![]() ![]() This book cannot be completed on the first read. I am both intrigued and puzzled by her writing. But even this sentence cannot explain the strange feeling of being both obliterated and yet being kept as a distance from her work. It's like reaching out to grasp only air. This book is very strange - the more she pulls out her surgical knife, the more puzzling and mythical her characters become. Poetic, intellectual and also psychologically inclined, though not in a way that is immediately apparent to the reader. This is my first time reading Hazzard, who is a thrill to read. Ted Tice, an astronomer, is utterly besotted with her, but she chooses to be with Paul Ivory, who signals the start of her eventful life and relationships. Caro, with her self-posession and aura of taciturn mystery, has an unsettling effect on those who she meets. With such cosy domesticity, she still finds herself being catapulted into the burgeonings of a least-expected affair. Grace, the more lovelier and socially astute of the two sisters, settles into marriage and family life. ( )Ī beautifully written book of two orphaned Australian sisters, Grace and Caro, whose lives experience profound changes through the people they meet, and/or fall in love with. Maybe I'm just too old or have read too many much better novels. ![]() By the end of the novel, I really didn't care much about any of the characters. Honestly, I found it all rather tedious and somewhat laughable. You have to pit some larger reason than mere living against these rocks: it was your mortality, your very capacity to receive the wound, against their indifference." There could be no winning or even mattering here. Not that the dark boulders supplied, by their outlasting, any triumphant sense of durability in man's intentions. The sweet village itself, through which the farthest monoliths were posted, suggested, with its few thatched and slated centuries, a frail masking of reality. Compared with this scene, all the rest of Creation appeared a flutter of petals and pebbles, a levity in which the most massive tree was insubstantial. "The little charchyard slabs - child-height, companionable - among which Caro and Paul had once sauntered became, by contrast with these huge and mighty forms, epemeral leaflets promulgating a forgotten cause. The language is baroque and upper-class English, more flavored by the 19thc, not really in keeping with the the time period of the 1950s-70s - though one would be hard put to distinguish one decade from another. It has been praised as multi-layered and mysterious. "Transit of Venus" is a book about the passion of love - young love, middle-aged love, shared love, unrequited love, carnal love, disappointed love, disillusioned love, fulfilled love. Highly recommended for those who enjoy literary novels and good writing ( ) I chose to reread this novel now, as I am about to start (Briggita Olubas). Back then I gave it 4*s, and have elevated it to 5*s this time. I read this novel for the first time in 2009, along with Hazzard's other novels, and recalling nothing about the specifics, but remembered the tone. If not quite an original, Hazzard is certainly a writers writer. It took a little time to get into her writing as in many ways it is denser than writing we have become more used too, and occasionally a sentence needs interrogation. For me it very much is about use of language and good writing, often exploring place and the inner world of it's characters at least as much as their engagement with what is going on around them. Recently I was thinking about what makes a literary novel, and suspect it varies a bit for all of us. The novel revolves mostly around the life of Caro (Caroline), one of three sisters, who along with husbands and lovers people this dense novel of inner lives. ![]()
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