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The Bay of Noon
A young Englishwoman working in Naples, Jenny comes to Italy fleeing a history that threatened to undo her. Alone in the fabulously ruined city, she idly follows up a letter of introduction from an acquaintance and so changes her life forever. Through the letter, she meets Giocanda, a beautiful and gifted writer, and Gianni, a famous Roman film director and Giocanda’s lover. At work she encounters Justin, a Scotsman whose inscrutability Jenny finds mysteriously attractive. As she becomes increasingly involved in the lives of these three, she discovers that the past--and the patterns of a lifetime--are not easily discarded.
181 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1970
70 people are currently reading
1789 people want to read
About the author
Shirley Hazzard
25 books317 followersShirley Hazzard was born in Australia, and as a child travelled the world due to her parents’ diplomatic postings. At age 16, she began working for British Combined Intelligence Services in Hong Kong, monitoring civil war in China. After her family moved to New York City, she worked for several years as a typist at the United Nations Secretariat in New York.
After leaving this post, she became a full-time writer and a passionate opponent of the United Nations, the subject of several of her nonfiction books.
Known for elegant and controlled writing, Hazzard’s works of fiction include five novels. Her last novel, The Great Fire, was shortlisted for the 2004 Man Booker Prize for Fiction and the 2005 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
After leaving this post, she became a full-time writer and a passionate opponent of the United Nations, the subject of several of her nonfiction books.
Known for elegant and controlled writing, Hazzard’s works of fiction include five novels. Her last novel, The Great Fire, was shortlisted for the 2004 Man Booker Prize for Fiction and the 2005 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 148 reviews
June 22, 2021
“Ordinariness, the affliction and backbone of other cities, was here non-existent. Phrases I had always thought universal – the common people, the average family, the typical reaction, ordinary life – had no meaning where people were all uncommon and life extraordinary; where untraceable convulsions of human experience had yielded up such extremes of destitution, of civilization.”
I can hardly believe it’s been nearly five years since I first visited Naples and three years since I’ve last been there. Not physically but mentally, thanks to Elena Ferrante’s series, of course. A friend had been reading some Shirley Hazzard of late and had me scouring the online used book sites for some copies of her novels. Thank you for that temptation, Katie! I once again made a sojourn back to that post-World War II city. There’s something about Naples that’s wholly seductive to me. It came alive with Ferrante’s work and once again here in this slim little book.
“There was – as there often was, there – the sense of an earlier time: it was not merely the lack of modernity – the chaste black dresses, a momentary absence of cars, the buildings in their ancient places – but truly as if the city had not caught up, had no interest in catching up, was dawdling in some previous era, the turn of this century perhaps, or of any century.”
Naples is one of the strongest characters here. But this trip was a bit different. Rather than boarding in the poverty-stricken neighborhoods of Ferrante’s world, I was guest to what I would call more of an elite crowd this time around. Like the twenty-something narrator from England, Jenny, I was a bit star struck by the introductions made to Gioconda, a beautiful writer with a tragic back history and Gianni, the Roman film director, unfaithful married man and lover of Gioconda. Rather than creating a love triangle of sorts, however, Hazzard draws another side to her figure with the addition of Justin, a marine biologist from Scotland conducting research with the Naples Aquarium. Unlike her NATO coworkers, Jenny has decided to immerse herself in the day to day life of Naples, rather than hiding behind the military walls.
“In and around those buildings thousands of NATO personnel and their families lived out their term of exile, requiring nothing of Italy or its language, passing among themselves stale, trumpery talismans of home, recreating a former existence from the shelves of the PX until such time as they should – on other, equally alien shores – speak with nostalgia and authority of the Bay of Naples.”
The more I think about The Bay of Noon, the more I admire it. On the surface, not a whole lot happens. It’s what simmers inside the hearts and minds of these characters that ultimately ensnares the reader. Jenny, with her lonely childhood and a rather singular story of an unconventional love. Gioconda’s heartbreaking tale of exile and a lost romance. Even Gianni, who I pegged as a womanizer and bastard at first eventually grew on me and had me catching my breath a time or two. Justin, well, Jenny says it better than I ever could: “… if I hoped to exorcize you by pronouncing your name that day, for the last time, I was unsuccessful.” Memories of certain persons we’ve met, even briefly, can haunt us for a long time to come. Trying to fit them into the puzzle that was our own life at the time; trying to make sense of that life.
It’s difficult to encapsulate such a novel in a review. The dialogue is engaging and the descriptions of the city are so entirely vivid. It’s the nuances of the characters and the sense of nostalgia that Hazzard evokes that really grabbed me in the end. If you are drawn to books about the inner life, relationships, and intense friendships that can be pinned to a certain time and place then this should be highly appealing. There were a few instances when the prose became a bit too impenetrable for my taste, which is the only reason I’m holding back on that last star. I also have a hunch that there’s another Shirley Hazzard novel out there that will completely sweep me off my feet.
“That epoch, our time at Naples, seems historic now. It doesn’t seem like modern life. But it didn’t seem like modern life then either, it was more like life than modern life, more lifelike, livelier, likelier.”
