THE TRANSIT OF VENUS by Shirley Hazzard People. This is one of Kimberly's very most favorite books.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
On whatever book it is. I literally found one on
the transitive Venus. It's always shocking to me how few
podcasts I can find on specific books. And it was
so interesting because it was these two young women and
they really, I don't think, loved their experience of the book,
and I came away understanding that this is a very
subtle book. It is a book of incredible genius, but

(00:21):
I might almost put it in like a to the
Lighthouse kind of category, in the sense that you have
to be a very careful reader, and you have to
be someone who really really loves exceptional prose in order
to fully enjoy it. It is also a book and
the conversation that these women were having also attests to this.

(00:41):
It is a book that you can read again and
again and again because there are so many aspects of
it that are incredibly well done, but again, many of
them are very subtle. And for some reason, to me,
this book always feels kind of summary, and I'm not
even sure why. I think maybe it's the heat of Australia.
Maybe it's because there are some kind of summary moments
in the book, but it spans like three decades and

(01:02):
it is certainly not exclusively summary. In fact, it begins
with that crazy storm, but it seems very fitting some
reason for the middle of July. This is a good
time just to let you know there will be spoilers. Today.
We will be talking about this book in its entirety.
Because the structure of the book is singular and is
so incredibly well wrought, and it is something we're going
to look at. It's important that we have the entire

(01:24):
book in mind. This was also one of the most
rewarding experiences I have had of going back and looking
at the beginning of a novel once I had finished it.
So for those of you who have not finished the book,
you know, if you don't mind a spoiler or two,
which I never mind a spoiler. I'm always more interested
in the how than the what. Much more interesting to
figure out why something happened, how something happened than what happened.

(01:47):
If you're like that, listen on. If you finish the book,
I really think you're in for a treat, because going
back and taking a close look at the beginning once
you have finished is incredibly satisfying. Like an agenda, today,
we're going to be talking about the title. The title
I always kind of just like glossed over, and it
actually was really fun to look at. We're going to

(02:07):
take a close look at the first paragraph because I
think it's a good example of Hazard's incredible prose. We're
going to talk about this narrator who's really interesting, nimble,
not as neutral as it seems, and honestly in some
ways like an oracle of truth. It's a really important
presence in the book, and I think if you are

(02:28):
not reading really carefully, you might miss some of the
subtleties of this genius narrator. We're going to talk about
the prose in general. We're going to talk about names.
The names in this book are insane. We're going to
talk about figurative language. We're going to talk about description.
She just is like an absolute master of description. We're
going to talk about motifs. Essentially, my argument about her

(02:49):
prose is that it is poetry. My copy of the
book is the Penguin copy, and the introduction is by
Lauren Groff. She has such interesting things to say. She
herself is a poet. She also is a short story writer,
and she identifies some really interesting things in Hazard that
fit very nicely with this concept that really what we
have here is a prose poem. I mean, don't be afraid,

(03:13):
you guys know how I feel about poetry. It's not
really my bag, but I love a good novel that
really has like very deep poetry underpinnings. We're then going
to talk about the structure. The young women on the
podcast they kept talking about like just like nothing happening,
and how they just were so confused they could just
kind of like never figure out what was important or
what was happening. I would argue, actually that a lot

(03:34):
is happening. Sometimes it's very subtle, but sometimes it's really not.
There's a lot of plot that's happening here. And one
of the reasons why the scope of the work seems
so broad and also so deep is because of this
incredible structure. We'll take a quick look at that, and
then we're going to close by looking at all of
the stuff that we do not have time today to
dive into. That the are things that even as I

(03:55):
am mentioning them, I think you'll have a deeper appreciation
of those aspects of novel even if we don't explore
them deeply. Okay, we're diving right in with the title
of the book. I'm actually not doing a bio on
Shirley Hazard. I don't know. It didn't jump out at me.
She's Australian. I think she maybe doesn't get her due.
She ran a very big prize for The Great Fire,

(04:16):
which is a novel that I read a long time
ago and don't remember much about, which is maybe not
the best advertisement for it, but I should probably read
visit that. We are instead going to jump right into
the title of this book. So the transitive venus, I mean,
in my mind, I was like, Okay, obviously this has
to do with something astronomical. I was literally going to
say astrological. I'm so in my head about those two

(04:36):
words that this is definitely astronomical. It also, of course,
has to do with the idea of love, and I
sort of just left it at that. I was like, okay, whatever,
it's some sort of you know, star thing, and then
it's also some sort of love thing. But when I
dug into it a little deeper, I was so interested.
So one of the things I want to touch on
is this ridiculous statement on the back of my copy,

(04:57):
my Penguin copy here, it's right up at the top.
It's in big letters. It is so stupid. Listen to this.
It says, the story of two beautiful orphan sisters whose
fates are as moving and wonderful and yet as predestined
as the transits of the planets themselves. I mean, oh
my god, it's honestly just like doing this book so
dirty that I just don't even know who pulled this

(05:18):
cover together. Just underneath that we have something very worthwhile
from the Paris Review, which I find very reputable, and
largely because I share many aspects of my book taste
with the Paris Review. But they say one of the
great English language novels of the twentieth century. Now that
is something I can totally get behind. What bothers me

(05:39):
about the first part is it seems kind of twee
and kind of like too light. It also is really
leaning into the idea of fate here, and in some
ways the book is very caught up in the idea
of fate for some reason. I mean, I'm not a
big person who believes deeply in predestination, And in some
ways it felt like it was robbing both Carol and
Grace and frankly Dora. Frankly, all of the people in

(06:00):
the novel, mostly the women, that this idea of predestination,
the idea of moving and wonderful and yet as predestined
as the transit of the planets themselves, and that we
are all sort of stuck in these orbits without any control.
It sort of undermined this deeply feminist strain that I
see all through the novel. So I was not wild
about this idea of them being predestined to live a

(06:24):
certain life just like the planets. And honestly, that might
have been the reason why I wanted to look at
the title more carefully, because I was like, this whole
commentary about the planets in their fixed orbits is not
doing a lot for me. So astrologically, wow, I knew
it would happen. It happened astronomically. Is that even the word?
I think? So astronomically what happens in the transit of

(06:45):
Venus is that Venus moves. Venus is the second planet
from the Sun. More God, I'm hesitating because I'm unsure
talk about being in my head. So when it moves
between the Earth and the Sun, you can see it
not with the naked eye, but astronomers can see it
as a little black dot. It's the silhouette of Venus
that moves across the face of the sun. This is

(07:07):
something that is very rare. It happens in pairs eight
years apart, and about every hundred years. I have in
my notes here that the next time it's going to
happen is twenty one seventeen and twenty one twenty five.
So what's important here is the idea of rarity, and
what else is important is that Venus is obviously maybe
this is not obvious to everyone, but it kind of

(07:29):
should be. Ever since thought book, you know, women are
from Venus, men are from Mars, or maybe I got
that backwards. But this idea of Venus as being very
closely tied to love but also very closely tied to women.
So Venus is the Roman goddess of love and beauty.
She is the equivalent of Aphrodite in the Greek mythology.
So when we put these two things together, what we

(07:50):
have is this idea of love, of love and beauty
as being something that is very rare and something that
you have to look for very carefully. It is also
something in the book that no one sees. And I
loved thinking about that throughout the novel, we have lots
of things that feel like short stories, which is something
Lauren Groff touches on. There's a whole story within the
story of someone from Europe who comes to South America

(08:14):
probably two hundred years before the twenty one seventeen crossing.
He is someone who went because he was going to
be able to see the transit of Venus in South America,
and he waited eight years there, which now makes more
sense to me because presumably someone saw it and they
knew that it would happen again in eight years, and
he went to the place where he would be able
to see it, and then the weather was still bad
that he couldn't see it. We also know that Ted Tye,

(08:37):
I mean, there's a very important stream throughout the book
of this idea of ted Tye understanding that England is
a very bad place for a telescope, and yet it's
like this thing that he has to argue that he
has to kind of go against the establishment. And I
think those of us who know that there are a
lot of telescopes in like New Mexico could maybe surmise
that England is not the best place for one. But

