Literary Award Winners Fiction Book Club discussion

Please comment here on 'The Transit of Venus' by Shirley Hazzard, 1980 National Book Critics Circle Award winner.

I rated this book 5 stars eleven years ago and am looking forward to rereading it. All I can recall apart from the subject of unrequited love, is that the ending surprised me!

An interesting, intriguing, well written novel about Caroline and Grace Bell and the tragedy of Ted Tice. A novel about passion and ambition. Caroline and Grace emigrate from Australia to England in the 1950s. We learn about their lives into middle age and their varying experiences of love, marriage, failure and work. How the power of time can transform and crush.

What surprised you?

The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard
Irene (Harborcreek, PA)’s review of The Transit of Venus | Goodreads

This is the story of two sisters. We meet them as young adults recently arrived in England and leave them three decades later as they are shaped by life and shape life by their personalities. Although I did not initially connect with the story or characters, the exquisite prose, the intricate character development, the raw truth of the emotions caught me up in the tide of this novel.

Actually two things surprised me. That Paul was a most unscrupulous man and that Ted had kept quiet about what he had seen. The other surprise was thinking something was going to happen to Ted, given the short paragraph on page 12 of the novel where it states, “In fact Edmund Tice would take his own life before attaining the peak of his achievement. But that would occur in a northern city, and not for many years.”

I agree with you about the beginning of the novel. I found the first fifty or so pages a little clunky and hard to understand, but once I gained an appreciation of the characters, things became easily comprehensible.

I also really enjoyed ‘The Great Fire’ by Hazzard, (2003), winner of the 2004 National Book Award and the 2004 Miles Franklin Award, (Australia’s main fiction award).

I note a review of ‘The Great Fire’ makes comments that seem to fit my reading experiences with this novel:

“I had never read anything by Hazzard before and consequently did not know what to expect from this author or her individual style. In the beginning, I must say I had my reservations. The narrative overflows with broken, run-on sentences; psychological asides; etc. the whole thing is suffused with a kind of breathless, nervous energy that we also see in Woolf……At some point you will realise that the style, idiosyncratic as it is, is perfectly in keeping with the story and the two fuse together almost perfectly in the end;…”. Reference is World Literature Forum website.

SPOILER WARNING
SPOILER WARNING

I was not at all surprised that Paul was unscrupulous. His total disregard for his wife and the way he strung Caroline along made it clear that he was only interested in Paul. But I did not expect to read that he was gay. And I certainly did not expect his confession about that lover's death. I did not realize that the young boy at the theater was his sex toy. That was disgusting, but not out of character.
I had forgotten about the reference to the future suicide of Ted. It did strike me when I first read it, but then I let it slip out of my head.

The Great Fire is on my pile of downloaded books to read.