I can hardly believe it’s been nearly five years since I first visited Naples and three years since I’ve last been there. Not physically but mentally, thanks to Elena Ferrante’s series, of course. A friend had been reading some Shirley Hazzard of late and had me scouring the online used book sites for some copies of her novels. Thank you for that temptation, Katie! I once again made a sojourn back to that post-World War II city. There’s something about Naples that’s wholly seductive to me. It came alive with Ferrante’s work and once again here in this slim little book.
“There was – as there often was, there – the sense of an earlier time: it was not merely the lack of modernity – the chaste black dresses, a momentary absence of cars, the buildings in their ancient places – but truly as if the city had not caught up, had no interest in catching up, was dawdling in some previous era, the turn of this century perhaps, or of any century.”
Naples is one of the strongest characters here. But this trip was a bit different. Rather than boarding in the poverty-stricken neighborhoods of Ferrante’s world, I was guest to what I would call more of an elite crowd this time around. Like the twenty-something narrator from England, Jenny, I was a bit star struck by the introductions made to Gioconda, a beautiful writer with a tragic back history and Gianni, the Roman film director, unfaithful married man and lover of Gioconda. Rather than creating a love triangle of sorts, however, Hazzard draws another side to her figure with the addition of Justin, a marine biologist from Scotland conducting research with the Naples Aquarium. Unlike her NATO coworkers, Jenny has decided to immerse herself in the day to day life of Naples, rather than hiding behind the military walls.
“In and around those buildings thousands of NATO personnel and their families lived out their term of exile, requiring nothing of Italy or its language, passing among themselves stale, trumpery talismans of home, recreating a former existence from the shelves of the PX until such time as they should – on other, equally alien shores – speak with nostalgia and authority of the Bay of Naples.”
The more I think about The Bay of Noon, the more I admire it. On the surface, not a whole lot happens. It’s what simmers inside the hearts and minds of these characters that ultimately ensnares the reader. Jenny, with her lonely childhood and a rather singular story of an unconventional love. Gioconda’s heartbreaking tale of exile and a lost romance. Even Gianni, who I pegged as a womanizer and bastard at first eventually grew on me and had me catching my breath a time or two. Justin, well, Jenny says it better than I ever could: “… if I hoped to exorcize you by pronouncing your name that day, for the last time, I was unsuccessful.” Memories of certain persons we’ve met, even briefly, can haunt us for a long time to come. Trying to fit them into the puzzle that was our own life at the time; trying to make sense of that life.
It’s difficult to encapsulate such a novel in a review. The dialogue is engaging and the descriptions of the city are so entirely vivid. It’s the nuances of the characters and the sense of nostalgia that Hazzard evokes that really grabbed me in the end. If you are drawn to books about the inner life, relationships, and intense friendships that can be pinned to a certain time and place then this should be highly appealing. There were a few instances when the prose became a bit too impenetrable for my taste, which is the only reason I’m holding back on that last star. I also have a hunch that there’s another Shirley Hazzard novel out there that will completely sweep me off my feet.
“That epoch, our time at Naples, seems historic now. It doesn’t seem like modern life. But it didn’t seem like modern life then either, it was more like life than modern life, more lifelike, livelier, likelier.”
December 19, 2020
Jenny arrives in post-war Naples to work for NATO. Unlike her fellow workmates who prefer to live inside a self-isolating bubble as if Naples is rife with contagious disease, she engages with the city, allows it to enter into her blood, largely through her friendship with Giocanda, a writer and her film director lover, Gianni. Most of the dramatic action has already taken place when the novel begins - most notably the tragic love affair of Giocanda during the war. Like the other novel of hers I read this is very much about the alchemical effect Italy has on a young woman. You could almost say it's her second attempt at writing the same novel. There's another terrific portrait of an Italian male. And Hazzard's depiction of Naples is a wonder of insights, both loving and critical. 4+ stars.
June 3, 2023
For most of this read I thought yes - this is pretty good - but it will be 4 stars - and then in the last quarter - there is a chapter of absolute genius. There is an epithet on the front cover "One of the greatest writers working in English today." Michael Cunningham - whoever he is, but I thought Yes this is correct.
In the first 12 chapters there is plenty to enjoy - I particularly liked Hazzard's dissection of the relationships between men and women. The whole is narrated by Jenny a youngish woman, I'm guessing late twenties, who travels to Naples in 1959 to take up translation work for a division of the British army. This work is never mentioned except in a late chapter when Jenny herself says, it took up a great deal of my time and yet I remember nothing of it.
Jenny has a letter of introduction to a woman called Gioconda, whom she decides to call up, one day, in a rare stretch of free time - and so the story begins. Not a lot happens, but we learn slowly the details of the relationship between Gioconda and Gianni and just as importantly there is the background of Naples.
Jenny takes an apartment on the Posillipo, in an old building which is approached via an underground tunnel - the building itself stands literally in the Bay - and the windows of the apartment provide an endless display of activity, especially during the long hot summer months.
I'm not sure what to say about that spectacular chapter 13 - because it will give away the entire plot except to say that it is writing of pure genius. There is a moment when Gianni stands eating grapes and leaning on the balustrade overlooking the bay. Jenny has just received a letter from Gioconda and she says to Gianni - "Go and Fetch her." I suppose most readers, knowing the developments up to that point will be Gob-Smacked, and yet to me it rings true. If you have ever quarrelled so badly with someone you love that you have left them - then you will know that you are heart-torn until you are reconciled with them - nothing makes sense until you are with that person once more.