(08:58):
the important thing here is that no one is actually
seeing the transit of Venus throughout the novel. So with
this title, what she is underscoring is the rarity of
love and the fact that within the scope of the novel,
very few people are seeing it. There's also a very
important line on page eighty, sorry one to eighty can
barely read my notes here that says Venus can blot

(09:20):
out the sun. And there's several different references. You all
know that I love as I'm reading to find that
you know the actual word verbatim. There's a bunch of
references to the transit of Venus and to Venus itself,
and each one is very significant. But this one stuck
out to me because of the importance this idea. I mean,
Venus in astronomical terms just looks like a tiny black

(09:41):
dot moving across the sun. But this idea that love
can blot out the sun really speaks to the enormity
of romantic attachment. Okay, we're not going to open the book.
I don't always take time to look at an epigraph,
but I really want to look at the one here
because it is so significant. It's a poem just interesting
to me. Because you all know that poetry is like

(10:02):
not really my jam, but it is so fitting that
I really like this poem. This is a poem that
is very sort of clear in many ways. I mean,
it is in French, so if you don't speak French,
it might not be super clear. I also appreciate the
fact that they're trusting that any reader has enough French
to decipher this, because they certainly didn't offer you surely
did not offer you a translation. But it's the kind

(10:24):
of poem that I love because it's really really beautiful
and has a very important message for us. But it
is also fairly clear. So it reads the following gerreve
de tois gell tell mont quill rest Purian deer toois.

(10:45):
So I'm going to just attempt to translate here. I
have dreamed so strongly of you, I have walked so far,
I have spoken so much, I have loved your shadow
so much that nothing of you remains for me. I'm
just looking at this. I'm like really actually wanting to
do a very deep dive into all of the beautiful

(11:05):
things that are happening here, and my translations certainly did
not do them justice. But we're not going to spend
the time. What I will say here is this idea
of the shadow and this idea of having nothing left
of someone. Literally, now that we have finished the book,
is a pretty good summary of what is happening with
what I would argue is the most primary relationship in

(11:26):
the book. I mean, you can argue that the girl's
relationships Grace, Caro and Dora, those are maybe more primary.
But the main love story in here, for my money,
is the love story between Caro and Ted. The love story,
of course, between Caro and Adam is in some ways
much more fulfilling within the scope of the novel, but

(11:48):
this is absolutely Ted tights. I mean, he has really
dreamed so much of Caro that nothing is left of her,
and it is very interesting. We're going to talk about
this at the end. But the promise of their love
together is outside the scope of the novel. At the
very end of the book, She's going to Rome, She's
going to meet him there. He has told his wife
that he is going to go off with Caro. But

(12:09):
we also know, because we learn on page twelve that
he is going to commit suicide in a northern part
of England. For any of you out there who forgot that,
because honestly, it's kind of forgettable. This book is insane
because on some level you're kind of ending on this
optimistic note, and then if you're a careful reader, you
remember in fact that this is not going to end well.

(12:29):
So I really loved this poem. It is by Robert Desnos.
It is called also the Dernier Poem, the Last Poem,
which is also very elegic and very sad. And before
we dive into the novel itself and start looking at
the language, I'm just going to take this epigraph one
step further and kind of tie it in with the title.
So if we're talking about the rarity of love, and

(12:49):
here I'm not talking about To my mind, the relationship
between Caro and Adam is the kind of like mutually nourishing,
you know, pop positive, stable, long lasting kind of marriage.
Although I will also argue that it was fairly truncated.
They found each other late, he died early. It was
not productive in the sense that they had to meet children,

(13:12):
even though Caro seems to have wanted children because she's
bereft when she has her miscarriage. So not even the
relationship that seems kind of most satisfying is in fact
satisfying in the sense of kind of your fairy tale
vision of romantic love, which I mean, obviously, there are
lots of different ways that love can be satisfying. I

(13:32):
think like a really like ecstatic, really passionate, short affair
can be very satisfying, and in many ways, the Transit
of Venus is talking about that. But this is a
book that is fairly concerned with the idea of lasting
romantic love, and no one finds it. So if we
kind of tick through all of the people, we have
Grace and Christian. They're kind of one of the first

(13:54):
couples that we see, and their marriage is fine, but
it is not great. We also then have Christian not
finding love with Cordelia, we have Grace not finding love
with Angus, and then we move on to Caro. In
the very beginning, she meets Ted. She's just not that
into Ted. She is in fact really into Paul Ivory.
Paul meanwhile, is going to marry Trisha. They are not

(14:14):
going to find love. Caro and Paul in many ways
do not find love. They certainly find some passion, which
just like wrecks her and can in many ways be
seen as like this incredible romantic affair, although I would
argue that the fact that there is so much darkness
devoted in the book to their relationship is arguing that
in fact it is not a successful romantic affair. We

(14:36):
also find out, of course, that Paul is bisexual, and
that Paul was kind of looking for love with this
young actor. And you could argue that Paul is not
finding love with the young actor, certainly not also not
with Caro, also not with Tricia Adam. In some ways, yes,
he finds love with Caro, but it's a little later.
His first marriage seems very fraught. He has a wife

(14:57):
who in fact takes her life. And then we have
Ted who's also not finding love, not particularly with Margaret,
not with the prostitute who he is with during one
very moving scene, kind of a pivotal scene actually in
the book, the prostitute being the one who basically says like, well,
you should go and have sex with her. If you've
been obsessed with her forever and you have never had
sex with her, you should probably go and try and

(15:19):
consummate this love affair. And again you could argue maybe
that at the end of the book, Ted has the
promise of love. He is moving toward love, and yet
it is outside the scope of the novel. We don't
even find love in the second generation. So we have
this next generation Felix, who has cancer and who may
be dying. We're not really sure. We hope he is not.
We have Josie, who is Adam's daughter, and toward the

(15:42):
end of the book she's pregnant. I think she's going
to Sweden or maybe Switzerland. That's terrible. I think it's Sweden,
and there is talk about a partner, but we certainly
don't get the impression. Hazard is purposefully not giving us
the impression that Josie is in a really nurturing, mutual,
exciting life affair. So all of that is to say,

(16:02):
both with this epigraph and with this title, that Hazard
is giving us all sorts of indications that love is rare,
that love is difficult to sustain, and in fact, everyone
in the novel is sort of looking for this kind
of connection and very few people are finding it, and
even when they do, it is for relatively short spans
of time. I made it sound like we're going to
dive right into the book. After we talked about that epigraph,

(16:25):
but in fact I have to make another detour, which
is through the names in the book. Lauren Graff makes
this excellent observation in her introduction that they're all of
these monosyllabic names. And when we think poetically of a
monosyllabic word, it's one that has a lot of force.
It's one that can stand on its own. It's usually
a sound that's very striking, and in many ways it's

(16:47):
kind of blunt, and it's really saying a lot. And wow,
when you take a look at the actual names, almost
every single name in the book is monosyllabic, and when
they're not, it's very telling. And when you kind of
start pursing what these monosyllables actually are, it is so fascinating.
So much of Shirley Hazard seems like it should be
kind of like too much, like she's kind of hitting

(17:07):
you over the head with stuff, and it never ever
feels like that. So we begin with this idea of
sefton Thrail, I mean, the idea of Thrail. It's like
kind of difficult to pronounce. In some ways. Rail makes
me think of his stick. He always has, like his cane,
which is obviously a very phallic symbol. He has a
very patriarchal presence in the novel, but he's also failing.

