RIP - Shirley Hazzard, author of "The Great Fire"

I wrote earlier this year of the death of Umberto Eco and how literary deaths seem to come and go and no one (or small groups of dedicated people) notices. It is, as I said earlier this year, a consequence of living in a seemingly anti-culture world. The world has been occupied with reactions to the recent election--I get that. The problem with this is that it plays onto the hands of the main driver of culture today: mass media. I read "The Great Fire" by Shirley Hazzard many years ago, long before I started this blog. I remember it as one of those books that move you and keeps you reading, not passively, but as an active part of the plot... discovering, predicting, jutting ahead with your perceptions. I was engaged with this book at a time when reading saved my life, and it is a novel I will (along with many others) come back and write about here.

The Australian-American author, whose novel The Transit of Venus won the 1980 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, and who won the 2003 National Book Award for her novel The Great Fire, died this month at age 85. Of her work, Mary Duffy writes, “at a sentence level, Hazzard forces a pace of thought and demands a level of intelligence from her reader that elevates rather than taxes and rewards you with tears, with a sharp intake of breath, with (what else?) beauty. Words like “moving” and “profound” are too messy for Hazzard—reading her is like bathing in cold light.” (bio taken from LitHub)