The rather astounding aspect of Jenny's character is that although she herself is not part of a couple - she understands this feeling completely. She selflessly extracts herself from the lives of both Gianni and Gioconda.
In chapter 14 - there are several poignant moments when you know she will suffer - as a reader you question her motivation, and yet you understand she has made a genuine sacrifice. But the real genius of this story is not so much the plot - it is indeed a very common one; the genius is in the restraint of this writer's style - the delicacy with which the tale is told. I cannot praise Hazzard enough. The final chapter - number 15, steps away from the immediate events and philosophizes a little over the paths we take in our lives and what we learn or don't - but the main purpose really of that final chapter is to tell us that Jenny needs to see Gioconda again - although it is as much as 10 years later. It allows us to see the depth of the friendship between the two women.
Brilliant - totally, totally BRILLIANT. And my many thanks to Violet Wells - a Goodreads friend who pointed me in the direction of Shirley Hazzard. She is not very well known here - and deserves to be much more widely read.
And - a couple of short paragraphs when Jenny and Gioconda spend an evening together.
Gioconda came to see me one evening, a week or so after her return. * * *
She was deeply sunburned, to a high colour that flushed her cheeks and burnished her hair. She wore an immaculate white dress, a dress that no one would launder for themselves. Because of the milk I had come to the door in bare feet, and she seemed to me statelier and taller than before. She laid down on my hall table a wide hat of stitched blue linen she had carried in her hand.
She stretched out on a long chair on my terrace, saying little, turning her head against the cushions to look at the bay, languidly, like a convalescent. Crowds of children were swimming off the rocks along the Posillipo, or from packed rowing boats, shrieking at one another in summer ecstasy; every evening they shrieked there as long as the light lasted. Turning on their backs, kicking frantically, they sometimes looked up to us and waved, and she waved back or called out 'Ciao', while I set out a jug and glasses on a table between us.
In the first 12 chapters there is plenty to enjoy - I particularly liked Hazzard's dissection of the relationships between men and women. The whole is narrated by Jenny a youngish woman, I'm guessing late twenties, who travels to Naples in 1959 to take up translation work for a division of the British army. This work is never mentioned except in a late chapter when Jenny herself says, it took up a great deal of my time and yet I remember nothing of it.
Jenny has a letter of introduction to a woman called Gioconda, whom she decides to call up, one day, in a rare stretch of free time - and so the story begins. Not a lot happens, but we learn slowly the details of the relationship between Gioconda and Gianni and just as importantly there is the background of Naples.
Jenny takes an apartment on the Posillipo, in an old building which is approached via an underground tunnel - the building itself stands literally in the Bay - and the windows of the apartment provide an endless display of activity, especially during the long hot summer months.
I'm not sure what to say about that spectacular chapter 13 - because it will give away the entire plot except to say that it is writing of pure genius. There is a moment when Gianni stands eating grapes and leaning on the balustrade overlooking the bay. Jenny has just received a letter from Gioconda and she says to Gianni - "Go and Fetch her." I suppose most readers, knowing the developments up to that point will be Gob-Smacked, and yet to me it rings true. If you have ever quarrelled so badly with someone you love that you have left them - then you will know that you are heart-torn until you are reconciled with them - nothing makes sense until you are with that person once more.
The rather astounding aspect of Jenny's character is that although she herself is not part of a couple - she understands this feeling completely. She selflessly extracts herself from the lives of both Gianni and Gioconda.
In chapter 14 - there are several poignant moments when you know she will suffer - as a reader you question her motivation, and yet you understand she has made a genuine sacrifice. But the real genius of this story is not so much the plot - it is indeed a very common one; the genius is in the restraint of this writer's style - the delicacy with which the tale is told. I cannot praise Hazzard enough. The final chapter - number 15, steps away from the immediate events and philosophizes a little over the paths we take in our lives and what we learn or don't - but the main purpose really of that final chapter is to tell us that Jenny needs to see Gioconda again - although it is as much as 10 years later. It allows us to see the depth of the friendship between the two women.
Brilliant - totally, totally BRILLIANT. And my many thanks to Violet Wells - a Goodreads friend who pointed me in the direction of Shirley Hazzard. She is not very well known here - and deserves to be much more widely read.
And - a couple of short paragraphs when Jenny and Gioconda spend an evening together.
Gioconda came to see me one evening, a week or so after her return. * * *
She was deeply sunburned, to a high colour that flushed her cheeks and burnished her hair. She wore an immaculate white dress, a dress that no one would launder for themselves. Because of the milk I had come to the door in bare feet, and she seemed to me statelier and taller than before. She laid down on my hall table a wide hat of stitched blue linen she had carried in her hand.
She stretched out on a long chair on my terrace, saying little, turning her head against the cushions to look at the bay, languidly, like a convalescent. Crowds of children were swimming off the rocks along the Posillipo, or from packed rowing boats, shrieking at one another in summer ecstasy; every evening they shrieked there as long as the light lasted. Turning on their backs, kicking frantically, they sometimes looked up to us and waved, and she waved back or called out 'Ciao', while I set out a jug and glasses on a table between us.