(17:28):
He's like a failing patriarch, so in some ways we
kind of have him flailing. We have this idea of
thrail as also like railing against something, which he always is.
He and Ted are very much locked in this kind
of battle of like the old Guard versus the modern
day progress. We then have Ted, so he's Edmund but

(17:48):
he goes by Ted. But more interestingly, this last name Tice.
It's kind of like entice, but without the end part,
so it's kind of like he's sort of impotent in
some ways. It's like he's almost going to entice people,
but he's not because that for syllable is missing. We
also have the idea that it almost kind of rhymes
with nice, like nice Tice, which he is kind of
a nice guy in many ways, and there is that

(18:10):
adage about nice guys finishing last, certainly as compared to Paul.
We then have Bell, so you know, Caro, Grace, and
Dora all share the last name Belle. At one point,
a bell rings in Paul's apartment when Caro is there,
and the bell shattered the silence. So you have this
idea of a bell as an alarm. You have this
idea of a bell as something beautiful. You know, you'd

(18:32):
hear bells in like a church, something kind of sacred.
You also have this idea of things belling outward. These
are women who really would like to take up more
space in the world, and kind of do in certain
different ways. Their names themselves. Grace obviously is monosyllabic. It
is the perfect name for her. She is graceful. It
says everything we need to know about her. Caro Caro

(18:54):
I was interested in. I don't love it like I
wanted to love it more because I actually really do
love ca Caro was not a not a popular character
with the podcast Women I was listening to, And maybe
that's kind of universal. Maybe people don't really like Caro
very much. I loved her. I found her totally inspirational
in lots of ways. That strength and that independence was

(19:15):
very compelling to me. But in terms of names, her
name is slightly different. She's taken off the line part,
so in some ways I would argue that she is
not following the line. She is not going to just
like be predestined and just go ahead and do what
fate is, you know, what the planets are saying she
should do in terms of her orbit. But I was
also very interested in the fact that Dora and Caro

(19:38):
are not that far apart. We obviously have the same
to vowels, both have the R. In fact, they're very
like similar. They're not quite an anagram but almost, which
I think is supposed to make us recognize in fact
that that Dora, who is like really not likable in
many many ways, she's not that far from Caro. It
sort of shows us in some ways, like the bullet

(20:00):
at Caro dodged just by having been born a little later,
by having had Dora in her presence, And certainly Kara,
Caro and Dora both stand in stark contrast to Grace.
We then have Adam veil. So this idea of a
veil we have like a very bridal thing, but we
also have this idea of a veil as like a
safe place, like a like a like a glen, you know,

(20:21):
like a like a place where you might find some
kind of refuge, you might find shade. And Adam, you know,
first man, like as in Adam and Eve. It's so
kind of on the nose in some ways because he
is in some ways she's discovering him as kind of
this first man. Ted does not really in the beginning
serve as kind of like a real man in her life,

(20:43):
and in fact Paul doesn't either because in many ways
he is you know, already betrothed literally to Tsia, and
he has a very kind of passionate but very shadowy
presence for her, whereas Adam is really kind of this
first man who she can really attach herself to. And
again that idea of Veil, he's very much kind of
a refuge. We then have Ttershia so Tursha Drage, which

(21:05):
first of all, you know Rage hello also like Dread.
It's also kind of it's kind of like Thrail. It's
a little difficult to say Drage, and in fact Thrail
and Rage are similar. They both live out in these
like Moneyed I mean, she literally lives in a castle
and the Thrails live in this big country house. So
we have these kind of unusual and in the case

(21:25):
of Drage like like very kind of difficult sounding last names.
And then Tursha of course being the third thing, like Tertiary,
she is a point in a love triangle almost every
single time we see her. Well she is because we
have Paul and Karo and Tursia. We also have Tursha
and Paul and his lever. We also have Tursha and
Paul and her lever. So we have Tursha as being

(21:47):
very tertiary. Then we have Angus Dance. Again. The dance
part is like we have Dance, Veil, Drage, Thrail, Bell, Tice.
All of them are are these monosyllabic, very strong, but
very varied different last names in some ways. I mean,
I loved the character of Angus Dance and it was
so sad when things don't work out for them. Just

(22:07):
off the cuff here, I'm thinking of Angus in terms
of beef, and I'm thinking of Angus as someone who's
from the north. I think it's either Scottish. I think
it's either Scottish, maybe Irish, but as being northerly and
sort of not of the ilk of everyone else. But
this idea of dance that they might have the kind
of connection that you would have dancing with someone, and
yet it does not work out that way. And then

(22:29):
we have a strain of last names that are not
monosyllabic but are so interesting. So we have Rex Ivory,
who is a poet who this is the structure that
we're going to talk about. We see him at the
beginning and then we see him at the end. Both
of those times are incredibly important. He is someone whose
presence should be kind of felt all throughout the novel.

(22:49):
And when he pops up again at the end on
the television while Missus Thrale is in the old person's
home watching him, it is so kind of shocking but
also so appropriate. It's the perfect thing, which is like
the thing that every writer is looking for, which is
you get toward the end. I mean, it's not like
a major plot point, but it's so beautifully done. And

(23:09):
when he does pop up, on the one hand, you're like,
oh my gosh, wait, this is kind of coincidental and crazy.
You're surprised and you're like, oh my gosh, wait here
we're coming full circle. And then you realize, of course
we should be coming full circle. So we have rex Ivory,
Rex of course meaning king, and he is obviously a
fallen king. He is like the opposite of a king,
so there's a lot of irony in that name. He's

(23:32):
a prisoner of war. Even when he comes back from war,
it's not working out well for him. A lot of
this book has to do with the post colonial era.
This is in the nineteen fifties, which is kind of
well after the English Empire, like the height of the
English Empire is over, but you have all of these
kind of shadows of colonialism and the idea of someone
named King Ivory, Ivory obviously being something very colonial, something

(23:56):
that the British people were trafficking in Ivory from their colonies.
The idea of King Ivory as being completely impotent and
powerless is so fitting. Then we have Paul Ivory. So
you have to think here about first of all, you
know the biblical part, but more importantly, this idea of
a pall of casting a pall over things. I mean again,

(24:19):
it should be too much, and it is not too much.
At one point, we have both Caro and Dora. We
have them in relationships with men, and I love the
kind of parallel between these two. These are relatively short
lived things, although for Dora it's kind of a big deal.
So Dora is with major ingot. So an ingot is
like a piece of money, like a Spanish ingot. I'm

(24:41):
fairly certain that's correct. Oh my gosh, all of a
sudden again I'm doubting myself. It's a day full of
doubt if you were on the YouTube. If I'm not correct,
I will go ahead and correct myself here. But the
fact that she is marrying someone who is going to
pull her out of her poverty essentially, which is kind
of a self inflicted poverty, and that he has named
major Ingot like Major money. It should be way too

(25:06):
on the nose, and yet it is not. And then
we have Caro, who when she leaves Paul and she's
incredibly breft. At the beginning of her grieving of her
romance with Paul Ivory, she meets someone named Nicholas Cartilage. Well,
she met him for cartilage, I think, is how we
should say that. I said it like cartilage, because in fact,
he serves as sort of cartilage. He's kind of like

(25:26):
between bones. Wow, that is not what I meant. There's
a literal sexual overtone there. But I just cannot believe
like that she's using him as like connective tissue and
kind of this temporary thing that is not really important,
and is literally naming him cartilage. And I don't know.
Maybe some of you out there are really digging into
the names and maybe you have already thought all of

(25:48):
this through. But if not, you know, honestly, it's it's
just time to take a step back and realize that
nothing in this book is unintentional, which is obviously the
case with someone who writes as well as Shirley Hazard.
But it's important to realize that every single opportunity she has,
she is taking to make this book incredibly rich, with
every single element having tons of resonance. Okay, now we

(26:12):
are going to dive into the actual book itself. We're
going to take a look at the first two paragraphs
and then one paragraph that's like a couple of pages in.
One of the things that Lauren Groff mentioned in her
introduction in my copy, which is such a great observation,
is that Hazard is moving a lot of the verbs
to the end of the sentences, which is something that
a poet would totally notice. And it is so true,

(26:34):
and I found not only do we have a lot
of verbs toward the end of the sentences, but we
have these very important words that are shifting toward the end.
Part of the reason why that's so important We have
talked about this quite a bit. The end of a sentence,
the end of a paragraph, the end of a chapter.
They're really important, partially because all of the momentum of
the sentence is leading you to that thing, but also

