On Shirley Hazzard

by Michelle de Kretser

Overview

On Shirley Hazzard is a vibrant and personal tribute in which the Miles Franklin Award–winning novelist Michelle de Kretser offers a masterclass in writing and reading. She celebrates the precision and musicality of Hazzard’s prose and illuminates the humor and humanity in her work. This exhilarating book is both a brilliant introduction to Hazzard and a gift for her longtime readers.

On Shirley Hazzard reveals Michelle de Kretser’s lively intelligence at work and her distinctive wit. This testament to her sustained engagement with Hazzard’s work is, at its core, an appreciation of the significance and joy of good fiction. Receptiveness when reading is a prerequisite for perceptive analysis, according to both de Kretser and Hazzard. And for prose, the “simple and precise,” the “transient and insignificant” are key qualities: “Not moonlight but the glitter of broken glass,” for de Kretser as for Chekhov. Selective biographical details about Hazzard are relayed, too—her leaving Australia and formal education at the age of sixteen, her working, unhappily, at the United Nations in Manhattan, her long friendship with Graham Greene. Hazzard’s morality is also invoked—“solidarity with the vulnerable” and pacifism being of prime importance.

Shirley Hazzard (1931–2016) published her first short story in The New Yorker in 1961. The magazine continued to publish her work in the decades thereafter, including excerpts from her most successful and beloved novel, the bestseller and National Book Critics Circle Award winner, The Transit of Venus (1980). Michelle de Kretser’s insightful and provocative appreciation does Hazzard fine justice.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781948226820
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	03/10/2020
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	4.30(w) x 6.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Michelle de Kretser was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Her family emigrated to Australia when she was a teenager, and she was educated in Melbourne and Paris. She is the author of five novels, including the Miles Franklin Award winners Questions of Travel and The Life to Come, the Man Booker Prize long–listed The Lost Dog, and a novella, Springtime. De Kretser now lives in Sydney with her partner, the poet and translator Chris Andrews. She is an honorary associate of the English department at the University of Sydney.

Hometown:

Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Date of Birth:

November 11, 1957

Place of Birth:

Colombo, Sri Lanka

Education:

B.A. (Hons), 1979; Maîtrise-ès-lettres, 1982

Editorial Reviews

12/23/2019

In this compact, intriguing work, de Kretser (The Life to Come) offers a series of short appreciations of fellow Australian novelist Shirley Hazzard (1931–2016). Making no attempt to be exhaustive, de Kretser carefully chooses what interests her about Hazzard’s work, covering such topics as the late author’s “unwavering belief” in the transformational potential of art, her strong sense of place, and her politics—Hazzard, de Kretser states, “reserves solidarity for the vulnerable,” making the political personal. To convey a sense of who Hazzard was in her own words, de Kretser quotes heavily from her work, inviting the reader to linger over such vivid images as the “hard apple” of a cat’s head rubbing against an arm. She also discusses characterization and “echo patterning” in Hazzard’s work, particularly in The Transit of Venus and The Great Fire. These disparate subjects are unified by the deep attachment de Kretser feels to Hazzard’s work, and the author herself. While this is unlikely to be accessible to those who aren’t familiar with Hazzard’s oeuvre, it stands as a deeply felt if idiosyncratic tribute. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for On Shirley Hazzard

“It is impossible to describe de Kretser’s prose as anything but rich, luxuriant, intense, and gorgeous.” —Anita Desai

"On Shirley Hazzard by Michelle de Kretser is an exquisite, nuanced homage to the renowned writer. It makes you want to return to Hazzard’s earlier books, starting with The Transit of Venus." —Nicole Abadee, The Sydney Morning Herald

“Novel by novel, the Sri Lankan–born Australian has emerged as one of the most fiercely intelligent voices in fiction today.” —Boyd Tonkin, The Independent

"On Shirley Hazzard, the result of de Kretser’s decades of reading Hazzard’s work, is a love note from one spectacular writer to another. This love arose at least in part due to biographical circumstance . . . But the affinity between de Kretser and Hazzard also comes from a shared style—a tendency toward the sumptuous and painterly, the surprising verb and electrifying adjective. Neither seems capable of writing a boring sentence, and one of the joys of reading this book is seeing one splendid stylist marveling at the stylistic splendor of another."—–Commonweal Magazine

"A short, exquisite book in which [de Kretser] pays tribute to a predecessor she never met or corresponded with, but whom she loved dearly enough that, upon learning of her death in 2016, she wept for days on end . . . When de Kretser writes, ‘Instead of conveying the moonlight, all I’m showing is the glitter of broken glass,’ that is only partly true, for she shows the moonlight as well as the glitter. Or better, the moonlight comes forth in the glitter, the way truth comes forth in a perception that has been cleansed by the writer’s reflective imagination." ––Robert Pogue Harrison, Sydney Review of Books

"De Kretser's associative critical conjectures are wonderful because they mess with our sense of orthodox, academically sanctioned truth . . . More of this type of criticism in the world? Yes please."" —Trevor Payne, The Literary Review

"A brief paean to a much–admired fellow Australian writer . . . De Kretser's book is strongest in its very personal, often moving appreciation for Hazzard's work."—Kirkus Reviews

"In this compact, intriguing work, de Kretser offers a series of short appreciations of fellow Australian novelist Shirley Hazzard . . . It stands as a deeply felt if idiosyncratic tribute." —Publishers Weekly

"Michelle de Kretser's On Shirley Hazzard is my favorite kind of criticism: granular, expansive, stringent, confessional, beautifully written. Reading a brilliant, essential forebear, de Kretser meditates on the way literature, even as it discomfits us, can make us feel more at home in the world and in ourselves. This is a moving work of rigorous and loving homage." —Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You

From the Publisher

2019-12-08
A Sri Lankan-born Australian novelist offers a brief paean to a much-admired fellow Australian writer.

De Kretser (The Life To Come, 2017, etc.), who moved to Australia with her family in 1972, fell in love with the novels of Shirley Hazzard (1931-2016) because they "spoke of places from which I had come and places to which I longed to go." They also offered a view of Australia that was cleareyed about such problems as sexism and racial prejudice, which helped the author come to terms with living as an Asian woman in a white-dominated country. Moreover, Hazzard's novels revealed a deep engagement with history and especially imperialism, a topic with which de Kretser was intimately acquainted. Hazzard was also a keen craftsperson who "read her work aloud to herself to get the rhythms right" and consciously sought to create high literary art. De Kretser writes that "movement of poetry infiltrates [Hazzard's] prose," and she offers examples from various, often unnamed, novels of the "precision, swiftness [and] taste for compassion" with which Hazzard used adjectives, described places and characters, and expressed political views. De Kretser's book is strongest in its very personal, often moving appreciation for Hazzard's work. As literary criticism, the narrative is flawed. De Kretser provides only bits and pieces about Hazzard's life and brief reflections about important novels like The Bay of Noon, which was shortlisted for the Lost Man Booker Prize in 2010, and The Great Fire, which won the 2003 National Book Award. She offers little biographical, historical, critical, social, or political details and no cited references that would help those not already acquainted with Hazzard and/or Australian 20th-century literature more deeply appreciate this important novelist. As a result, the book reads more like a disconnected collection of poignant private musings than a text meant to educate readers who might be interested in exploring Hazzard's life and work.

An incomplete tribute that may please some Hazzard fans but leave others adrift.

Kirkus Reviews