THE BAY OF NOON

by Shirley Hazzard ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 1970

These things aren't orderly, or precipitate, like stories."" Certainly Miss Hazzard cannot be referring to her own (the collection The Cliffs of Fall or her previous novel, Evening of the Holiday). This book, the finest she has written, which may seem like a supererogatory statement to begin with, isn't orderly -- rather it is a casual approximation of feelings, sensations, insights, remembered fitfully and appraised more accurately some years after the events in question. The setting, for the most part, is Naples, that city of catastrophe with its ""extremes of destitution, of civilisation,"" and once again her Italian backgrounds are marvelously pictorial, almost palpable. Positioned there with NATO is Jenny, also to a degree a victim of her past (the Blitz, South Africa, and a tertiary role in the household of her married brother to whom she was too close). Now, with a letter of introduction to the charming Gioconda, she is once more an intermediary in Gioconda's precarious relationship with a lover although Jenny is at first unaware of the supplementary role she plays. Vis-a-vis Gioconda and her Gianni, a filmmaker--belittling, overbearing, self-indulgent and faithless, in many of Miss Hazzard's stories and the earlier novel, she has been only too aware of the impermanence of love, and premonitory intimations of its loss heighten the intensity. There are many equivocal shifts here--all a part of this happier, sadder and unresolved past which ends with the enigma of another Gioconda's smile. . . .The Bay of Noon serves as a reminder that the novel must more than replicate experience. Miss Hazzard expands and diffuses it in a suggestive, seductive and just about flawless book, irrevocably engaging the reader all the while.

Pub Date: March 1, 1970

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Little, Brown--A.M.P.

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1970

Categories: FICTION