In the Australian-American author’s precise fiction, devastation is the subject and the aim - and the reader is not spared
There is, Shirley Hazzard fans will know, something sublime in hearing the perfect truth, no matter how bad it is. As a child during the second world war, Hazzard learned from listening to Winston Churchill that simple words, arranged in just the right rhythm, could be devastating. In 1940, when Churchill announced Germany’s invasion of France, he said: “The news from France is very bad.” It was, she declared later, “an immortal sentence”.
In Hazzard’s precise fiction, devastation – in love and war – is the subject and the aim: and the reader is not spared. She writes about people sensitive to beauty and feeling, who are punished for it by those whose ruling planets are reason, machinery, power. Once in love, her protagonists are changed for ever.
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