December 12, 2023
There’s a strong feeling of autobiography in this bittersweet and sharp 1970 novel that evokes Simone de Beauvoir, Daphne du Maurier or Anita Brookner.
Hazzard is a wonderful stylist and her descriptions of a now forever-lost post-war Naples and a young woman’s impressions of its people and influences are both romantic and strangely vulnerable in their affection (and occasional) naivety, with stronger impressions at play than plot.
Hazzard is a wonderful stylist and her descriptions of a now forever-lost post-war Naples and a young woman’s impressions of its people and influences are both romantic and strangely vulnerable in their affection (and occasional) naivety, with stronger impressions at play than plot.
July 19, 2015
Shirley Hazzard has a most wonderful knack of precise, deft characterisation: the narrator describes her sister-in-law as "an emphatic little woman. When I first knew her she could look delicious even so, an infuriated kitten.", which succeeds in giving us a picture of the sister-in-law and an idea of Jenny, the narrator, too. And although Jenny is the voice we hear, we are nevertheless made privy to how others see her: the time she spent in Naples she was a young woman of twenty something, and the men tend to picture her as an ingenue, an innocent abroad, whereas the dry scathing analysis of verbal games that she gives us certainly gives the lie to her naivete.
There's a marvellous sense of place in this novel too, Naples plays as much a role as any of the people, is always present: "In our office, in those days, I was always aware of the city, like someone compelled at a dinner table to be attentive to a boring neighbour while listening all the time for the voice of a loved one at the other end of the room."
The action of this novel is predominantly inner rather than outer, it sucks you in not through plot but through the supple expressive language. Just what I love.
There's a marvellous sense of place in this novel too, Naples plays as much a role as any of the people, is always present: "In our office, in those days, I was always aware of the city, like someone compelled at a dinner table to be attentive to a boring neighbour while listening all the time for the voice of a loved one at the other end of the room."
The action of this novel is predominantly inner rather than outer, it sucks you in not through plot but through the supple expressive language. Just what I love.
October 28, 2015
3 and 1/2 stars
I wanted to say that this is a book that could only have been written by an author at the height of her powers, but I know Hazzard went on to write two even more beautifully written, complex novels after this one.
"The Bay of Noon" is about much more than what it seems to be about. It is about more than Naples, or even Italy, though a very strong sense of both comes through (including, through the pasts of two of the characters, what the city and the country suffered during WWII) because it is a story of place, any place -- about the need for a place. It is about more than a young Englishwoman and her intense friendship with an Italian couple and with a Scottish co-worker, because it is a microcosm of a life lived, though we only see in detail the 'noon' of this life.
Despite themes that I love (including the one of memory), I am not quite as enthusiastic about this book as my friends here are. I'm not sure why that is, except to say that I didn't feel completely engaged until near the book's end. And I did love the ending.
I plan on reading all Hazzard has written and the Italian setting here has got me wanting to read her memoir of Graham Greene on the island of Capri next.
I wanted to say that this is a book that could only have been written by an author at the height of her powers, but I know Hazzard went on to write two even more beautifully written, complex novels after this one.
"The Bay of Noon" is about much more than what it seems to be about. It is about more than Naples, or even Italy, though a very strong sense of both comes through (including, through the pasts of two of the characters, what the city and the country suffered during WWII) because it is a story of place, any place -- about the need for a place. It is about more than a young Englishwoman and her intense friendship with an Italian couple and with a Scottish co-worker, because it is a microcosm of a life lived, though we only see in detail the 'noon' of this life.
Despite themes that I love (including the one of memory), I am not quite as enthusiastic about this book as my friends here are. I'm not sure why that is, except to say that I didn't feel completely engaged until near the book's end. And I did love the ending.
I plan on reading all Hazzard has written and the Italian setting here has got me wanting to read her memoir of Graham Greene on the island of Capri next.
November 30, 2012
I have reviewed this book three times, three times I have hit save, and poof, Goodreads disappears it. I can't go through it all again. If you love Italy, if you have ever been an expatriate, if you were ever young but aren't anymore, read this book. It grabbed my heart with its perfect deft prose and didn't let go. Hazzard's writing reminded me of Edith Wharton's in its ability to convey the mores and social relationships of a world not our own.
The limpid apt directness of the writing -- and the enchantment of the immersion in 1957 Naples -- were so sheerly delightful that I read very slowly, just to savor. "That was before artists spoke of their influence, or journalists of their artistry," Hazzard writes, and her writing is also "old fashioned" in that it is of an age when writers did not have to be archly self-referential and self-conscious, but could tell a nostalgic bittersweet tale of first happiness and first love in a world that is always already slipping away in a way that goes right to your heart (without bypassing your mind). The expatriate experience, the peculiar intensity of the friendships and loves formed in that special glorious isolation, the odd relationship you have to a place that you are at once peculiarly proprietarial about and yet always conscious of your foreigness to, the sudden importance of language - yours, theirs, others...brilliantly depicted, again -- clear eyed and nostalgic, but never sentimental. I'm just hoping this doesn't get deleted again, and going off to buy everything Hazzard's ever written!
