Shirley Hazzard

 

Let me say at the start that I found The Transit of Venus to be a very difficult book. Its author, Shirley Hazzard, writes with unusual detail, but everything is qualified: the sun is hot, and yet, it shows signs of abating; the motor is loud, and yet, it could be slowing. The effect is a cascade of description, of approximation: whether of emotion, circumstance, or geography. But it all leads, in a way, to nothing: because all that qualification, very little in this novel is certain -- not even its ending. 

At its core, The Transit of Venus struck me as a novel about, well, about adultery. You dress this up a bit and argue that the book's about relationships or the dynamics of marriage. But I think that would be going too far. Really, this is an extended meditation on the nature of the affair: about how it evolves and collapses; and about how some find their way to it more often than others. 

But for a novel about adultery, there was surprising little sex or sexuality; and more than that: there's surprisingly little emotion. The characters in Transit undergo hardship; they engage in travel; they grow old. And yet, throughout, I never understood how they truly felt: there were long passages that evoked very little emotion, despite their having been built on a complex web of events cast as part back as the characters' youth. 

If The Transit of Venus takes as one of its themes the idea of growing old -- as a person, as part of a relationship -- that passage of time was not always well marked: unlike, say, The Old Wives' Tale, which chronicles the impact of time and history on two sisters, Transit rarely accomplished this: we are told that the sisters have grown older, but they seem still to be struggling with the same issues, with the same unresolved circumstances from their youth. (They are still engaged in adultery or seeking to find their way to it.) 

The culmination this novel in its final two chapters did speak to at least some of its magic: here, Hazzard manages to brings portions of the plot full circle, resolving a number of arcs, and clarifying the uncertainty tied to several interlocking relationships. And good for her: this was well done. But for me, it was all too late: after more than three hundred pages of struggle and adultery and more struggle, I'd expected an emotional release, clarity; instead, it was more of Hazzard's qualified narrative style, coupled with oddly detached personalities.   

Hapy birthday …

… Mel Brooks at 100: A Century’s Worth of Laughs (Hat tip, Dave Lull}

Tarjei Vesaas

 

In a recent edition of Granta, Karl Ove Knausgaard reviewed -- and recommended -- the work of Tarjei Vesaas, the Norwegian author nominated on multiple occasions for the Nobel Prize. Needless to say, I'd not heard of Vesaas, but having finished The Birds, I can confidently say: Vesaas strikes an unusual, and successful, balance between the calm and the anxious, between independence and belonging. 

First published in Norway in 1957, The Birds tell the story of a brother and sister -- Mattis and Hege -- living in a remote corner of the country. Mattis, who has a cognitive impairment, is dependent on his sister, who spends the majority of the novel knitting sweaters to generate sufficient money to support them.

Mattis is intellectually disabled, but he is not defenseless: indeed, his physicality -- his power and agility -- marks his character and movements. Mentally, Mattis is not entirely disabled: his thoughts emerge at all moments, but they tend to be truncated or selfish, or shared without sufficient context. The result is a reliance on Hege and the sense that Mattis will never advance beyond his current station. 

As the novel progresses, it is clear that Hege -- for her own part -- has changed, and that her relationship with Mattis has fractured: this is the result of one of the book's great ironies: that Mattis brings into their home the man who will become Hege's lover. 

That fracturing results in a question Mattis must ask himself: whether he belongs in this new world, or whether his dependence has run its course. Ultimately, Mattis sets a test -- a tragic test -- for himself, leaving his future to something approaching fate.

This short novel generates an immediate emotional response, and the foreshadowing that Vesaas develops -- by way of a secondary plot involving birds -- is very well done. I don't know enough to say whether, as Knausgaard suggests, this is the "greatest Norwegian novel," but I can say that it operates on a number of levels, and that its culmination is one I won't soon forget.