i admit i learned first Shirley Hazzard shortly after his famous speech when he received the prestigious award National Book Award in 2003. then he spoke Stephen KingHe was honored for his long career in making popular literature a closed advocacy. The Australian writer argued the opposite with energetic simplicity, justifying high culture.
Born in Sydney in 1931, he came to the United States two decades later to work at the United Nations after passing through various Australian government offices in Hong Kong and New Zealand. He married the critic, biographer, translator, and novelist in New York City. Francis Steegmuller, and lived with him in Paris, England, and Italy. He fell in love with Capri, where he bought Villa Emma, overlooking the Bay of Naples. This synergy with the Mediterranean sauce in the three great oceans has produced a particularly sensitive writer, a great reader of Plato, Dante, Proust and Auden.
Hazzard, Dora’s character ‘The Transit of Venus’Published in 1980 and now a light dose of her Scottish mother, rescued by Alba translated by Jesús Cuéllar, self-destructs. His Welsh father was an alcoholic. Both immigrated to Australia in the 1920s.
As a precocious verse writer, he later switched to fiction after good reading, and although his best known work is ‘The Great Fire’, a novel that won numerous awards in Australia and America, the reprint of ‘Transit of Venus’ is an excellent read. discovers an exemplary novelist with a narrative. The plot is simple. Two orphaned Australian sisters come to England in the 1950s. Mild Grace, who marries a wealthy bureaucrat, and independent Caroline, who falls in love with an unscrupulous married man, another Ted Tice, seduces and harasses her.
On top of that, he sets up a story about youth misunderstandings with an unnamed corpse on its first page. While reading Hazzard we must always be on the alert, because pages later we will know what fate has prepared for Ted Tice, while at the same time the author leaves clues throughout the paragraphs, just as he himself did, with a snare for the “careless reader”. said no.
‘The Transit of Venus’ is a double literary production; two sisters, two sick children, two watches and two umbrellas. And three continents. A symbolic, intimate story filled with poems, quotes and clever dialogue. An example: “I wasn’t criticizing you, my dear friend. It’s just a matter of communication. -The word ‘communication’ was given Elphinstone’s pompous emphasis on ‘problem’”.
A four-part delivery –‘Old world’, ‘Contacts’, ‘New world’ and ‘Climax’‘- along with everything that is the journey between love and its betrayals. A grand ending that some of the best screenwriters have already wanted.
As Proust said, it’s a beautiful book that awakens in us not only new answers but new desires. Pure modern literature.
FILE:
‘Venus transit’
Shirley Hazzard.
Translation: Jesus Cuellar Menezo
Alba, Contemporary collection, 2022, 488 pages.
Source: Informacion
