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A review by dbianco
The Bay of Noon by Shirley Hazzard
4.0
A beautifully observed portrait of a time & a place that came to be inhabited by 4 people: a charismatic Italian artist called Gioconda, a typically boorish-but-complicated man called Gianni (typical for Hazzard, that is), a cool intellectual called Justin, & our young British narrator, Jenny. Hazzard's writing on place - in this book - is delicate & insightful, though occasionally insensitive (I'm not sure if I'd appreciate the image of Naples as being crushed by poverty if I actually lived there) & I admit my perception of Italy was often at odds with Hazzard's. But that's the delight of this book, the particularity of its viewpoint, the keenness of its observances, the clean, hungry beauty of its prose. It left me craving summer dinners on the terrace overlooking the beach, & ill-fated romances of the kind that are meant to make youth beautiful & bittersweet. It left me thinking of my own past in places like Capri & Naples, & wishing it had all turned out better. It left me sad & yearning, & not many books do that. Not anymore.
Having just finished Hazzard's earlier book, The Evening of the Holiday, & found it wanting a sense of place & an immediacy of voice, I was very satisfied to find those elements here, & for that reason I think I appreciated Jenny more than some other of Hazzard's protagonists. I still don't understand Jenny's attraction to Gianni, but that's almost a mainstay of Hazzard's fiction, I think: the gothic style of her relationships, the men all overwhelming masculine power, the women all distracted submissiveness. As if they haven't any other idea in their heads but what is presented to them. Forced upon them, I should say. They see a fingertip in a wrist, a particular bend to his neck, a *something* in his gaze, & so it is implied to the reader that this is attraction, this is love.
I half wonder why it is Hazzard keeps writing about love. Or rather, why she keeps writing about compulsion & calling it love. And I think my wonder has to do with the fact that Hazzard's writing is so intellectualised. Does she write about 'love' as a kind of counter-measure to that fierce intelligence of hers, is she trying to address an imbalance? Or is she merely articulating something that is actually quite genuine?
That is, is she really so overwhelmed by love herself that the only way for her fiction to come close to her real-life experiences is is in these brutish relationships she keeps imagining? Or does she feel no love at all, and in recompense, builds it into something greater in her imagination, something primal & undeniable? Because her heroines seem, quite frankly, often rather passive & emotionless. Keen-eyed observers of the great passions that seem more often to move men but which, ultimately, are almost always proven to be fickle. And that's the rub: they almost always are fleeting, the attractions of men towards women. And hardly ever the other way around, women's attraction to men being so dreadfully resolute.
What IS Hazzard's relationship to love, after all? Apart from it being a ready, tragic literary conceit?
(Note: in 2010, this book was shortlisted for the Lost Man Booker prize, for books that missed out when the rules for the Man Booker changed in 1970.)
#aww2013 no.02
Having just finished Hazzard's earlier book, The Evening of the Holiday, & found it wanting a sense of place & an immediacy of voice, I was very satisfied to find those elements here, & for that reason I think I appreciated Jenny more than some other of Hazzard's protagonists. I still don't understand Jenny's attraction to Gianni, but that's almost a mainstay of Hazzard's fiction, I think: the gothic style of her relationships, the men all overwhelming masculine power, the women all distracted submissiveness. As if they haven't any other idea in their heads but what is presented to them. Forced upon them, I should say. They see a fingertip in a wrist, a particular bend to his neck, a *something* in his gaze, & so it is implied to the reader that this is attraction, this is love.
I half wonder why it is Hazzard keeps writing about love. Or rather, why she keeps writing about compulsion & calling it love. And I think my wonder has to do with the fact that Hazzard's writing is so intellectualised. Does she write about 'love' as a kind of counter-measure to that fierce intelligence of hers, is she trying to address an imbalance? Or is she merely articulating something that is actually quite genuine?
That is, is she really so overwhelmed by love herself that the only way for her fiction to come close to her real-life experiences is is in these brutish relationships she keeps imagining? Or does she feel no love at all, and in recompense, builds it into something greater in her imagination, something primal & undeniable? Because her heroines seem, quite frankly, often rather passive & emotionless. Keen-eyed observers of the great passions that seem more often to move men but which, ultimately, are almost always proven to be fickle. And that's the rub: they almost always are fleeting, the attractions of men towards women. And hardly ever the other way around, women's attraction to men being so dreadfully resolute.
What IS Hazzard's relationship to love, after all? Apart from it being a ready, tragic literary conceit?
(Note: in 2010, this book was shortlisted for the Lost Man Booker prize, for books that missed out when the rules for the Man Booker changed in 1970.)
#aww2013 no.02