(26:55):
because even if it's just like a period and you
just have a quick little, like very quick break, that
word is kind of lingering in your mind for a
very quick minute. So here we're diving in. By nightfall,
the headlines would be reporting devast station. I mean, it's
so good. I mean, this is a book that right
from the start is really telling us what it is

(27:17):
all about, which is darkness. So we have Nightfall, which
is also tying into this idea of being able to
see love, being able to see maybe not in England,
but being able to see the stars, being able to
see the transit of Venus. And then we have the
idea of headlines. This is a book that spans so much.
We were beginning in the fifties, but we kind of
dip backwards into time. We move all the way into

(27:38):
the eighties, and in some ways there is a lot
of news and a lot of like large scope things
that are happening. So the idea of headlines and the
idea of the breadth of this is really important from
the start. But then of course we have at the
end of the sentence devastation. This is a book. I mean,
if you're not into darkness, I'm not really sure this

(27:58):
is the book for you, because here we are at
the beginning being told by her that this is a
book about devas station. So then we read on it
was simply that the sky on a shadeless day suddenly
lowered itself like an awning. And you know, maybe as
we're going through this, I'm going to pick out some
of the figurative language so that later when we're talking

(28:19):
about figurative language, I can mostly just kind of list
the ways that she does these unbelievable things. In this case,
it's a simile. It's a comparison using like or as
and actually Lauren Groff talks about this one. For me,
it didn't work quite as well as it seemed to
have worked for Lauren Groff, because it felt like it
was like a little bit too far afield in some ways,

(28:41):
and it kind of took me out of the thing.
I was like imagining an awning, and I was imagining
like I'm like, how is the awning lowering? Is it
like mechanical? Is it on a roller? Like? What are
we thinking about the lowering of the awning? So if
a reader is taken out of the text like that,
if you have to think to yourself like, wait, is
this a motoriz awning, then you know in fact that
it maybe is not for that reader the most successful simile.

(29:06):
But we also in the very beginning have all of
these incredible sibilants. So all of these s sounds. It
was simply that the sky on a shadeless day suddenly
lowered itself like an awning. So we have all of
these sibilant sounds, and then we're ending with awning, which
is a low vowel. We have this nasal It's like
a very kind of ominous sound in some ways, and

(29:29):
it works so well. We're then going to move on
to a lot of plosives. So we have a lot
of sibilants in the first and then the plosive is
like a P sound or a B sound. So then
we have this purple silence petrified the limbs of trees
and stood crops upright in the fields like hair on end.
So here we have again another simile, and I actually

(29:51):
really liked this one because it reminded me of like goosebumps,
Like I felt like I could really see this kind
of energy and it made me feel kind of cold.
I mean not literally, but like it made me understand
that suddenly the day would have gotten cold. Then we
have whatever there was a fresh white paint sprang out
from the downs or dunes or lacerated a roadside with

(30:12):
a streak of fencing. So this is one thing that
Hazard does again and again and again. This is kind
of a minor example of it, but she articulates things
that a reader may not have articulated for herself, and
it is insanely great. Like in this case, I absolutely
know what she's talking about. There's that kind of especially
on the East coast of the United States, and apparently

(30:34):
in England you have that kind of electricity that like
I don't know if it's like ozone. I don't know
why that just popped into my head, but this idea,
like before a thunderstorm, when you have that sense of
everything kind of getting darker and that ominous feeling of gray,
and yet the white stands out in ways that's almost alarming,
and honestly, I'm not sure that's something that I have
ever really like recognized until I saw it in writing,

(30:56):
and then I'm like, oh my gosh, yes, that is
that kind of ominous feeling of contrast that does alert
us to some sort of alarming, impending weather change. It's
also important here that we're ending with the idea of fencing.
In some ways, this is a book that's so much
about territory. It's about people creating boundaries between one another.

(31:17):
We also have this beautiful downs or dunes. Fresh white
paints sprang out from downs or dunes, and that was
one of these things that to me seemed very poetical.
When she's talking about this storm, I who have read
the book no that we're going to be seeing it
in the countryside, and so the dunes to me, I
was like, wait, why are there dunes here? Partially because

(31:39):
she's talking about the scope of this storm, which we
should see, of course as a metaphor, but on some level,
not only did it expand the idea of the storm,
but I love downs and dunes. It's such a beautiful
phrase that even if I was a little bit like,
wait where are we it's just beautiful, and then to
follow downs and dunes with the verb lacerated. A lot

(32:00):
of people in this book are being lacerated, and lots
of different ways, but we move from devastation to lacerated.
I mean, these are just like devastations obviously not a verb,
but lacerated. It's just it's so active and it's so
evocative and it's so like painful, and very briefly before
we move on the note about the storm. There's something

(32:21):
called pathetic fallacy, which is a type of figurative language
where the weather in an area is reflecting what's happening
for the people. I mean, think of Gothic literature when
you have, like you know, the thunderstorm and suddenly, like
you know, the sky opens and rainfalls. If a writer
is worth her salt, that is going to in fact
be indicative of what is happening for these people. They

(32:42):
are being brought together by an act of nature. And
in many ways it is the storm and storminess in general,
like chaos and devastation in fact death that are bringing
these people together, which should tell you something about what
is going to happen with all of these people. It's
pretending all sorts of chaos among them. So then we
have this beautiful kind of wrapping up of this first paragraph.

(33:05):
This occurred shortly after midday on a summer Monday in
the south of England. I love that. So we have
all of this drama, we have all of this beautiful
poetic language, all of these evocative similes, and then we
have this absolutely mundane statement that deflates things in the
most beautiful way. Not everything in this book is high flown,

(33:27):
which is part of the reason why the prose is
singular and why it works so well. Again, I'll repeat it.
This occurred shortly after midday on a summer Monday in
the south of England. So England is the last word
in full in the whole paragraph. England is very important.
I mean, I think that's obvious when I say it
like that. There's a lot of stuff about sefton thrail

(33:49):
and Trisha drage and the diminishing of the aristocracy and
progress in England. But we also have this very mundane
right before this a mid day on a summer Monday.
So here we have all of these m sounds. I
think that's a bilabial nasal. My linguistics might be failing me.
But we have all of this kind of murmuring sound,

(34:10):
and this Monday, it's like midday on a summer Monday.
It could not be more mundane, which is speaking in
part to the fact that this storm is coming into
the lives of these people, these kind of ordinary lives
of these people, and is really going to shake things up.
So sure enough we have the second paragraph. We're going
to read through a little more quickly here as late
as the following morning, small paragraphs would even appear in

(34:31):
newspapers having space to fill due to a hiatus in elections,
fiendish crimes and the Korean War, unroofed houses and stripped
orchards being given in numbers and acreage, with only lastly,
briefly the mention of a body where a bridge was
swept away. Okay, hugely important. If you are longtime listeners

(34:55):
to the Fox Page, you know that I would counsel you,
if you want to read better, to just simply pay
more attention. And certainly you should be paying attention to
the opening of a novel. In this case, it is
particularly rewarding because basically we have like a white lotus
thing here, we have a body who at this point
doesn't seem super consequential, but because Hazard is so good,

(35:16):
we know in fact, or we don't know yet, but
having finished the novel we do. We know that this
is very consequential, and she's going to tie all sorts
of different strings up in a knot that essentially this
is such a tortured metaphor here, but the knot essentially
has to do with this body. You also maybe should
be suspicious that it is important because we have it

(35:38):
kind of drawn out with only lastly briefly the mention
of a body where a bridge was swept away. Also
that kind of pile up of adverbs only lastly briefly.
They're also they have commas. She does such good things
with punctuation, but this pile up of adverbs. Actually her
adverbs are also incredible. I mean, any reputable MFA will

(36:00):
tell you to avoid adverbs, but if you're as good
as Shirley Hazard, you can just go crazy with them.
So we have this very kind of wide scoped narrator
who's talking about the storm in these kind of really
large ways, giving us the scope of all of England,
talking about dunes and downs, and then how it is

