the bay of noon

The Bay of Noon by Shirley Hazzard (Little, Brown, 1970)

I have always remembered this book as being good but somewhat inferior to The Evening of the Holiday, and perhaps it is not as exactly and perfectly etched as that book, but this re-reading after thirty years struck me very deeply (perhaps because I have just returned from Naples?).  A young British woman named Jennie narrates the book.  She spent the war in South Africa and returns to London only to leave again, this time to Naples where her fluency in Italian and secretarial skills find her employment with an international military commission developing a report on fishing or some such maritime subject.  A letter of introduction brings her to Giaconda, a beautiful Italian woman about ten years older who is having an affair with Gianni, a charming and handsome film director who is older still.  Jennie becomes close friends with Giaconda, and a sort of third wheel to her and Gianni’s affair, while pursuing a dry and cerebral flirtation of her own with Justin, a Scottish biologist.  Over the course of a year, these four characters come together and apart in surprising ways.  Hazzard’s prose is dense with similes and metaphors, and burrows intimately into the story only to pull back, or flash forward, altering the perspective.  Jennie is, perhaps, wise beyond her years and experience, and Giaconda and Gianni are both given to profound and oracular statements.  But the grace and elegance and lightness of the prose allows all of the observations to float, and the book is buoyed, rather than weighted, by Hazzard’s intelligence.  A rare, beautiful, intelligent book.  I’m very happy that I read it again.