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.

Recently I was thinking about what makes a literary novel, and suspect it varies a bit for all of us. 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. And tone.

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. If not quite an original, Hazzard is certainly a writers writer.

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. Quite common for me. Back then I gave it 4*s, and have elevated it to 5*s this time.

I chose to reread this novel now, as I am about to start [Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life] (Briggita Olubas).

Highly recommended for those who enjoy literary novels and good writing ( )

it's a brilliant novel, one that will need re-reading. ( )

"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. It has been praised as multi-layered and mysterious.

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.

In describing the megaliths at Avebury:
"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. 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 sweet village itself, through which the farthest monoliths were posted, suggested, with its few thatched and slated centuries, a frail masking of reality. Not that the dark boulders supplied, by their outlasting, any triumphant sense of durability in man's intentions. There could be no winning or even mattering here. 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."

Honestly, I found it all rather tedious and somewhat laughable. By the end of the novel, I really didn't care much about any of the characters. Maybe I'm just too old or have read too many much better novels. ( )

"The Transit of Venus" is an elegant, verbally glittering exploration of the power of love -- or is it the love of power? "Love" in the novel takes possession of characters, in some cases dominating their lives for decades, and in others fleeting quickly away. The structure of the novel moves back and forth from one character (or set of characters) to another, illuminating and deepening each individual as it progresses. If it sounds like a complex novel it is, and the language in which it is expressed is as precise as it is poetic. Not an easy read, but a great book. ( )

A 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. Grace, the more lovelier and socially astute of the two sisters, settles into marriage and family life. With such cosy domesticity, she still finds herself being catapulted into the burgeonings of a least-expected affair. Caro, with her self-posession and aura of taciturn mystery, has an unsettling effect on those who she meets. 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.

This is my first time reading Hazzard, who is a thrill to read. Poetic, intellectual and also psychologically inclined, though not in a way that is immediately apparent to the reader. This book is very strange - the more she pulls out her surgical knife, the more puzzling and mythical her characters become. It's like reaching out to grasp only air. But even this sentence cannot explain the strange feeling of being both obliterated and yet being kept as a distance from her work. I am both intrigued and puzzled by her writing. This book cannot be completed on the first read. Maybe there will be more, on the second dive... ( )