(36:20):
all put into the media. And then ending with this body.
And then after those first two paragraphs, which are so broad,
we narrow in to what will become the focus of
the book. That noon, a man was walking slowly into
a landscape under a branch of lightning. So we're not
going to dig into deeply. But of course that is
Ted Tyce, and it is not simply that he is

(36:42):
walking toward the house. He is walking slowly into a
landscape under a branch of lightning. All of this should
be too much. It should be it should feel kind
of overwrought and overridden written, but it is absolutely working.
So it's really interesting to go back and take a
look at the beginning of the novel, of course, and
we are reminded of this body, this very kind of

(37:03):
white lotus moment where we have a body we don't
know who has died, or we are not sure of
the importance of it, and yet it does become very important.
The other thing that is interesting is we're beginning with
this landscape and then we are beginning with Ted Tye,
and he is someone who ultimately is going to be
very important, and obviously is very important at different points
throughout the novel, but in some ways it feels like

(37:25):
kind of an oblique beginning. It feels like we're moving
into this with a somewhat minor character, which he is not.
But I would also argue that Hazard does such a
good job with minor characters. She does such a good
job of widening, like having this very very wide scope
of the novel. And it's part of the reason, what's
part of the reason why things can feel confusing, and

(37:47):
part of the reason why readers maybe get frustrated and
aren't totally sure like what's important and what's not important.
But it's really part of the genius, because we have
this very wide swath of humanity, and we have all
of these incredible articulations truth and details about these people
that end up being revelatory. So we're going to read
these two paragraphs relatively quickly. The cheap suitcase oozed orange

(38:11):
on the black and white floor, while ted Tye took
off his raincoat and hung it on a stand as directed.
So of course we have things being black and white,
which is very symbolic, and then we have this idea
of the oozing orange. It's in many ways kind of
portending his death, this idea, it's almost sort of bloody,
also of course leaning into his poverty and the idea

(38:32):
that at the very end he's being directed to do
all of these things. We don't know that until the
very end of the sentence, but it seems kind of
perfect in terms of telling us that Ted Tys is
someone who, at least at this point, because of class
issues which are enormous in the book, is in a
milieu where he is having to be directed and is
taking direction. A smell of wet wool of socks and

(38:54):
sweat was pungently released in the coldly soaked and well
waxed void. So here we are this idea of life,
and in some ways like kind of a messy life.
It's pungent, it's sweat, it's old wool, it's which is
not like super flattering, But nor is the idea of
the coldly soaked and well waxed void. I mean, this
is like a prepty damning description of the space. But

(39:17):
it is so beautiful well waxed void. I mean, that's incredible.
It's an incredible sentence. Okay, moving on, all these slow
matters had taken seconds, and in that time it could
be seen too that the hall was circular, that a
bowl of roses stood on a table beside a usual newspaper,
beneath a dark picture framed in gold. Under the curve

(39:39):
of a stair, A door was open on a corridor
of Persian runner, and above, on the arc of stairs,
there was a young woman standing still. So we have
this idea of circularity of things moving around. I mean,
you can see the orbit of the planet perhaps there,
but there's also this idea of cycles of things moving
around and around in terms of relationships, in terms of

(40:02):
people moving through things and coming back to where they started.
Certainly that happens with Dora and major Ingot, but also
the idea of secrets that are sort of inescapable and
that are moving around and around in circles of betrayal.
We also have this bowl of roses, so flowers are
very important. We're not going to dig too deeply into
the idea of motif. That is a very poetic thing.

(40:23):
She does such an amazing job with it. I'm going
to kind of list some of the motifs later. A
motif is simply something that is arising again and again.
It can be an action, but often it is a noun.
And these motifs once you sort of sense them, they
actually become very telling. So flowers are arising at very
important points in the novel, and we see them here
at the very beginning. They're associated with the Thralee household.

(40:47):
They're associated with Caro and with Paul, and we do
see flowers throughout as sort of being present at these
very kind of momentous moments, often of conflict, sometimes of love.
And they're different in all these different circumstances, which is
why it is so well done. Notably, we have Caro,
who is the young woman, and she is standing still.

(41:07):
Then we have this Tys looked up to her. It
would have been unnatural not to. He looked up from
his wet shoes and his wet smell and his orange
blotch of cheap luggage, and she looked down, high and dry.
He had an impression of her body in its full dimensions,
as if he had passed at the back and seen

(41:28):
her strong spine, the black hair parting on the prominent
cord of the nape, the fragile creased behind the knee.
Her face was in shadow. In any case, it would
have been too pat too perfect, if she had been
seen to be beautiful I was looking for Tom, she said,
and went away. Unbelievable. So we're not going to purse

(41:49):
this too carefully, although I will say one of the
things that Hazard does again and again, and you could
write like an entire dissertation on this. There is so
much wordplay, so much pun and so much double on
Pondra This idea of her being high and dry here,
you know, it's like an accurate description. He is wet
and low and she is high and dry. But the
idea of being left high and dry is not great.

(42:12):
We also have a lot of this black and white
being repeated. She's very pale, her hair is very dark.
We have all of these lines that are drawn, the
line of her spine, the line of her part. All
of this is speaking to things being very linear in
some ways to Fate, but also things are very shadowy.
So we have both black and white, but we also
have the orange and we have shadows. And then I

(42:32):
think we're going to have time to look into this.
But this is the perfect example of this narrator as
being very nimble and has being not quite neutral. So
we have this kind of meta thing at the end
where the narrators like it would have been too pat
too perfect if she had been seen to be beautiful.
So she's not quite beautiful. No one in this book
is quite anything. That's not true. Actually, Trisia is very beautiful,

(42:53):
but it's like not in a great way. Also, I
think Grace is very beautiful in her own kind of subtle,
mundane way. But then we have this I'm going to
talk about devastation. We have the thing that she says
to him very first, and he's already you can tell
he's kind of already in love with her because of
all of the things that the narrator has just told us.
And literally we have this line I was looking for Tom,

(43:14):
she said and went away. I mean it's crazy. Tom,
of course is very close to Ted. So you have
this idea of her like almost looking for him, but
not quite, and this idea of them it sort of faded,
this big kind of romantic moment, this kind of meet
cute that's happening, and then it is deflated in the
most devastating way. So I think you get a sense

(43:35):
from the opening couple of pages of how lyrical and
I mean not in the best sense, and how telling
an evocative this language is. This is certainly in many
ways like a writer's book, and it really is one
where if you dig into it and really pay attention,
you're going to get the most out of it. If
you're reading this really quickly and you're reading for plot,
you will definitely be disappointed. But if you are appreciating

(43:58):
these descriptions, it's just an absolute joy. So these descriptions,
I want to dig a little more deeply into that
she's so incredibly good at telling us so much. On
page seventy we have this very telling description of all
of them, and as I'm reading it, I'm going to
read it fairly quickly. I just focus a little bit
on the narrator and how the narrator is kind of

(44:18):
tipping their hand as we are moving through. Again. This narrator,
to me feels obviously and very sort of omniscient. It
is a third person narrator. It knows everything, but it
has a little bit of sasas this is a narrator
who has a little bit of an identity and is
always revealing when there are these kinds of telling, kind
of descriptive biased statements. So on page seventy we have

(44:40):
this very short couple of paragraphs that are so substantial.
So here we have Paul Irey was motoring down from
London and should soon arrive motoring down. Then in parentheses,
motoring down was the professor's choice of phrase. Ivory's car
would swoop up alongside Tursha's, which would almost I certainly
put it in the shade or in the wrong. So

(45:03):
the cars are very symbolic. Tersia's is green, Paul's is red.
The idea of them always being in cars and in
separate cars. They're always on the move, they're never together.
We obviously have the green light and the red light.
And then this idea where she is really playing with
language here in the shade or in the wrong. I
can't wait, said Tursha, meaning only that she would not.

(45:24):
So this again is that kind of double chondre. It's
she's not saying, oh, I can't wait, She's like, I
can't wait. And you don't know that as a reader
until it is clarified, which is helping us understand that
the people who are in the room with Tursha are
also just beginning to kind of suss her out. I
can't wait, said Tursha, meaning only that she would not.
I dislike reunions. She would assert I don't like animals.

