The Transit of Venus

This is a captaviting novel and reading it is a litle like working a puzzle. All the piece do fit but it requires due dilligence. Hazzard is a master and hints, foresadowing, entwining bits of history, using Australian and British slang, and so much more. In actuallity, I enjoyed her abilites as a writer more than the story itself.From the cover art to the epigraph, readers need to stay tuned.

Shines a vivid light on each footstep of the narrative, recording just what her “camera” sees!

Seller delivered. I read this book years ago and wanted to re-read but had a hard time finding it. I ordered from Kindle, but the book I received was not this book. It was another book by the same author which was not what I wanted. There does not seem to be an electronic version or an audiobook. So I was happy to find this used copy in good condition.

Ordered used book, The Transit of Venus. It's condition is good and it arrived quickly.

I share some of the criticisms of "Transit of Venus" voiced by others but I stuck through to the end and felt my patience was rewarded. I was truly surprised by the climax and the closing scene, which led me to reassess the entire book. I still have some reservations but generally admire the compassion and intelligence behind this finely crafted novel by Shirley Hazzard.I agree with others that the dialogue is cryptic and weighed down by too many obscure literary allusions. Whole conversations are conducted through metaphorical references to poetry or antiquity. It seemed overwritten and pretentious at times. A good editor should have reined that in. My bigger disappointment was with the passivity of the primary character, Caroline. I realize that she's our Venus stand-in, buffeted by love, but she was hard to get to know. Orphaned, adrift and with few friends, she only sparks when a man enters or re-enters her life. In many scenes, she's monosyllabic, uttering "Yes" or "No" as other characters - especially the men - expound at length. To the extent the author meant this as a critique of power relations between the sexes, it makes sense. Caroline's lack of agency reminded me of some of Edith Wharton's women who are trapped or defeated by forces beyond their control. Also like Wharton, Hazzard writes of her characters with detachment, which makes them hard to warm up to.Among the things I enjoyed about "Transit of Venus" was its careful plotting. It covers three decades in the lives of multiple characters, which includes some lulls in action (like real life), but it heads toward a dramatic conclusion. Ironies abound and there is some sharp humor, including withering depictions of bosses and bureaucrats. In the end what stayed with me was its broad canvas of lives lived, love won and lost, the complicated trajectories of people's journeys. Its examination of relationships, whether exploitive, unrequited, ephemeral or enduring, whether parent-child, sibling or sexual, is rich and thought-provoking. It explores goodness and venality, love and death, lust, abandonment, idealism, deception, regret, infidelity and fate. So despite stylistic flaws, "The Transit of Venus" left me with much to ponder.

The first seventy or so pages of this book are difficult to get through. The first couple pages begin to set the scene, and then those characters which have been introduced are delved into by way of flashbacks for a solid sixty or so pages. The story was not grounded enough in the present for me to appreciate the past, and I was left off balance for the first fifth of the book. By the time I finished all the flashbacks, I had forgotten about the present-day characters, and returning to real-time narration was both a shock and a relief. The extended flashback period precludes understanding of what type of story is being told, and left me off balance. I found I could not read more than twenty or thirty pages at once, losing interest frequently, and did not understand the point of the section. At this point also, I found the style inappropriate. It is written in mimicry of Dickens and his contemporaries, but does not quite achieve the feeling they cultivate due to construction. Mark Twain spoke of this effect in language: "The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. ’tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning." Here as a reader I am both conscious of what is being attempted, and the failure to achieve it. The expectation of the lighting against the reality of the lightning bug. The first fifth of this book is frustrating as it fails to give any expectation for the story besides disappointment.After that, the story really takes off. The just-missed feeling becomes an apt use of old-style writing. The almost is gone, and reading is pleasant on a sentence and section level, as well as that of the word. The characters' relationships weave together in unexpected and complimentary ways. Caro comes out as the definite focus of the novel, and she is a worthy character to follow. In this, too, the styles of yesteryear are cultivated with the good, strong, and long suffering female protagonist. The main set of characters each receive a chapter or section devoted to exploring their humanity, and inner strength or lack thereof. All are complex and well shown, and the order in which each moment is given serves to cast starker light on the relative failures and virtues or those portrayed. All of this is very well done.At the end, Caro's emotions are not believable--they develop too quickly. More should have been done to lead up to her feelings, or bring them out slowly. Now I complain that not enough time was given: only a few pages.This story was excruciatingly slow to start, and too quick to finish, but sandwiched in between is a very rewarding read. I rate this book 5/10.

