Word: hazzard
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...TRANSIT OF VENUS by Shirley Hazzard Viking; 337 pages; $11.95 " Venus can blot out the sun," the heroine of The Transit of Venus cries out, racked by her unremitting passion for a man who repeatedly abandons her. Astronomically, the observation is inaccurate. Still, there can be no doubt that Shirley Hazzard's Venus has eclipsed other recent efforts to illuminate the unending agonies of obsessive love. "The tragedy is not that love doesn't last," says another of the novel's sufferers. "The tragedy is the love that lasts...
...Hazzard's characters get "tangled" in history, their personal lives snarled or braided in its net. She buries the sprawling abstract formalism of the book, so reminiscent of the ancient tragedians and the old stories of Hardy and George Eliot, her literary forebearers, beneath a shimmering surface of immediacy. The novel makes its transit through lines and stars through the inner spaces of loneliness and passion...
THIS IS THE ARTISTIC BEAUTY of Hazzard's style; an elegant and controlled prose that, carefully dispassionate and particular, nevertheless evokes an atmosphere of intense emotion. The writing is clean, sharp, and brilliantly metaphorical, with a tendency toward hesitation and qualification, a beautiful refinement of diction that results in poetic prose...
...story of such world-ranging pathos as Transit of Venus might be expected to lapse into the trite romantic-melodrama that fills airport book racks. But Hazzard errs infrequently. She makes sentimental slips in directing the plot; but they remain only minor errors, like those of other great writers, short detours from her delicate discipline...
Still, a graver defect alienates us from the story at times. Hazzard suffers a cultural manneredness that sometimes overwhelms the pleasure we take in the novel's intelligent style. Occasionally we detect pretentiousness, a conscious literacy, an assumed intellectual and artistic sophistication. Allusions to literature, paintings, sculptures, mythology, and the great, exotic places of the world abound, and while we enjoy this armchair journey, Hazzard cannot always assimilate it into the flow; it becomes unfortunate, irksome baggage. She establishes Caro Bell, the Australian heroine, as a charming and sensitive woman, but Caro's literary cultivation seems incongruously elevated from what...