(45:47):
That's in quotation marks, and then out of the quotation
marks we have this she would assert I don't like
animals or children, or the ocean or the spring, confident
that her distaste must have importance. So this is a
fascinating thing where our narrators actually completing her thought. It's
sort of like filling out this thought that Trisha would have.
It's going beyond the scope of the quotation marks of

(46:09):
the actual dialogue to really tell us so much about her,
Any contrary opinion must be, as she implied, falsely sentimental.
Even so, she would not manage to put these two
sisters in the wrong or shade. They were actually waiting
for her to be gone so they might resume. So

(46:29):
this is so we have this echo of in the
wrong or shade. But it's very interesting because it's flip
flopped before the car put it in the shade or
the wrong. And then now we have this idea of
Trisha not being able to put the two sisters in
the wrong or shade. So we have all of these pairs.
We have Tursha and Paul, we have wrong and shade,

(46:49):
we have the two sisters, and one thing I Love
is again and again it's very obvious with Christian when
he goes in and visits them and they're just like
not that impressed by him, and they haven't like really
like made the apartment spectacular, and they don't seem to
be like impressed or like really appreciative of the fact
that he who is definitely of a higher class. They're

(47:10):
kind of not that impressed that he has like like
sunk to their level. They don't conceive of it like that.
And every time we see them with Ttersha, there is
a strength to them. Trisha is used to people bowing
down to her and people feeling less than her, and
in fact, these sisters won't. They're all of these subtle
waves where their strength is so apparent, but it gives
you the kind of subtlety that you would have to

(47:30):
experience in this kind of drawing room situation. And then
it's made very clear in sentences like they were actually
waiting for her to be gone so they might resume.
And that's interesting because we have this sense that the
narrator is telling us what the women, what the girls
are are actually doing. So in a lot of the
paragraph we have, you know, a lot of information about Tursha,

(47:52):
and then we're ending with kind of entering into the
minds of the women who are just like waiting for
her to go so that they can resume their conversation.
So what I want to underline here is the way
that Hazard is using this very lyrical language, all of
these really sort of beautiful combinations of soullables and words.
But she's telling us so much in all of these
subtle ways. It is subtle, and you have to read

(48:14):
for those subtleties in order to fully appreciate it. But
if you are reading that way, it is so satisfying.
So I want to dip in just a little bit
further into this incredible narrator. So throughout we have this
third person narrator, and what's astonishing is how nimble it is.
It moves from the consciousness of one person to another
in these incredibly subtle ways. And then we also have

(48:36):
the kind of cagy, kind of sassy editorializing that we
saw earlier. That is so impressive and I think unusual.
It's not something you know usually if you have an
omniscient narrator, the goal of that narrator is to be
sort of invisible and in this case, they're very subtle
ways in which this narrator is kind of intruding in
a way that is very appealing. So I'm going to

(48:57):
read a little bit of dialogue here. It's just such
an absolute gift to read this language. And this is
when the Thrails are sitting down. It's the Thrails and
Caro and ted Tye and they are talking about Paul Ivory.
And this is dialogue, which is one of the ways
where we see the narrator most clearly, because the glosses.
So a gloss in dialogue is just it's whatever words

(49:19):
it's like he said, is the gloss But this is
a narrator that has glosses that are very telling. So
all of the words that are outside the quotation marks. Okay,
so we have this. The professor proceeded to elaborate his
preference definitely aligning fork and knife. Paul Ivory has already
established some place for himself in literature and is rising
so swiftly that there is no telling where he may

(49:41):
yet go. Ted Tyce grinned by no means defenseless. So
here we have this idea we're kind of in in
the beginning where with the professor, Professor Thrail, who is
like aligning his fork and knife. You know, it's very
rigid and it's very like down to an abbey kind
of thing. And then we're moving to Ted Tyce, who
is rinning and who is by no means defenseless, So

(50:03):
that is something you can hear it. Ted Tys has defenses.
The professor is not thinking about Ted as being defenseless.
He's simply confident that he is kind of superior to Ted.
So we have Ted Tys grinned by no means defenseless
like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, impossible to measure speed and position simultaneously.

(50:24):
So he is certainly there like kind of besting the
professor with his own tools. And then we have it
seemed that Caroline Bell could giggle like other girls. So
here what we are having is we're still in Ted
Tys's mind because he's saying it's so Caroline is laughing
because he's made this joke. But when he says it
seems that Caroline Bell could giggle, which you know, the

(50:45):
grinning and the giggling is very kind of in contrast
with Sefton Thrall, who's straightening his knife and fork. But
then we have this idea that she could giggle like
other girls. So this is Ted kind of observing her.
Then we move on and the professors just like continue
as if Ted has not said anything and is all
but engaged. The professor was determined to prevail to the

(51:07):
daughter of our neighbor at the castle. Ted wondered what
all but engaged might mean and saw Caro's smile with
the self same thought. He recalled the castle, its gray walls,
discouraging even to lichens. Seeing into their souls, The professor
told them, it's a brave man these days, will marry
the daughter of a lord with all you radicals around.

(51:29):
This was meant for Ted and Caro, since Grace's way
of quietly stacking the plates exonerated her. Yet it was
Grace who looked up and said, perhaps he loves her.
Oh my gosh, incredible. So we have so much characterization here.
We have Sefton Thrall, who's you know, determined to prevail,
and who's going to be talking all about, you know,
the castle, and he's going to talk about these radicals

(51:51):
in what he hopes is this disparaging way. And we
are very much in his mind. When he's like shooting
that comment, you know, you radicals, what he means is
ted and caaro and not Grace, because Grace is being
helpful in a very graceful kind of way. But in
fact he's even underestimating her. It's absolute genius when she
is the one who kind of pushes back against Professor Thrail.

(52:12):
And the best thing about that is when she does
push back against him, it's not in an expected way.
She's not kind of pushing back as a radical. She's
pushing back as a romantic and says what ends up
being kind of this ironic thing, but it's very like
hopeful about, like, oh well, maybe Paul and Trisha are
actually in love, which of course is kind of a
laughable concept. So the point here being we have this

(52:34):
nimble narrator who, throughout the entire novel is moving very
deftly into the minds of these different people, but with
all of this kind of verve and sass that makes
it so fun to read. So we're going to move
on now and talk very briefly about figurative language. I'm
just going to kind of list all of the amazing
things that she does and then I do want to
look at one passage just because it kind of incorporates

(52:55):
a bunch of these things and is so beautiful. It's
very short throughout. In terms of figurative language, we have
kind of the usual things, which are like metaphor, and similarly,
we have pathetic fallacy, which is when nature is sort
of mirroring what's happening for the characters. We have lots
of personification, which is so well done. We have a
whole bunch of foreshadowing. I mean, in many ways, because

(53:17):
the structure of the book is so intricate, we have
foreshadowing that's very telling and very important. We have tons
of symbolism, so there's a lot of phallic symbolism. We
have a lot of canes, we have umbrellas, we have towers.
All of these things are phallic. And one of the
things that stands out to me most is all of
this double entendre. She says these things like high and

(53:39):
dry in the beginning is the perfect example. It's this
cliched expression and she's kind of bringing it to life
by using it as an actual description. But we are
also left to think of the pun. There is like
at one point, Grace is dyeing her hair, but she's
talking about dying, and you know it's because she's aging
that she's needing to dye her hair. But this idea

(54:00):
of dying, of course, relates both to her hair and
the idea of just dying. She's also kind of dying
because you know, she does not have any purpose, because
her boys are older, and you know she doesn't have
a particularly passionate marriage, and Angus Dance has left. So
we have all of these different, very clever examples of

(54:21):
figurative language. And honestly, I mean you could. I don't
think there's probably a paragraph in this whole entire book
that doesn't have some incredible figurative language at work. But
I want to read this one part. It's on one
sixty one. It's two very brief paragraphs. It's so incredible.
So in the middle of the page, this is when
Paul and Carow are together. They've just arrived at his
apartment for you know, their tryst. Okay, so we have

(54:44):
these two short paragraphs. Kro lay dressed on the bed
and Paul sat beside her, preoccupied. His hand rotated on
her breast. But from force of kindly habit absolutely fondling
a domestic pet on the coverlet her own and lay open, upturned,
extended to a fortune teller. She watched him with love.

