blind to their surroundings, to beauty-human, natural, architectural, textual-and to the poignancy of the enveloping moment. Literature and travel have been Hazzard’s intertwined passions her entire life. In all of Hazzard’s fiction and literary essays is a meaningful attention to place: Capri, Naples, Ita Jima, Hong Kong, London, the English countryside, New York, Auckland. Her books have not been patiently waiting on the nightstand for a stretch of quiet reading they are firmly off the radar. When I thrust her name forward in conversation-and hers is always the first out of my mouth-people ask who she is. ![]() In December of 2011, Tad Friend wrote a blog post for The New Yorker that opened, “Nothing gave me as much happiness as Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus.” Yet, so few people I know have read her. The former won the 1980 National Book Critics Circle Award, and the latter the 2003 National Book Award. It’s for the sentences and scenes that blaze with the most precisely articulated passion and high moral stakes that I keep returning to Hazzard’s work.Īmong her six books of fiction are two masterpieces, The Transit of Venus and The Great Fire. In her books, simple conversation creates seat-edge drama, and otherwise sentimental occasions bristle with freshness and clarity. There is often war and its casualties, always love, and the threat of separation that is the catastrophe of both. ĭevastating partings-man from woman, person from place-haunt the literature of Shirley Hazzard. Reviews of new books can still be found on our blog at. The Look2 essay series, which replaces our print book reviews, takes a closer look at the careers of accomplished authors who have yet to receive the full appreciation that their work deserves.
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