The Transit of Venus (1980)

Back in my high school days, I wanted to read a novel by Australian author, Shirley Hazzard titled The Transit of Venus. I was in a period of reading a great deal about astronomy, and this seemed like a natural connection. When I found out Hazzard’s novel hat nothing to do with astronomy, I ditched her novel. But my curiosity lived on and on. In a recent trip to an independent bookstore, I found I found a copy; I was finally able to cure my longing for this work. I am glad I persisted.

According to the author’s note in the paperback, Shirley was born in Australia. She has written eight books, five works of fiction, and three works of non-fiction. Many of her stories have been published in The New Yorker, and she has received, among other recognitions, a First Prize in the O. Henry Short Story award competition. She died in 2016.

The Transit of Venus is the story of two sisters, Grace and Caro who decide to leave Australia and make their way to the UK. The sisters are immediately on the hunt for husbands. Grace marries and lives an exemplary life as a faithful and dedicated wife. Caro seems unable to make up her mind and has a few affairs. She meets Ted Tice, who immediately falls in love with Caro. Hazzard wrote, “An hour had already passed, of this day they were to spend together. Ted Tice was glad of each additional mile, which would at least, at last, have to be retraced. Every red and noticeable farm house, every church or sharp right turn was a guarantee of his time with her. He said, ‘Are you thinking how tame it is, all this?’. He meant the floral English summer, but could not have been understood otherwise. In fact, he was not bold enough to touch her, but made his gesture to her head. ‘What are you thinking?’ // Caro had been watching out the window, and turned the same look of general, landscaped curiosity on him. This man was no more to her than a callow ginger presence in a cable-stitch cardigan. The country bus lurched over an unsprung road. The girl thought that one would read that he and she were flung against each other’ and how that was impossible. We can only be flung against each other of we want to be” (26). Caro seems bored with this young man, but he will do until something better comes along.

In another scene, Hazzard wrote, “Grace with a satchel and pale jiggling ringlets, Caro tilted to a loaded briefcase. At school both were clever, which was attributed to the maturing effects of their tragedy—just as they had lagged, obtuseness would have been ascribed to the arresting trauma. They sought each other in the playground and were known to be aberrant, a pair” (39).

The girls’ mother, Dora, was a difficult woman, and part of their desire to leave for the UK was an attempt to get away from her. Hazzard wrote, “Dora was twenty-two and had dark sloping eyes and, despite an addiction to boiled sweets, perfect little teeth. Caro wondered when Dora would be old enough for tranquility. Old people were serene. You simply had to be serene, for instance, at seventy. Even Dora must be, if they could only wait” (41).

This interesting story won Shirley Hazzard a National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. The Transit of Venus reminds me of some of George Eliot’s fiction especially The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch. 5 Stars

--Jim, 7/2/18 ( )

http://shawjonathan.com/2018/06/21/the-book-group-and-shirley-hazzards-transit-o... ( )

So I read this after having read Hazzard's The Great Fire, which was okay, because someone on some lit site said it was her favorite book ever. Not mine, but I am appreciative of the skill of the writer, in doing such excellent reveals of the inner thoughts of her characters, and of spinning plots that have a unique balance between personal lives and worldly events. It all takes place right after WWII, mostly in Australia and England, and focuses on two beautiful (of course) sisters who make sensible and unwise choices. If you've ever read any Rosamund Lehmann, a mostly forgotten Brit novelist of the WW I epoch, you'll get it. There's a ton of passion, fulfilled and -un. It does harken back to the first world war, though, in the settings and just the overall feeling of the places and the formality of the language and of the relationships. But, ultimately, annoyingly, there's an ending that is very difficult to interpret. SPOILER ALERT STARTS NOW. The future death of one of the characters (Ted) is announced very early on. There's the easy-to-misinterpret line "For the last time, Caroline Vail lay in a bed alone." And the very last line, "Only, as the plane rose from the ground, a long hiss of air - like the intake of humanity's breath when a work of ages shrivels in an instant; or the great gasp of hull and ocean as a ship goes down." Hazzard herself said that the ending was a happy one. Google it and there are scholarly works devoted to figuring out the ending. Too obtuse for me, but I might think better of it as it fades from memory. This is one damned singular work, for sure. ( )

I read some reviews of this book after I finished it to see if others felt the same way I did - boy did I see a lot of reviews that were just gushing about it! Not so much for me.

This book is about two sisters that are orphaned in Australia when their parents die in a ferry accident. They are taken in by their much older half sister. They move to England, where the story starts, and the book follows their lives and loves for the next ~20+ years.

This book went a lot slower than I expected (and hoped) it to go. I was regularly flipping forward saying to myself, Really???. The language that was used to write it had me constantly thinking that it took place in a much earlier time, and then I'd catch a reference and realize it starts maybe 20 years after the end of WWII and towards the end there is even a veiled reference to the start of the AIDS epidemic.

Another thing I didn't like about the way it was written was that it seemed to me that important parts of speech, like verbs, nouns and objects, were sometimes left out of sentences.

I toyed with the 50-page rule (in my case it's 48 pages... ; )), but I soldiered on and I'm glad I finished it. The back of the book referred to two tragic secrets and I wanted to know what they were. I guess one of the secrets explains some things, but it didn't really work for me.

Happy to check another Virago Modern Classic off of my list though. ( )

A beautiful book, it showed me what good literature could aspire to be. ( )