(55:05):
That was like a loss of consciousness, unbelievable, so so
good a couple of things. I have to admit that
the idea of his hand rotating on her breast, I
was like imagining somebody like opening like a jar of
peanut butter. Like I was like, what's happening here, which
I mean, maybe that's kind of part is supposed to
be kind of awkward. But the important thing here in
terms of figurative language, is he has this idea of

(55:27):
his hand rotating on her breast. She of course is
wanting to be, you know, sexually involved. Right then he's
actually thinking about a play that he might write. There's
a lot of play within play, just like a Shakespeare
kind of thing throughout this novel, and it's all very important.
But so we have this idea that he is But
then we have this metaphor. The way he's doing is
absently fondling a domestic pet. So you have this metaphor

(55:50):
here that is so good. And then right after it,
we have this idea of her hand she lay on
the bed and her hand and her hand lay open, upturned,
extended to a fortune teller. So this is example of
a metaphor because she's not saying her hand was like
a hand extended to a fortune teller. She's saying it was.
So in some ways, the difference between simile and metaphor

(56:12):
here is important because she's holding out her hand to Paul,
and he is the fortune teller. In some ways, he
does have the control, which is terrible. But then so
we have this paragraph that is describing them, and then
we have this single sentence that you know, a lot
of this this book is long, and a lot of
the paragraphs are long and involved, but every once in
a while we have this punctuation with this beautiful sentence

(56:36):
that is set off by itself. And in this case,
she watched him with love. That was like a loss
of consciousness. So good, incredible, Okay, we're going to talk
about the incredible structure of the book. It's really important.
Sometimes structure is important, sometimes it's not. Here it's absolutely key,
and then we'll close with a quick list of all
of the things that we have not touched on today.

(56:58):
So the structure of the book is fast we have
all sorts of different aspects. One of them at the
very beginning is that we have this kind of present moment.
It is the moment we begin with. It's the moment
of the storm, and in many ways we're kind of
anchored to it. But right from the beginning, we have
this incredible flexibility in terms of time, and in terms

(57:18):
of sequence, and in terms of character. So I'm just
going to just very quickly move through kind of the
first eight sections that happen. So we have Tyson's arrival.
If we look at that as kind of like zero,
that's like moment zero, present moment. Then we go back
one month and we learn more about what is happening
with these people. Then in the third section, we go

(57:39):
back several years and we learn about we learn about
how Christian meets Dora and Grace, so then we understand why,
in fact, the Bell Girls are at the Threl's house.
Then we move one month forward, so we were moving
from that time when Ted walks into the house. We're
moving a month forward to when Ted and Caro are

(57:59):
driving around together. Then we move back all the way
to nineteen thirty eight and thirty nine, when we have
the girl's childhood in Australia, and we have the same
kind of we go back to that moment one month
later when Ted and Caro are together, but what's happening
within that moment is Ted is telling her the secret
of his German soldier. So we are both in the

(58:20):
moment which is kind of one month after Ted arrives,
but we are also going all the way back in
time to Ted's childhood, and then we move forward and
all sorts of things, and for all the point being
at the beginning, we have this kind of moment zero,
and then she's moving us so deftly backward and forward.
This might cause some confusion for people, but mostly I
loved it. What she is doing with all of this

(58:42):
backward and forward is filling us in on all sorts
of details. And if you're a patient reader and you're
someone who's paying a lot of attention, your interest has
been piqued. And then she's backfilling all of this information
in a way that's way more interesting than if she
had just done this chronologically. So it's really genius that
we have this first moment. It's also incredible that we

(59:03):
are beginning on page three, which is the first page
of the novel with this dead body. And the reason
why that is important is because it's mentioned very briefly
the end of the second paragraph, but then at the
end of the novel it takes on supreme importance, and
the careful reader is just incredibly rewarded by that. We
also have this interesting thing in terms of structure. We're

(59:24):
on page twelve. We are told so very early in
the novel, we are told that Ted Tye is going
to take his life, which is hugely important. I mean,
this goes back to my idea about like, I'm more
interested in like how things happen and why things happen,
and not like what happens, because some people might be like,
oh my god, the story's ruined because we already know
that Ted is going to come to a very sad end.

(59:46):
But I would argue that what she is doing is
casting this incredible tension because you're kind of like, wait, why,
why is he going to be that distraught? And also
every time that things start going well for him, you
have this idea of this kind of tension and this
kind of sadness because you're like, oh gosh, this is
feeling good right now, Ted, But things are about to
get worse, which is so interesting. And one of the

(01:00:09):
best things that she does is that we were invested
in a few of these characters, kind of the main characters,
and they have these incredible arcs. So we have, you know,
for Paul, who's, you know, kind of our splashier guy.
He is with Caro, then he's married to Tsha, then
we hear about his young lover. Then he's kind of
back with Caro, then he's back with Tsiha. So we

(01:00:29):
have this kind of arc. I mean, it's not so
much an arc as like it's like kind of an
up and down kind of roller coastery type of thing,
but the idea of the romantic relationships among these people
really does give a lot of structure to the book.
We also have that with Caro, so in the beginning,
she has this kind of mild flirtation with Ted while
she's really in fact infatuated with Paul. Then we have
her with Cartilage Cartilage, then we have her with Adam,

(01:00:54):
and then ultimately with Ted. So it's also important obviously
I'm just I just knocked my precarious situation with my
computer here. It's also important obviously that you know, she
has a job. In the meantime things are happening among
the women. I loved it and that in the beginning
no one thinks she's going to pass the exam, and
then of course she passes the exam like with flying colors.

(01:01:14):
And as much as I think of this book as
being very feminist, and I think of Caro in particular
as being very independent and very feminist, really the book
is concerned with her relationships with all of these different men.
So in a book that's pretty long and broad scope,
that has a pretty large scope, we have these mini arcs,
but we also have these much larger arcs that are

(01:01:36):
tying the beginning to the end, and you have to
be a bit patient because a lot of what happens
at the end is going to make rewarding all of
the stuff you had to remember from the beginning. But
we also have these shorter arcs that are also very satisfying.
Another aspect of the structure, and Lauren Graff talks about
this in her introduction, is that Shirley Hazard is a

(01:01:58):
short story writer, and lots of the chapters that we
see throughout the novel can be read likes short stories.
They have the kind of a short story structure. So
I'm thinking here of the chapter with Valda and how Valda,
who is one of Kara's work people, one of her
work associates who is very feminist, Valdas asked to do
I don't know if she's asked to sew on a button,

(01:02:19):
which she is not that happy about doing because that
is not why she has been hired and it feels
very misogynistic. And so then she does this very cool thing,
is like when her typewriter needs it's ribbon change, she
goes in and asks the man if you will do that,
because that's kind of like this archetypal manly kind of
fix it thing because it's a mechanized machine. Mechanized machine

(01:02:40):
does not quite work, but the arc of that, the
kind of parallel of that, and the beauty of it,
and how Valda is very memorable, partially because her name
is so awesome, but that does feel very much like
a short story. It has kind of the satisfying arc
of a short story. I think maybe that might be
part of the reason why people are like, wait, which
is the important part and which is not? Another one
that's like that is the description of Paul with his

(01:03:01):
German soldier, this idea when he was so unhappy at
his boarding school and he would walk ten miles out
to the ocean. I think it's ten. And there's that
beautiful line about how it was enough to see such
broad expanses to feel free because in the school he
felt so unfree. That's not really the right word. He
felt so captive. I don't know. But the arc of

(01:03:22):
like why he helped the soldier, and then this idea
of what happened to the soldier afterward, the German soldier
and this idea about ethics, and all of the kind
of ramifications of that are so beautifully done because we
have what feels like a very satisfying kind of short
story arc with this German soldier. It also feels like
that when Paul is when Paul Ivory is talking about

(01:03:43):
his young lover and how the father of the young
lover is like, I don't know if he's like a
lorry driver. I can't really remember us. It's like popping
into my head because it sounds very British. But we
have this whole description of their family and the young
lover as extorting Paul and trying to get all of
this money from him. That also feels very much like
a short story arc. We have that incredible twist which

(01:04:05):
I totally didn't see coming. I mean, honestly, sometimes I
wonder about my brain. But when he has the description
of seeing the young man lying asleep on the river bank,
and then the other person walking by and witnessing all
of this, and then of course it's ted Tice, I
did not put in fact together that it would be
Ted Tyce. I also was a little like, yes, I
guess young men of that age probably sleep very deeply,

(01:04:27):
but part of me was like a little suspicious that
this was like a tiny bit too tidy, the fact
that this guy would stay asleep. Although what am I
saying one of my children who's twenty three right now,
I mean, man, he could sleep through a lot of stuff.
And then lastly, there are lots of examples of these
short story things, but like the idea of those Latin
American petitioners, that ended up feeling like a short story.

