For the past couple of weeks I have been slowly, slowly, slowly making my way through Shirley Hazzard's 1980 novel, The Transit of Venus. I tend, like many people who gravitate toward Victorian literature, to like novels that I can devour, or even snort. But you can't do that with Hazzard's fiction. The Transit of Venus is a slim and seemingly simple book; it's a sedately paced narrative of the romantic lives of two sisters over a series of decades, bearing traces of Jane Austen, belonging to the school of Penelope Fitzgerald and Barbara Pym, and reminding me overwhelmingly at points of Henry James.

As with James, the significance of Hazzard's little novel lies in the quality of her observation, which centers on the usually unmarked eddies and undercurrents of human interaction. Unlike James, who will tie sentences in knots to perform the complexity of which he writes, Hazzard distills deceptively subtle recognitions into short, compact, even clipped sentences. Of the girls' bitter elder sister, for instance, Hazzard writes, "Meaning was acoustical, ringing out, shaping inflections, filling silences. Grievances were statistical: 'They only invited me once in two years.' 'In all that time I was there to tea exactly twice.'" Passages like this one litter The Transit of Venus, whose cumulative effect is one of enormous emotional and stylistic complexity. The novel cannot be read quickly and still be read well. Its nuance demands a dipping method of reading, in which the reader stops reading frequently to consider what she has just read, and in which the reader routinely disrupts her forward progress to reread a passage whose precision cannot fully be grasped at once. It's a rare and exquisite pleasure to read this way and to be rewarded for it, a reminder that nothing is ever bland, and that the closer one attends to the details of life, the more there is to see, to know, and to feel.

I'm coming to the end of The Transit of Venus, at which point I will require a sorbet of an entirely different stylistic sort. Great fiction always works this way--one hallmark of its power is that you can't read anything else afterward, not even more books by the same writer, unless and until you've cleansed your literary palate. Recommendations are welcome.

Thanks for the recommendation.

Some time back at a used book store (the kind with stacks of decaying books for 10 cents or less) I ran across a paperback copy of Mary Renault's The Charioteers. It's an unassuming little novel that I guess you could describe as a gay love story, although if it's read for that the reader will be very disappointed. I had to go back through it a couple of times after I finished it. As you say, I couldn't enter another book-universe right away. I gave it to my daughter to read, and she had the same reaction. I don't know why it's so compelling, unless it's because the protagonist is such an extremely likable person in an impossible situation. Also, the author is good about showing, not telling - she doesn't tell you how kind and brave and not too full of himself Laurie is, you just see him acting in ways that reveal his character. We'll probably have to buy another copy because this one is so rotten it won't last much longer.

I've been reading Orhan Pamuk's *Snow*, and I highly recommend it. Symbolically dense, but sentence by sentence the book is a fairly quick read. The book deals with a minor poet's return to Turkey after years of exile in Germany. He gets caught up in a small border town's conflicts between faith and secularism, and Pamuk does a superb job of using grotesque characters, surreal dialogue, and black humor to show all the sides in the debate as toxic. As a political novel, *Snow* knocks both East and West down a few pegs. As a stylistic achievement, Pamuk blazes a new direction in so-called "world literature" away from both social realism and magical realism. *Snow* has more in commen with modern Russian fiction than with anything European or American.

Erin, as a fellow-lover of Victorian novels I beg you to read Richard Powers' "The Time of Our Singing" if you haven't already! It is truly amazing--I'd say it's now on my list of 10 favorites of all time--and it's absolutely a novel to be devoured. And I think you'd find it really interesting. Another devour-ee, if you wanted something rather lighter, is Robin McKinley's most recent novel, "Sunshine." (And have you read "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay"? I found it initially offputting but then sucked it up in almost one sitting, it was completely addictive.)

(BTW I love Mary Renault too, though I like a couple of her ancient Greek novels the best: I think "The Last of the Wine" is my favorite, but "Fire From Heaven" [a novel about Alexander the Great that will take away the taste of the recent movie] is another particular favorite.)

The Hazzard novel sounds like Muriel Spark. If you haven't read her novels, you might like them. I would suggest "The Girls of Slender Means", "A Fr Cry from Kensington," and "The Mandelbaum Gate."

For an entirely different stylistic sort, have you read any of
David Carkeet? One of the funniest American novelists, in the Mark Twain and Kingsley Amis tradition. His mystery "Double Negative" has an entirely original premise and is hilarious.

Ms. O'Connor--

Have you read the novel The Furies by Fernanda Eberstadt? I found it very compelling. For a change I felt that these are characters that I know and quickly came to care about. In some ways this novel was reminiscent of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, though for my money Eberstadt's writing is more felicitous.

Regards,
Byron Annis

I just finished The Furies a few weeks ago. I live on Manhattan's Upper West Side and I'm a moderately observant liberal Jew, so I know many of the scenes she writes about, and it was fun to see them described so vividly. (I walk by the Apthorp Pharmacy about once a week!)

I did want to give both of the protagonists a good smack. But I intend to read her other novels.

How about Little, Big by John Crowley? All the books he wrote after that are more and more bloated, but that one's a masterpiece. Also set in Manhattan and environs, albeit a very different one.

You could stick with a theme:

Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon is a fictional telling of the exploits of those two, starting with their first commission to measure the Transit of Venus on behalf of the then-new Royal Astronomer and going through their measuring of the eponymous "Line".

Good intrigue, very off-center humor, excellent history and historical feel. Not for everyone, perhaps, but one of Pynchon's most accessible books.