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.

Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert (Penguin Classics, 1964)

I had tried to read this book several years ago, but had not gotten beyond the opening pages.  This time I persevered and made it through.  It’s a difficult book, very full of character and event but with very little narrative momentum or shape.  And most of the characters, including our hero Frederick Moreau, are flawed and not very sympathetic, and don’t learn much or change or mature over the long course of the book.  What kept me reading was the beauty and vividness of Flaubert’s prose.  The descriptions of clothes, interiors, landscapes — everything, really — are so good and so pleasurable to read that one continues reading merely to remain within the dazzling world of the book.  Sentimental Education lacks the perfect succinctness and coherence of Madame Bovary, but it is not without somewhat shaggy charms and pleasures of its own.

The Winds of Heaven by Monica Dickens (The Book Club, Date Unknown)

Louise is left alone and almost penniless when her good-for-nothing husband dies.  She has three adult daughters and spends the year staying a few months with each of them, and the winter months at her old friend’s hotel on the Isle of Wight.  Her three daughters are all very different: Miriam is a snob with a barrister husband and a nice house outside of London and three children (one from a lover); Joan is a fat and lazy slob who lives with her patient and kind lower-class husband on a small farm, and Eva, the youngest, is a pretty actress trying to make it in London on stage and in the BBC. 

At the beginning of the book Louise meets a fat man who sells beds in a department store.  She is basically homeless, for the charity of  her daughters and her friends is grudging and stingy, and she longs to have the means to support herself and not be dependent upon others.  A little like a middle-aged Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, this book was very enjoyable to read with interesting (though often rather broad) characters.  It offers a nice view into many different English locales and a spunky, kind, and very sympathetic heroine.  The melodramatic and abrupt ending is the only real disappointment.

Lilacs Out of the Dead Land by Rachel Billington (Heinemann, 1971)

Terrible title.  I found this in a used bookstore in Cambridge (MA).  Published in 1971, this story of a very young woman on a holiday with her much older married lover in Sicily alternates scenes from the disastrous and ultimately violent stay in Italy with scenes from the past in England detailing the development of their doomed affair.  The writing (first person) is sprightly, vivid, and often funny.  April, our heroine, wanders through the book ineptly, in a sort of fog, clobbered by the sudden tragic death of her perfect older sister.  It’s very well done, for what it is, with some excellent supporting characters: Jenny, John, Emmie, April’s somewhat dim parents, and Laurence, her unappealing bombastic publisher lover.  Nicely evocative of Sicily and London.

I Married You for Happiness by Lily Tuck (Atlantic Monthly, 2011)

An exquisite, beautiful book, a real delight to read and savor.  After forty-two years of marriage, a husband dies suddenly after coming home from work — he’s a professor of mathematics.  He dies before dinner can be served, and his wife, Nina, stays by his body all night long, keeping a vigil and allowing herself to float back through the memories she has of their (mostly) happy, golden marriage: meeting as young lovers in Paris, living in stimulating and upscale academic communities in Berkeley and Cambridge (MA), vacationing (sailing) on beautiful islands in the Mediterranean, and raising their lovely daughter.  The book celebrates this golden life not by relying upon its surface charm and beauty but by always gently evoking the love that lies beneath that surface, the love that holds these two sympathetic and interesting people so surely together.  The writing is Salteresque: the form fragmented and mosaical.  An  unusual, personal (one feels), and very beautiful book.

The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal, translated by Richard Howard (The Modern Library, 1999)

Odd, lively, exasperating.  Our hero, Fabrizio, a young man of noble birth, makes a mess of just about everything in the very messed-up and disorganized Italy of the early 19th century.  His aunt, who is unnaturally attracted to her handsome and charming nephew, is the more interesting character here: an independent, intelligent woman who successfully manipulates the world around her to live as she desires.  The book is finally undone by its repetitive dynamic and the static flatness of the characters.