I admit that I first heard Shirley Hazzard shortly after her famous speech when she received the prestigious National Book Award in 2003. She spoke after long-time honorary Stephen King, a staunch champion of popular literature. The Australian author argued the opposite with energetic simplicity, vindicating high culture.
Born in Sydney in 1931, he came to the United States 20 years later to work for the United Nations Organisation, passing through various Australian government offices in Hong Kong and New Zealand. She married critic, biographer, translator, and novelist Francis Steegmuller in New York and lived with her in Paris, England, and Italy. She fell in love with Capri, where she bought Villa Emma, a house overlooking the Bay of Naples. This synergy in the three great oceans, together with the Mediterranean sauce, has created a particularly sensitive writer, a great reader of Plato, Dante Alighieri, Marcel Proust and Wystan Hugh Auden.
Hazzard concedes that Dora’s character in the Transit of Venus, rescued by Alba, published in 1980 and now translated by Jesús Cuéllar, is a mild dose of her self-destructive Scottish mother. His Welsh father was an alcoholic. Both immigrated to Australia in the 1920s.
As a precocious poetry 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 the United States, it is the reprint of The Transit of Transit. Venus reveals an exemplary novelist with an excellent 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 builds up a story about the misunderstandings of youth with an unnamed corpse on its first page. You should always be on the alert when reading Hazzard, because after a few pages we will find out what fate awaits Ted Tice, while at the same time the author leaves clues throughout the paragraphs with a pitfall for the “careless reader”. like you ever said
The transit of Venus is a literary production in pairs; two sisters, two sick children, two watches and two umbrellas. And also three continents. A symbolic, heartfelt 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 flamboyant emphasis on the problem.
A delivery in four parts – Old world, Contacts, New world and Climax – the journey between love and its betrayals, with all that. A grand ending that some of the best screenwriters have already wanted.
As Proust said, it’s a beautiful book that awakens new desires, not just new answers. Pure modern literature.