Rating: 
Summary: Jane Austin, Not
Review: Jane Austin without character. First the characters are very shallow and uninspired. Second the characters have no character. They are not torn between right and wronge, well at least not in the first 147 pages, I would have stopped long before this were it not for my book club meeting. The most entertaining part of the work so far is I find myself casting the movie. Hmm, I think Jude Law as Paul, Catherine Zeta Jones perhaps for Caro, obviously Nicole Kidman or her pal what's her name for Grace. Perhaps Henry Thomas for Ted, and throw in Anthony Hopkings and Emma ? that should be enough star power. Anyway I'm back to work on this, must finnish by the 13th
Rating:
Summary: The Emperor's New Clothes
Review: Shirley Hazzard obviously has great literary gifts, but I nevertheless regard this novel as a failure. The characters are lifeless, one-dimensional and stereotyped, the plot slow-moving, and the language overly ornate. The most vibrant characterization is of Dora, the professional martyr, who raises her two younger sisters, (the protagonists), after they are orphaned. Hazzard captures the essence of a woman whose joy in life is complaint, and whose ultimate weapon is the suicide threat, but no other character is more than a paper doll, clothed in fancy phrases and incongrous metaphor. Most of all, this novel is about Shirley Hazzard. It screams "Look at me! I can write! I am wise! You will have to work if you want to decipher my meaning." But was it worth the time?
Rating:
Summary: The Emperor's New Clothes
Review: Shirley Hazzard obviously has great literary gifts, but I nevertheless regard this novel as a failure. The characters are lifeless, one-dimensional and stereotyped, the plot slow-moving, and the language overly ornate. The most vibrant characterization is of Dora, the professional martyr, who raises her two younger sisters, (the protagonists), after they are orphaned. Hazzard captures the essence of a woman whose joy in life is complaint, and whose ultimate weapon is the suicide threat, but no other character is more than a paper doll, clothed in fancy phrases and incongrous metaphor. Most of all, this novel is about Shirley Hazzard. It screams "Look at me! I can write! I am wise! You will have to work if you want to decipher my meaning." But was it worth the time?
Rating: 
Summary: Beautifully written but puzzling
Review: Shirley Hazzard's "Transit" is a beautifully written story of the pain of ordinary life. Two orphaned sisters from Australia make their way to London to begin their adult lives, and a chance encounter in a theatre between Grace, the "blond pretty one," and her future husband irrevocably changes the lives of all of them. Grace and Caro have an innate dignity and intelligence that puzzles and attracts in the staid English society of the time, where they refuse to be pigeonholed into the category of the shabbily genteel. Grace's story is of the ordinary life--an unremarkable husband, children, home--yet her safe world is so easily shattered when she meets a young doctor caring for one of her children. Caro's world is one of passion and pain, as she (rather inexplicably) falls in love with the charismatic Paul Ivory, failing to realize how corrupt he really is.The characters in this novel continue to puzzle me several weeks after I finished the book. Caro's intelligence and poise are at odds with her almost lifelong passion for Paul. This is especially hard to understand when one reaches the end of the novel--when Caro learns several shocking secrets about Paul, she admits she suspected some of them, which makes her love for him even more inexplicable. Hazzard also badly neglects the character of Adam, Caro's eventual husband. On the other hand Hazzard is right on target with Cora, the half-sister who raises Grace and Caro and never gets over the burden she was required to assume. And Hazzard's handling of Christian Thrale, Grace's husband, is masterful--at the beginning he seems a nice enough, unassuming man, but as he becomes more successful in government Hazzard subtly reveals, through a casual remark, a brief thought of Grace's quickly suppressed, what an insufferable, pompous fool he's become. Despite all, this novel threatens to end happily. I admit a happy ending may have been a letdown, but Hazzard's alternative feels like a quick escape. Did she not know how to wrap it up? Nevertheless, I stayed up halfway through the night to finish it. Despite its flaws this novel is worth your time.
