An Award-Winning Novel of Exquisite Nuance

By Ann Packer    |   Wednesday, April 08, 2015 - Off the Shelf In this moment of the extremely limited attention span, we can give in and confine our reading to the brief and the obvious, or we can enter into the kind of fictional world that makes the immediate fade for hours at a time—the literary equivalent of choosing a Meryl Streep movie over a twenty-second YouTube video of a kitten playing with a piece of string. Shirley Hazzard’s extraordinary The Transit of Venus creates such a world. In the tradition of novels going back at least as far as Jane Austen, it’s the story of two sisters and the divergent paths they take in matters of love, self-definition and security. Australians orphaned before the Second World War, Caroline and Grace Bell travel with their comically self-martyring half-sister to England, where they encounter the men who will define, limit, and enlarge their lives, sometimes all at once. A description like this runs the risk of making an exquisitely nuanced and intricate novel sound like light beach reading. The Transit of Venus, which won the 1980 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, is anything but, not only because it goes so deeply into matters of great moral significance but also because it is written in prose tha... READ FULL POST