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A review by moonpix
The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard
5.0
Perhaps the greatest novel I have ever read. & Certainly the finest final sentence I have ever read.
"Caro's chair was placed so that she faced the cellist-a woman of thirty or so with white skin that, contrasting at throat and wrists with black crepe, suggested the pallor of torso beneath a dress voluminous as a nun's. This woman was passing visibly from Madonna youth to dedicated spinsterhood in calm renunciation. Once in a while her dark eyes would meet Caro's with melancholy, recognizing tenderness, as if to affirm a bond. As if to state: You and I will make no part of that enervating and degrading struggle.
Each evening the cellist's gentle confidence in Caroline Bell's willingness to waive her claim on destiny cast its pall. Later, in her hotel room, the girl would stare in the mirror to discover why she had been picked out as a kindred soul. In some moods, a dispiriting response raised the prospect of solitary, chaste, in- effectual decades. At other times a vital, coloured image in the mirror obliterated the cellist's pale acquiescence and the threat of the waxen body in its dark shroud."
"Caro's chair was placed so that she faced the cellist-a woman of thirty or so with white skin that, contrasting at throat and wrists with black crepe, suggested the pallor of torso beneath a dress voluminous as a nun's. This woman was passing visibly from Madonna youth to dedicated spinsterhood in calm renunciation. Once in a while her dark eyes would meet Caro's with melancholy, recognizing tenderness, as if to affirm a bond. As if to state: You and I will make no part of that enervating and degrading struggle.
Each evening the cellist's gentle confidence in Caroline Bell's willingness to waive her claim on destiny cast its pall. Later, in her hotel room, the girl would stare in the mirror to discover why she had been picked out as a kindred soul. In some moods, a dispiriting response raised the prospect of solitary, chaste, in- effectual decades. At other times a vital, coloured image in the mirror obliterated the cellist's pale acquiescence and the threat of the waxen body in its dark shroud."