Shirley Hazzard (1931–2016) was born in Australia but traveled the world during her early years, a result of her parents' diplomatic postings. In 1947, at the age of sixteen, she was hired by British intelligence to monitor the civil war in China. In 1963, she married the writer Francis Steegmuller, who died in 1994. Hazzard wrote several novels, two of which were National Book Award finalists: The Bay of Noon (1971) and The Transit of Venus (1981). She is also the author of two collections of short stories and several works of nonfiction, including the memoir Greene on Capri. Hazzard's final novel, The Great Fire, won the 2003 National Book Award for Fiction and the Miles Franklin Literary Award.
"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."
—The Paris Review
"An almost perfect novel . . . Hazzard writes as well as
Stendhal."
—The New York Times
"The Transit of Venus is complex and luminous, like tapestries
of mythological scenes, the craftsmanship admirable with no strand
lost or insignificant, the details deliciously precise and the
scope panoramic."
—Chicago Tribune Book World
"Shirley Hazzard is a worldly writer with a sense of humor; at one
twist of her skewer, the trendy and the shoddy are
impaled. The Transit of Venus is an old-fashioned novel
of plainest elegance."
—Harper's Magazine
"Nothing gave me as much happiness as Shirley Hazzard's The
Transit of Venus. Hazzard's prose is magic on the page, somehow at
once surgical and symphonic . . . All the sentences are . . . small
masterpieces that amount to a large one. Read it now, so you can
read it again soon."
—Tad Friend, The New Yorker
"In The Transit of Venus, [Hazzard] 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."
—The Independent
"A luminous novel . . . almost without flaw. Aphoristic and
iridescent, her language turns paragraphs into events."
—The Washington Post Book World
"An impressive, mature novel, full and satisfying . . . The richest
fictional repast I have had in a long time."
—Doris Grumbach, Los Angeles Times
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