The limpid apt directness of the writing -- and the enchantment of the immersion in 1957 Naples -- were so sheerly delightful that I read very slowly, just to savor. "That was before artists spoke of their influence, or journalists of their artistry," Hazzard writes, and her writing is also "old fashioned" in that it is of an age when writers did not have to be archly self-referential and self-conscious, but could tell a nostalgic bittersweet tale of first happiness and first love in a world that is always already slipping away in a way that goes right to your heart (without bypassing your mind). The expatriate experience, the peculiar intensity of the friendships and loves formed in that special glorious isolation, the odd relationship you have to a place that you are at once peculiarly proprietarial about and yet always conscious of your foreigness to, the sudden importance of language - yours, theirs, others...brilliantly depicted, again -- clear eyed and nostalgic, but never sentimental. I'm just hoping this doesn't get deleted again, and going off to buy everything Hazzard's ever written!
October 18, 2015
The most compelling character in this novel is without question of the city of Naples. And because Hazzard can write such beautiful sentences – she’s almost certainly better at writing sentences than at writing novels – we’re treated to many spellbinding and definitive vignettes of Napoli. The human drama at times seem almost incidental. Her reticent romantic treatment of character, harking back to the days of Henry James, doesn’t help here. At one point she says about one of her characters – “He seemed fictitious, a sort of sub-plot, something that had no existence other than to augment her experience and mine…” You could say this about all the characters in relation to Naples in this novel and consequently it’s perhaps more successful as travelogue than fiction. But, as usual with Hazzard, the prose is often exquisite, like some beautifully crafted object that has no functional value.
November 21, 2021
This was one of the six books shortlisted for the "lost" 1970 Booker Prize, a nomination that probably owed more to Hazzard's subsequent books than to this one, which seems rather slight in comparison to The Transit of Venus and The Great Fire. The plot tells the story of an orphaned young woman who volunteers for a posting in Naples shortly after the Second World War, which allows Hazzard to mix a rites of passage story with a lot of local colour. The plot doesn't really gain any momentum until well into the second half. A pleasant enough read but probably one for Hazzard completists only.
January 27, 2011
A quiet novel about friendship and love set in Naples, Italy. This is a book you'd want to linger over and luxuriate in the wonderful dialogue and vivid phrases that act like color in a painting. You see the landscape infused with thought and joy. Hazzard has a rare gift of subtly capturing states of mind and tones of voice. The Bay of Noon touches me deeply in a way I did not feel in The Great Fire. A rewarding book to read when you are not in a hurry and simply wish to savor the moment of pleasure when you perceive beauty in a line or a turn of phrase and have to read it over again.
March 11, 2017
A few seasons back, my challenge group had a task to read a book that a reviewer had described as having a "sense of place." This book most certainly should have fulfilled that requirement. If one were to read this novel solely to feel at one with the Naples of the late 1950s, the reader would be rewarded. Even Hazzard, late in her novel says:
It's entirely possible that I missed all this novel has to offer. I rarely re-read, but this is one I might pick up again after a few years. When I finished it, I thought it's just a good, solid 4-stars, but as I write this some 12 hours later, I know that it will be with me longer, and so creeps up into the 5-star group.
(... a portentous topographical melancholy unknown at Naples, as if the landscape itself were missing its own past) and the sea, it was not apprehension that increased in me, but the sense of place. If places were vengeful, as Gianni said, they were also more magnanimous than any human benefactor, making provision for us for the rest of our lives, asking nothing more of us than to take pleasure in their memory.It is not a travelogue, however, and that reader would be missing all the novel has to offer. The prose is complex and offers much. Hazzard doesn't give us too many characters, so she can present them more fully. What is most compelling is that the relationships between and among the characters are dynamic. I am not a good predictor, as I've said. I did see one change coming, but not the others.
It's entirely possible that I missed all this novel has to offer. I rarely re-read, but this is one I might pick up again after a few years. When I finished it, I thought it's just a good, solid 4-stars, but as I write this some 12 hours later, I know that it will be with me longer, and so creeps up into the 5-star group.
August 31, 2023
A well written account about the evolving relationships between interesting characters and the city of Naples. I loved it. See here for more thorough review
April 6, 2018
A beautiful meditation on the tragedy of war and its aftermath, on love, friendship and betrayal.
January 21, 2023
I loved it. Post-war II, Naples, a quartet of characters, in a sense the story of what happens between the stories of these characters. A year in the life of Jenny, in Naples with NATO, her past, her future to some degree revealed, as well as the lives, aches, and tragedies of the others, all victims of the war-torn past and their own. Atmospheric, feelings, sensations, insights revealed and appraised some years after the events.
December 31, 2017
This author is new to me, and this was not the book I originally planned to read, but I am glad I came across this one instead. Beautiful prose, evocative of the 1940s/50s and of post-war Naples. The first person narrator is rootless, mainly due to her disrupted wartime childhood, and finds herself in a mostly expatriate community working for the UN in Italy but through a tenuous link connects with a local woman and her lover, and also develops a friendship with a Scottish scientist. Once the two worlds of these intense friendships collide the idyll soon comes to an end. Lovely, rather nostalgic, memorable. The only thing which made me a little uncomfortable was Jenny's relationship with her brother.
September 26, 2011
Gorgeous and precisely, almost surgically, heartbreaking. As with The Great Fire (which everyone everywhere should immediately read), and in spite of it being very specifically concerned with post-war Naples, this book feels oddly timeless, as if I could be reading something written in second century Rome or 19th century England.