Rating:
Summary: Beautifully written but puzzling
Review: Shirley Hazzard's "Transit" is a beautifully written story of the pain of ordinary life. Two orphaned sisters from Australia make their way to London to begin their adult lives, and a chance encounter in a theatre between Grace, the "blond pretty one," and her future husband irrevocably changes the lives of all of them. Grace and Caro have an innate dignity and intelligence that puzzles and attracts in the staid English society of the time, where they refuse to be pigeonholed into the category of the shabbily genteel. Grace's story is of the ordinary life--an unremarkable husband, children, home--yet her safe world is so easily shattered when she meets a young doctor caring for one of her children. Caro's world is one of passion and pain, as she (rather inexplicably) falls in love with the charismatic Paul Ivory, failing to realize how corrupt he really is. The characters in this novel continue to puzzle me several weeks after I finished the book. Caro's intelligence and poise are at odds with her almost lifelong passion for Paul. This is especially hard to understand when one reaches the end of the novel--when Caro learns several shocking secrets about Paul, she admits she suspected some of them, which makes her love for him even more inexplicable. Hazzard also badly neglects the character of Adam, Caro's eventual husband. On the other hand Hazzard is right on target with Cora, the half-sister who raises Grace and Caro and never gets over the burden she was required to assume. And Hazzard's handling of Christian Thrale, Grace's husband, is masterful--at the beginning he seems a nice enough, unassuming man, but as he becomes more successful in government Hazzard subtly reveals, through a casual remark, a brief thought of Grace's quickly suppressed, what an insufferable, pompous fool he's become. Despite all, this novel threatens to end happily. I admit a happy ending may have been a letdown, but Hazzard's alternative feels like a quick escape. Did she not know how to wrap it up? Nevertheless, I stayed up halfway through the night to finish it. Despite its flaws this novel is worth your time.
Rating: 
Summary: A 20th Century masterpiece
Review: Simply put, I have read THE TRANSIT OF VENUS many times over, and am always astonished to find new layers of meaning in this exquisite tapestry of a novel. Following two sisters from their Australian childhood through their lives in London, Hazzard is uncompromising and true to her tale. The style is unique; the episodes thrilling. Lovers, husbands, places and careers are set before these two women and before us, and even the most cameo appearance of a character or scene is rendered with the skill, reality and destiny-laden force given the heroines. Even when that destiny is tragically small. This is a novel on a par with the greatest of Eliot. From page one, Hazzard reveals a world where Fate and personal nature duel, often to the cold victory of the one and to pain for the other. But there is beauty in the pain we see; for us, and for these women we come to know so well. No one who cares about modern literature can afford to pass this by, and TRANSIT is more than deserving of the many fresh reads I intend to give it.
Rating:
Summary: A transit worth taking
Review: So why on earth would anyone want to read The Transit of Venus? Some say the writing is pretentious: Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. That word came to mind last year while I was reading Shirley Hazzard's 2003 National Book Award winner, The Great Fire. Yet I couldn't stop reading. Since I wound up loving that book, I decided to try this one, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award more than two decades ago (1980). Midway through my reading transit, on June 8, 2004, a Transit of Venus occurred, the tiny planet moving like a dot across our gigantic sun. (In 1769, James Cook set sail in the H.M.S. Endeavor to study a Transit of Venus and found Australia, hence the tie-in with this novel, which is primarily an Australian woman's transit through love and life.) Reading Shirley Hazzard is like climbing a mountain, agonizing over the rocks and rarified air during the long, arduous uphill climb. Struggle is not the same as suffer. Most modern books are downhill sloped, where the reader floats or speeds effortlessly toward a simplistic conclusion. A Hazzard novel is more vertically inclined, where one needs to stop on occasion to catch a breath, and then, when the climax comes, you are on a mountaintop, not the valley floor. It is not a transit intended for aliterates, much less illiterates. Hazzard might not be the author for you if you don't know, and don't care about, the meaning of words like "impercipience" and "abnegation." Also, if you're less than thrilled with such lines as "Magnanimity shaped a sad and vast perspective," and "My task, as I see it, is to adumbrate the sources of his entelechy," then you might want to move along to another bookshelf. However, if you want to read one of the finest novels ever written, grab a dictionary, take your time and don't miss a single clue in The Transit of Venus, such as the one embedded insignificantly in the middle of the first page. The importance of which is revealed only near the end of the novel. Hazzard does that to you; if she tells you, almost as an aside, that a trivial character is going to die one day soon, it could later on grab you by the gut that the mention was a portent of an even greater tragedy. Although The Transit of Venus is populated by several interesting characters, and is propelled by their sexual liaisons, the central story concerns the trio of Caroline (Caro) Bell, Ted Tice, and Paul Ivory and the mystery that directs, and warps, their relationship even into middle age. We're told right off that "Edmund Tice would take his own life...in a northern city, and not for many years." The book never explains why, and does not need to, once the reading is done. In the beginning, Caro, "established as a child of Venus," has come to England from Australia, along with her sister, Grace. Both