Shirley Hazard is without question a first rate wordsmith; she can write beautiful sentences and string them together into an exhilarating music. She does it consistently. But she seems incapable of writing a truly first rate novel. The Great Fire nearly made it but failed ultimately for me because of Hazard’s obfuscating and belittling worship of romantic love. The central relationship in that novel was a fairy story. Hazard is at her best when her characters are figuratively standing beneath a window in the pouring rain. But it’s a sensibility that belongs to a bygone era. And as such can often come across as something sentimental we still feel affection for but have grown out of. It’s as if she needs to do what Fitzgerald did in Gatsby – stand outside his own romanticism, project it elsewhere and see it for what it really is, a sustained act of heightened imagination that ultimately is an illusion.The Transit of Venus is a novel about affairs of the heart. Many of them illicit; or at least, outside matrimony. Characters are only really alive when the heart is engaged and pumping. It reminded me a lot of Rosamond Lehman’s the Echoing Grove – the theme of two sisters, one rebellious, the other more willing to compromise to the dictates of domesticity and the romantic lyrical nature of the novel’s sensibility. Lehman though did a much better job of examining the backstage realms of domesticity without belittling it as Hazard often does. Hazard isn’t interested in her domesticated female until she’s contemplating adultery. She isn’t really interested in anyone unless they’re about to step out into a storm.Also, stylistically this novel is a nightmare for the first fifty pages. So tangled and cryptic are her sentences that you have to read each one twice – which would be fine if it was worth the effort, but too often it isn’t. It reminded me of both late Henry James and Elizabeth Bowen –the trick-or-treat facemasking of the opaque overly wrought prose. The first fifty or so pages are virtually unreadable. Until, it appears, Hazard begins to enjoy her characters and her story and relaxes. As I said there’s much to admire in the writing itself but as a novel there was too much that jarred for me – her attempts to politicise the text for example when one of her triumphs is to transcend era: her novels always have an encompassing timeless drift - to truly take it to my heart.

The Transit of Venus is a mammoth work, a literary feat. It is regarded as one of the best 100 novels by some. I’m afraid I’m not among them. I was one hundred pages into the book and still didn’t know what it was all about or even who the central character is. Two hundred pages later I can tell you she is called Caro, Caroline Bell, Mrs. Vail. But that’s about it. This novel is a family saga that involves three generations over a span of at least seventy years. More than four families are involved. The author crams it all into 338 pages by telling us what is happening and hardly showing us anything at all. (The rule is show don’t tell, remember.) Add that to the omniscient viewpoint so we are told what characters are thinking and feeling. They show no emotion at all, and so remain remote and hardly very interesting. These techniques allow the author to cover a huge amount of ground, but the effect for me became like reading a newspaper. When the characters do speak for themselves they use endless clichés, but that is because they are indeed very boring and pompous civil servants, who sleep with their secretaries. Why we would want to know this is anybody’s guess as nothing comes of these random infidelities. But these are minor characters and irrelevant to the main plot which involves Caro and a playwright who seduces her while engaged to another. Caro feels no emotion as far as we can tell but we are told her heart is broken. So she sleeps with the Major who was sleeping with the fiancé and then marries Mr. Vail. But who cares? The one-eyed astronomer, apparently, who we met right at the beginning and then lost track of. Caro and her sister and sometimes her lovers have rare conversations that are a string of pompous platitudes and quasi-philosophical observations punctuated by awful puns.Well, I hope that doesn’t put you off because you may be the one who loves this book and rates it in the top one hundred.

It could be said that a book in which every sentence contains a double meaning is incredibly clever and witty or equally viable is that such writing obfuscates a story's deeper meaning, mirroring the contrariness of Hazzard's thoughts. Perhaps it is worthwhile to read this book word for word in its entirety to appreciate and savour meaningful metaphors and phrases that frequently confound the reader with 'the doublement of phrase' {PAGE 208] or the reader could concisely consider Ted Tice's twice told statement," I never had, or wished for, power over you. That isn't true of course. I wanted the greatest power of all. But not advantage or authority." I read the whole book through but wish that I had quickly found that phrase to know that it was both the beginning and the end of the path the author takes us to travel.

all as advertised and promised

Hazzard has a unique prose style, often beautiful and lyrical, but it stands like a wall between her readers and her characters. There were sentences -- not necessarily long or complicated ones, either -- which I read half a dozen times without getting any sense from them. And am I the only person who didn't understand the ending at all?The two sisters at the centre of the story are Australian, or so we are told, because I got no sense of them as outsiders in post-war Britain. Every time their Australian-ness was mentioned, it brought me up short because I'd forgotten all about it. Hazzard seems to have led a nomadic life, living in many continents, and maybe she has lost all notion of what makes individual nations unique, which might explain why British characters use so many American idioms -- surely not common in the 1950s.When I got to the baffling ending, I realised that, at some point, I was going to have to read it again. I'm afraid my heart sank rather at the prospect. It will not be soon.