I loved it. It hurt.
I loved it. It hurt.
January 19, 2011
This is a gem of a novel. I plan on reading everything by this extraordinarily perceptive writer.
July 15, 2023
A heat-haze hangs over Hazzard's atmospheric but ultimately superficial story of encounters in Naples. The sun shines bright to illiminate the concrete city of the title, but the people are seen obscurely at best. I felt I was walking with fairly unmemorable ghosts that glanced at (or through) one another. In contrast, the set-dressing is sharply observed and makes Signora Napoli - as well as the all-too visible hand of Hazzard herself - the focal point of its prominade.
'The Bay of Noon' started promisingly, but the most interesting features increasingly became extrinsic - the authorial hand rather than the work if fiction. It is Hazzard who I psychoanalysed even as her creations evaporate from consciousness. For Hazzard is written large in the many parental estrangements; in the nostalgia for Italian freedoms that Hazzard would have enjoyed after an unhappy childhood in Australia; and in the love affair with Italy itself that is recognisably Hazzard's own. Although the book is diverting and pleasant enough, it does not fully succeed in creating the self-surporting scaffolding that let me lose myself in it as a work of fiction. Instead, 'The Bay of Noon' read like the undigested piece of beefy gristle than contained the essence of Hazzard's factual nightmares and dreams, and which in turn spoke of formative autobiographical past unhappiness and subsequent adult escapes.
The hazziness of the novel only obtained substantiality through 'The Paris Review's' 2005 interview with Hazzard, that suggested its romantic vulnerabilities had a core in Hazzard's own life. Without reading the article I would probably have understood some of the sense of contingency in the passenger seat-viewpoint we accompany as co-travellers. Understanding Hazzard, however, felt a much more sunstantial quest than the mannered remoteness of the interplay between the set depicted in this otherwise beautifully written novel.
For me 'The Bay if Noon' was a rice paper shell through which Hazzard's own bones were all-too fascinatingly seen.
'The Bay of Noon' started promisingly, but the most interesting features increasingly became extrinsic - the authorial hand rather than the work if fiction. It is Hazzard who I psychoanalysed even as her creations evaporate from consciousness. For Hazzard is written large in the many parental estrangements; in the nostalgia for Italian freedoms that Hazzard would have enjoyed after an unhappy childhood in Australia; and in the love affair with Italy itself that is recognisably Hazzard's own. Although the book is diverting and pleasant enough, it does not fully succeed in creating the self-surporting scaffolding that let me lose myself in it as a work of fiction. Instead, 'The Bay of Noon' read like the undigested piece of beefy gristle than contained the essence of Hazzard's factual nightmares and dreams, and which in turn spoke of formative autobiographical past unhappiness and subsequent adult escapes.
The hazziness of the novel only obtained substantiality through 'The Paris Review's' 2005 interview with Hazzard, that suggested its romantic vulnerabilities had a core in Hazzard's own life. Without reading the article I would probably have understood some of the sense of contingency in the passenger seat-viewpoint we accompany as co-travellers. Understanding Hazzard, however, felt a much more sunstantial quest than the mannered remoteness of the interplay between the set depicted in this otherwise beautifully written novel.
For me 'The Bay if Noon' was a rice paper shell through which Hazzard's own bones were all-too fascinatingly seen.
March 7, 2018
Beautifully written, though occasionally it seems as if Hazzard is just trying out turns of phrase, or even showing off her erudition.
As with a previous book, The Evening of The Holiday, the protaganist is a young woman of no outstanding distinction. In fact she is every bit as “pastel” as the other young women she describes as having fetched up in Naples, working at a NATO facility. In both, they fall into a love affair with an older middle-class, professional Italian man who has distinctly abusive thoughts and actions towards women.
In fact I just wanted to shake Jenny in this book. Not only does she betray her female friend, whom she had heroine worshipped, but she spends the first 80% denigrating this pompous git. Or maybe Jenny perceived her friend as having betrayed her when dhe ran off to Spain with her non-sexual friend? Maybe she really was in love with HIM, but was waiting for something to HAPPEN?
It’s not plot-driven, more a showcase for the writing. A rather old short novel fashioned in that way. That in itself isn’t a drawback for me, and some of the stories told within, by the two women characters are terrific. Some chapters are like short stories within the novel.
There are some beautifully economical word portraits of certain archetypes - the stuffy middle-class English, the straight-backed Italian housemaid and more.
The best drawn character is in fact just-post-WW2 Naples, which Hazzard describes beautifully (far better than the rather flat prose in her later volume of collected essays/magazine pieces about that city, Ancient Shore:Dispatches From Naples).
As for the ending? I have no idea what it meant really; I would describe it as frustratingly inconclusive.
As with a previous book, The Evening of The Holiday, the protaganist is a young woman of no outstanding distinction. In fact she is every bit as “pastel” as the other young women she describes as having fetched up in Naples, working at a NATO facility. In both, they fall into a love affair with an older middle-class, professional Italian man who has distinctly abusive thoughts and actions towards women.
In fact I just wanted to shake Jenny in this book. Not only does she betray her female friend, whom she had heroine worshipped, but she spends the first 80% denigrating this pompous git. Or maybe Jenny perceived her friend as having betrayed her when dhe ran off to Spain with her non-sexual friend? Maybe she really was in love with HIM, but was waiting for something to HAPPEN?