sisters, orphans, are beautiful. While the "fair" Grace settles for a wealthy but unsatisfying married life, dark-haired Caro works for a time as a shopgirl and dallies with strategically-married Paul the gorgeous playwright, while Ted the astronomer can only simmer and settle for Caro's enduring friendship. When Caro marries a wealthy New Yorker, it seemingly dashes any hopes Ted may have for finally winning Caro's love. But in Caro's transit through life, such stability is not destined to last, and perhaps Ted has one last chance to possess the woman of his dreams. As they move through the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies, we see a lot of the other characters, including Grace and Caro's half-sister, Dora, who seems to revel in misery, and Grace's husband, Christian Thrale, a government bureaucrat. Though interesting and well defined, these characters, and others, are largely irrelevant to the main plot, and I found whole chapters on them to be side rails that simply divert the reader temporarily off the central track. This does not mean the reading is not worthwhile; these diversions establish depth of character, and character exposition is one of Hazzard's strong points. A couple of my favorite lines compare a woman to her car parked outside: "Circular lamps, set over the mudguards, were glassily unlit like Tertia's eyes... Outside the window the car was kinder because suggestive of fluency and eventual animation." A cold woman, for sure. Nevertheless, it is the Caro-Ted-Paul saga that leads to a revelation worthy, perhaps, of M. Night Shyamalan, and a "Sixth Sense" type of turnabout, one that makes you realize things are not quite what they seem. And it shifts the novel from a complex love story into another genre altogether. Any reader who fails to read the final three chapters misses out on the great reward; and to appreciate those chapters, you must read all the others related to these three main characters. Ironically, it is Ted, with his one disfigured eye, who is the most clear-eyed of them all when he thinks, "...the tragedy isn't that love doesn't last. The tragedy is the love that lasts." He also observes, "Even through a telescope, some people see what they choose to see. Just as they do with the unassisted eye... Nothing supplies the truth except the will for it." And with these sentiments, he opens up the novel's heart. With so many one-or-more-books-per-year "celebrity author" tomes now afloat in the sea of modern publishing, where the term "author" too often takes the secondary dictionary meaning, "one who assumes responsibility for the content of a published text" (meaning, not the actual writer), isn't it of value to strive through a work that has the feel of complex authenticity? Here, in The Transit of Venus, we can be fairly certain this is the genuine voice of Shirley Hazzard. Isn't it worth the price of admission to read not just a rare and beautiful voice, but a true and honest one as well? Take the Transit.
Rating: 
Summary: Ambitious and admirable, but not successful
Review: The reasons Shirley Hazzard's best-known novel doesn't succeed are not the same as readers fear when they start it. Her burnished lapidary prose and her characters' extremely aphoristic way of speaking can seem initially offpyutting, but once you realize she knows what she's doing exactly on the level of the sentence you trust her and let her run with it. But Hazzard's sense of control at the larger level of plot is less steady. The novel, which describes a huge span of time (25 years) in the lives of two sisters and the people with whom they gather in an academic's house in England in the 1950s, is an admirable attempt to cover the arc of many lives over a period of years as they occasionally cross paths in ways as transcendantly as the astonromical event mentioned in the title; the big narrative surprises at the end seem to undo much of what you thought about the characters before, but since there are so many characters to keep track of you end up feeling more confused and cheated than entranced. You wind up admiring what Hazzard is trying to do but left feeling she couldn't quite pull it off. Some of the ancillary narratives embedded within the larger narrative are first rate, however, and I have to say I am going to read her other novels regardless of my dissatisfactions with this work.
Rating:
Summary: A Brilliant Novel - Not for the Pat Booth Crowd
Review: The Transit of Venus is the only novel I return to again and again through the years. When Shirley Hazzard writes the line, "Although the dissolution of love creates no heroes, the process itself requires heroism," it speaks not to the mind trying to follow a plot line, but to the depths of the heart and soul. Early on in the book there is a scene, that serves no essential purpose for advancing the plot. The two would-be lovers are on a bus. The bus doesn't lurch and they are not thrown together in an embrace. Not moved by fate, their orbits take them in different directions. It's a very subtle interaction, one that will surely be lost on the Harlequin crowd. This novel took seven years to write. It is one of the finest, most delicately constructed works of art, you will ever read.
Rating:
Summary: A Brilliant Novel - Not for the Pat Booth Crowd
Review: The Transit of Venus is the only novel I return to again and again through the years. When Shirley Hazzard writes the line, "Although the dissolution of love creates no heroes, the process itself requires heroism," it speaks not to the mind trying to follow a plot line, but to the depths of the heart and soul. Early on in the book there is a scene, that serves no essential purpose for advancing the plot. The two would-be lovers are on a bus. The bus doesn't lurch and they are not thrown together in an embrace. Not moved by fate, their orbits take them in different directions. It's a very subtle interaction, one that will surely be lost on the Harlequin crowd. This novel took seven years to write. It is one of the finest, most delicately constructed works of art, you will ever read.
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