Auf ein Miniaturbild klicken, um zu Google Books zu gelangen.
|
Lädt ... The Transit of Venus (Original 1980; 2021. Auflage)von Shirley Hazzard (Autor)
Werk-InformationenThe Transit of Venus von Shirley Hazzard (1980)
   Top Five Books of 2023 (145) » 6 mehr Keine aktuelle Diskussion zu diesem Buch.   ) Cornelia16 | Oct 18, 2017 | 
The Transit of Venus is one of the great English-language novels of the twentieth century. It’s difficult to make such a straight, simple claim without wanting to modify or amplify it, but it is. It is greater than any novel by Don DeLillo. It is greater than any work by Alice Munro or Thomas Pynchon. No disrespect to those three indisputable geniuses, or to anyone else whose books have been tagged, however deservedly, with the word masterpiece, but I’m hard-pressed to think of a better novel than Shirley’s. I still don’t fully understand The Transit of Venus, which I suspect is why I will keep returning to it throughout my life. It has been fascinating to observe, in other writers’ responses, how often they remark on seeing its greatness only on a second visit – often decades after first buying or reading it. Michelle de Kretser, Geoff Dyer and Michael Gorra have all written of their early resistance to the book, only to have returned to it later and been shocked by its brilliance. Even Hazzard’s husband Francis Steegmuller remarked that nobody should ever have to read this book for the first time. It is a curious thing, this need to return. It is as if the book itself gives off a kind of anti-magnetic field at first, holding the readers off until they are ready to face up to the questions it asks of them. ... For it seems to me that in The Transit of Venus, a significant aspect of her artistic motive is to set up a sense of certainty – and then destroy it, capsizing the reader over and over again. Hazzard's great subject, already revealed in the early novels, is love. In The Transit of Venus, she brings a clarity and steeliness reminiscent of classical tragedy to her material – an extraordinary achievement. The sense of fatality and patterning in this flawlessly constructed novel is strong. Its devastating finale is prefigured in its first sentence, and seemingly trivial incidents reveal their significance as events unfold. Everything that happens seems determined by laws as inexorable as those that govern the stars. Hazzard's sentences burst on the mind like a succession of illuminations. Consider this skewering of a character: "Dora sat on a corner of the spread rug, longing to be assigned a task so she could resent it." The Transit of Venus is an almost unbearably sad book, yet Hazzard is also a wonderfully funny writer, hyper-alert to pretension and cant. Nothing gave me as much happiness as Shirley Hazzard’s “The Transit of Venus.” When I first devoured the novel, after its publication in 1980, I grew increasingly melancholy—never again would I have the pleasure of reading it fresh. Yet my latest rereading was a reminder that great books travel alongside you, seeming to grow as you do. Hazzard’s characters, who meet in England in the nineteen-fifties and pursue their passions through the decades, are by now old friends I’d recognize anywhere: Paul Ivory, a playwright who manipulates his intimates like characters in a first draft; Caro and Grace, Australian sisters who see everyone else clearly yet fall for disastrous men; Christian Thrale, the rising diplomat and earthbound husband; and Ted Tice, a watchful, hopeful, but increasingly disappointed astronomer. AuszeichnungenPrestigeträchtige AuswahlenBemerkenswerte Listen
"The Transit of Venus tells the story of two orphan sisters, Caroline and Grace Bell, as they leave Australia to start a new life in postwar England. What happens to these young women--seduction and abandonment, marriage and widowhood, love and betrayal--becomes as moving and wonderful and yet as predestined as the transits of the planets themselves"-- Keine Bibliotheksbeschreibungen gefunden. |
Aktuelle DiskussionenKeineBeliebte Umschlagbilder
 Google Books — Lädt ...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)823Literature English & Old English literatures English fictionKlassifikation der Library of Congress [LCC] (USA)BewertungDurchschnitt: (3.88)
Bist das du?Werde ein LibraryThing-Autor. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
1