It’s not plot-driven, more a showcase for the writing. A rather old short novel fashioned in that way. That in itself isn’t a drawback for me, and some of the stories told within, by the two women characters are terrific. Some chapters are like short stories within the novel.
There are some beautifully economical word portraits of certain archetypes - the stuffy middle-class English, the straight-backed Italian housemaid and more.
The best drawn character is in fact just-post-WW2 Naples, which Hazzard describes beautifully (far better than the rather flat prose in her later volume of collected essays/magazine pieces about that city, Ancient Shore:Dispatches From Naples).
As for the ending? I have no idea what it meant really; I would describe it as frustratingly inconclusive.
March 26, 2009
I loved The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard. At the time that I read it, it was the most beautiful, poetic prose that I had ever read. I recently decided it was time to go back and to read Hazzard's older novels.
I really enjoyed The Bay of Noon. Hazzard's characteristic poetic language, though not as well-formed yet in this book as when she wrote The Great Fire, is still present and soothing to read. She has a way of describing a feeling, evoking an emotion, describing a personality, in so few words, it is uncanny.
I don't give it a five because I didn't love it as much as The Great Fire; whether this is because at that time I was so awed by her, or that I actually today would prefer that book, I'm not sure.
The first person took me a while to get used to, first person narratives always make me wonder, "Why is this person telling me (or someone else) their own story?" What makes some average person's story so compelling as to make it necessary to tell?
I would love to talk about this book with anyone else who read it and liked it; one of the few books that I would like to talk about with a book group...
And I must go to Naples and Capri!
I really enjoyed The Bay of Noon. Hazzard's characteristic poetic language, though not as well-formed yet in this book as when she wrote The Great Fire, is still present and soothing to read. She has a way of describing a feeling, evoking an emotion, describing a personality, in so few words, it is uncanny.
I don't give it a five because I didn't love it as much as The Great Fire; whether this is because at that time I was so awed by her, or that I actually today would prefer that book, I'm not sure.
The first person took me a while to get used to, first person narratives always make me wonder, "Why is this person telling me (or someone else) their own story?" What makes some average person's story so compelling as to make it necessary to tell?
I would love to talk about this book with anyone else who read it and liked it; one of the few books that I would like to talk about with a book group...
And I must go to Naples and Capri!
September 30, 2020
Beautifully written with well-drawn characters in a very specific time and place. The first time I've bothered to highlight passages on my Kindle. Here is one from late in the book:
I pressed his arm as we walked. 'After this, anything's possible.' 'Anything was possible before this, too; but you didn't know it."
And from earlier:
In the telling, it is obvious. In the telling, all things are.
I pressed his arm as we walked. 'After this, anything's possible.' 'Anything was possible before this, too; but you didn't know it."
And from earlier:
In the telling, it is obvious. In the telling, all things are.
June 4, 2013
This is a well-written book and evokes place (Naples) strongly, but I didn't care about the characters or what happened to them. The narrator is self-reflective to the extreme, paradoxically making the reader care less about her rather than more. The events are meant to be life-changing, but they strike me as rather ho-hum.
January 30, 2022
I'm reserving my rating until I read it a second time. I really liked the book at first, but then kind of lost my connection with it. Now that I know the arc of the story, I think I will enjoy it more the second time around.
July 14, 2016
Not enough at stake in this novel to keep me interested though at its heart is an evocative portrait of Naples.
March 30, 2024
My 3rd Hazzard, and I continue to love everything I've read by her. The combination of exquisite sentences with a humane and sophisticated vision always make her worth reading for me, even in those cases when the book otherwise seems thin, as this does compared to Transit. Transit, however, was at times hard for me to get through, and my appreciation grew for it in retrospect (I look forward to a second reading), whereas this one is immediately accessible to the reader—this may be as aspect of Transit's superiority in a way, but has its own value too.
August 11, 2022
Incredibly well-written and the description of Naples was wonderfully rich and vivid, but ultimately I found this quite dull, and I struggled to care about Jenny until the final third of the book.
January 10, 2013
A beautifully observed portrait of a time & a place that came to be inhabited by 4 people: a charismatic Italian artist called Gioconda, a typically boorish-but-complicated man called Gianni (typical for Hazzard, that is), a cool intellectual called Justin, & our young British narrator, Jenny. Hazzard's writing on place - in this book - is delicate & insightful, though occasionally insensitive (I'm not sure if I'd appreciate the image of Naples as being crushed by poverty if I actually lived there) & I admit my perception of Italy was often at odds with Hazzard's. But that's the delight of this book, the particularity of its viewpoint, the keenness of its observances, the clean, hungry beauty of its prose. It left me craving summer dinners on the terrace overlooking the beach, & ill-fated romances of the kind that are meant to make youth beautiful & bittersweet. It left me thinking of my own past in places like Capri & Naples, & wishing it had all turned out better. It left me sad & yearning, & not many books do that. Not anymore.
