Praise for On Shirley Hazzard
"It may be that Hazzard’s probity and exacting standards have abashed critics, as well, because there has been little in-depth writing about her work. On Shirley Hazzard, by the Sri Lankan-born Australian novelist Michelle de Kretser, partly addresses that lapse, offering a lively personal homage that is less a critical study than a poetic apostrophe to 'a writer who honored the sentence' and practiced 'an ethics of noticing.'" ––Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
"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
"There are many pleasures in this matching of novelists a generation apart, closer in sensibility: global citizens with 'an antipodean way of seeing'; masters of the precise, lethal sentence who move their characters coolly through the mayhem of love and war, against constraints of nationality, class and gender. De Kretser says Hazzard is 'very serious and very funny', using irony and satire, 'the weapons of the outsider', to puncture pretension. The same is true of de Kretser." ––Susan Wyndham, The Sydney Morning Herald
"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
"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
"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
“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
“It is impossible to describe de Kretser’s prose as anything but rich, luxuriant, intense, and gorgeous.” —Anita Desai
"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
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.