(01:04:48):
So with this novel that really is very wide in scope,
that has these really beautiful entire novel arcs, there also
are all of these kind of short story feeling episodes
through throughout the whole thing. And then the last thing
I'll mention about structure, and this is a much smaller
thing I mentioned it earlier. With the flowers, we have
these little echoes that are so beautifully done. We actually

(01:05:11):
saw one on a very small scale when it was
when it talked about putting someone in the shade or wrong,
and then like you know, two paragraphs later, it was
in the wrong or the shade. So you have this
idea of things as being repeated verbatim or with a
certain motif. So we have this idea of flowers that
is one of these large motifs that comes up again

(01:05:31):
and again. But at one point, there's a kite that
we see at one point and then we see it
at another pivotal point. Adam Vale's stick his cane comes
at a bunch of different important points, one of them
after he has died. So we have this idea of
these things that show up, and that's a very poetic
thing to sort of have this kind of motif, this
kind of visual thing that often is repeated verbatim that

(01:05:54):
keeps reappearing in a way that's very powerful. So all
of these different aspects of structure are all kind of
squashed together. I mean, any one of these structures would
be incredible, but she's so good that she's got all
of them functioning in a way that might be a
bit overwhelming, but when you start pursing it, you realize
just how difficult and intricate and how rich the structure is. Okay,

(01:06:15):
we're going to end today by just talking about a
few elements that I would have loved to have dug
into more. But I think making mention of them. You know,
if you want to go back and reread The Sucker Man,
it is so excellent to reread. But also I think
as I mentioned these things, maybe you'll appreciate them even retrospectively.
So the first thing, and I have a bunch of
quotations here, like a bunch of page numbers I wanted

(01:06:37):
to look at, and I'm not going to do that.
But what I have here is this idea of power.
She talks about power so explicitly, and it is so awesome.
There are a bunch of different times where you know,
like Paul like is tempted to do something, where Caro
is concerned and she and our trusting narrator, I'm surely
Hazard will say like he wouldn't do that thing because

(01:06:58):
he didn't want to give her even more power. So
we have this sense of different people as having power
or not having power. They're all sorts of different ways
and the same person. Caro at times has immense power
and then at other times it seems totally without any power.
And it is so fascinating. I mean, almost every single
character sefton Thrail, you know, who's like the old guard,
the old patriarch, ted Tice has power at times and

(01:07:21):
doesn't at others. Paul obviously sometimes does and sometimes doesn't.
He's literally being extorted by a young man. Adam is
often seen as very powerful, but you know, ultimately dies.
Nick Cartilage, I mean, I have him written down here, boy,
that would be an interesting I don't really feel like
he's got a lot of power throughout this book. And
when we think of the women, when we think of
Dora at times as having power and not having power,

(01:07:44):
and the fact that most of the time when she
does have power, it's because she's playing the victim. It's
very interesting the ways that people get power. And Caro,
I mean, gosh, up and down and up and down,
I mean This is a woman who I think mostly
has a fair amount of power, but there are times
when she's just a bereft grace. I mean, it's a
little more her power is like a little more steady.

(01:08:04):
I think in some ways, Tursha is a very interesting person.
Volda looking at Valda as having power, which is very satisfying.
Or Josie, who is you know, the next generation. This
is a woman who has a fair amount of power.
Then we have like Una, Cordelia, all of these minor characters,
and every single one of them is a very interesting
study in power or the absence of power. And I

(01:08:26):
really love the way that a lot of that is
done so explicitly. This is not you know, it's not lyrical,
and it's not metaphors and whatnot. It's like explicitly talking
about someone having power with the word power. Another thing
she does incredibly well is pacing. So pacing is just
like the kind of way that an author is meeting
out information. One of the times when it's most noticeable
is there's the beginning of a chapter where she's talking

(01:08:47):
about all of the things that are happening in the
United States. You know, I think Martin Luther King is shot.
JFK is shot. All of these different things are happening,
and she moves us through like a large span of
American history in a way that is so deft and
well done, whereas at other times she's taking a single
moment and she's dilating it so that it slows way

(01:09:09):
way down. There's that incredible scene where Tersha comes in
to her own engagement party and has the flowers and
Caro is ironing, and it's kind of like, you know,
she has the long stem flowers which she puts on
they're dead, you know, and she's delivering them and it
puts them on marble that's like a cenotaph, you know.
It's like they're like final resting place, you know, they're

(01:09:30):
like grave kind of a thing. They're tomb. And then
we have Caro who's holding up that belt that's like
a cobra. We have all sorts of different things. Tersha
says the flowers need to go in deep water, and
then that phrase is echoed when Caro does put them
in deep water, and she sort of uses this phrase
back to Tsia. We have another one of these double
en ponderous, but it's a single moment, a very brief moment,

(01:09:51):
and yet it's dilated in these ways that allow for
all sorts of things to be revealed. So the pacing
is incredible. We have all these incredible motifs. We've touched
on a bull flowers for example, Umbrellas, kites, mothers are
a motif that would be very interesting to take a
look at. Mostly the absence thereof. She does incredible things
with punctuation, a lot of really interesting work with parentheses.

(01:10:15):
There are a bunch of neologisms, not a lot made
up words, they're just a couple of them. She also
does this incredibly inventive thing. There are a few times
where she'll end a sentence early, like she'll kind of
cut off the last part of it in a way
that is really deeply affecting. I mentioned it briefly, but
there is a lot of play within the play. Paul
Ivory is writing all these plays that actually are very successful,

(01:10:38):
and it's so interesting to look at them. Most of
them are about Caro and what Hazard is doing there
of course, is underscoring certain things that Paul Ivory is
kind of synthesizing, but also is synthesizing synthesizing things for
the reader. We have a lot of stuff about all
the classest things. Ted Tye is from working class, and

(01:11:00):
the Bell Girls also come from kind of a lower
station than the Thrails and certainly than Trisha Drage or
Paul Ivory, and class stuff is very important. But it's
really interesting too to see how it does get kind
of ironed out over time, because indeed we are beginning
with this generation of radicals, and when you have Josie
and Felix, you see classes becoming slightly less important. She

(01:11:23):
does incredible things with time. We talked a little bit
about structure, but the way that she moves so deftly
around in time is so good. So those are all
things that we aren't going to spend a lot of
time talking about. And I actually feel good about that,
because the thing that is most compelling to me, the
thing that I think is so prominent and so important
in this novel is the language. This is pros that

(01:11:44):
is unlike any other, and digging into it has been
so satisfying. So whether you've read this once, whether you've
read it many times, I hope that this deep dive
allows you to understand a little better why it is
so satisfying, and why it is such an incredible piece
of work. It honestly feels like something I could do.
You know, we could do a weekly lecture on this

(01:12:05):
for a year and still have so much to talk about.
So today has been limited, but for me, it was
really fun and I hope that you got a lot
out of it and that you appreciate this book even
more so. Thanks so much for tuning in. Happy Reading,