Having just finished Hazzard's earlier book, The Evening of the Holiday, & found it wanting a sense of place & an immediacy of voice, I was very satisfied to find those elements here, & for that reason I think I appreciated Jenny more than some other of Hazzard's protagonists. I still don't understand Jenny's attraction to Gianni, but that's almost a mainstay of Hazzard's fiction, I think: the gothic style of her relationships, the men all overwhelming masculine power, the women all distracted submissiveness. As if they haven't any other idea in their heads but what is presented to them. Forced upon them, I should say. They see a fingertip in a wrist, a particular bend to his neck, a *something* in his gaze, & so it is implied to the reader that this is attraction, this is love.
I half wonder why it is Hazzard keeps writing about love. Or rather, why she keeps writing about compulsion & calling it love. And I think my wonder has to do with the fact that Hazzard's writing is so intellectualised. Does she write about 'love' as a kind of counter-measure to that fierce intelligence of hers, is she trying to address an imbalance? Or is she merely articulating something that is actually quite genuine?
That is, is she really so overwhelmed by love herself that the only way for her fiction to come close to her real-life experiences is is in these brutish relationships she keeps imagining? Or does she feel no love at all, and in recompense, builds it into something greater in her imagination, something primal & undeniable? Because her heroines seem, quite frankly, often rather passive & emotionless. Keen-eyed observers of the great passions that seem more often to move men but which, ultimately, are almost always proven to be fickle. And that's the rub: they almost always are fleeting, the attractions of men towards women. And hardly ever the other way around, women's attraction to men being so dreadfully resolute.
What IS Hazzard's relationship to love, after all? Apart from it being a ready, tragic literary conceit?
(Note: in 2010, this book was shortlisted for the Lost Man Booker prize, for books that missed out when the rules for the Man Booker changed in 1970.)
#aww2013 no.02
Having just finished Hazzard's earlier book, The Evening of the Holiday, & found it wanting a sense of place & an immediacy of voice, I was very satisfied to find those elements here, & for that reason I think I appreciated Jenny more than some other of Hazzard's protagonists. I still don't understand Jenny's attraction to Gianni, but that's almost a mainstay of Hazzard's fiction, I think: the gothic style of her relationships, the men all overwhelming masculine power, the women all distracted submissiveness. As if they haven't any other idea in their heads but what is presented to them. Forced upon them, I should say. They see a fingertip in a wrist, a particular bend to his neck, a *something* in his gaze, & so it is implied to the reader that this is attraction, this is love.
I half wonder why it is Hazzard keeps writing about love. Or rather, why she keeps writing about compulsion & calling it love. And I think my wonder has to do with the fact that Hazzard's writing is so intellectualised. Does she write about 'love' as a kind of counter-measure to that fierce intelligence of hers, is she trying to address an imbalance? Or is she merely articulating something that is actually quite genuine?
That is, is she really so overwhelmed by love herself that the only way for her fiction to come close to her real-life experiences is is in these brutish relationships she keeps imagining? Or does she feel no love at all, and in recompense, builds it into something greater in her imagination, something primal & undeniable? Because her heroines seem, quite frankly, often rather passive & emotionless. Keen-eyed observers of the great passions that seem more often to move men but which, ultimately, are almost always proven to be fickle. And that's the rub: they almost always are fleeting, the attractions of men towards women. And hardly ever the other way around, women's attraction to men being so dreadfully resolute.
What IS Hazzard's relationship to love, after all? Apart from it being a ready, tragic literary conceit?
(Note: in 2010, this book was shortlisted for the Lost Man Booker prize, for books that missed out when the rules for the Man Booker changed in 1970.)
#aww2013 no.02
December 29, 2017
Shirley Hazzard’s novel of Naples deserves shelf-space next to Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet. While Ferrante is an insider, Hazzard presents the city from the point of view of a well-informed anglophone resident, but both fictions are equally vivid portraits of the city, with all its unique qualities and extremes of comfort, surprise and distress. Hazzard makes up for the comparative brevity of her book with an extraordinary ability to say a great deal in a few words. Consequently, she rewards slow, attentive reading and the book may take longer to get through than one initially expects. The language is not only concise, indeed dense, but also beautiful. At times it is also amusing.
The characters are as vivid as the city. I’ve seen it said that there's ‘no plot’ in this book, but the plot unfolds in the characters’ minds and relationships and can be as exciting as any ‘thrilling’ external events. The British and Italian characters are fascinated with each other and their cultural differences, which does not prevent misunderstandings, both sad and funny. Ultimately, they go separate ways, but that dispersal seems inevitable and concludes the plot as fully as any happy-ever-afterness might do.
The city of Naples plays its own role in shaping these lives and also has a life of its own. A street may look squalid one day and enchantingly romantic the next, depending on the minds of those who behold and inhabit it. It may also simply be a home. Whether in the 1950s (Hazzard) or the 2000s (Ferrante) streets may be clean and sunlit or dark and rat-infested, according to the industrial relations of the street cleaners and city authorities. Indeed, such features of Neapolitan life are centuries old. Wealth and poverty house next door to each other and share the outdoor conditions. The reasons for those conditions may not be as obvious as a traveller thinks. (‘Oh my God,’ said Justin, glancing into a soiled courtyard. I told him, ‘It’s not all neglect, some of it’s the war still, the bombardment.’)
This was a perfect read on a summery Christmas Day.
The characters are as vivid as the city. I’ve seen it said that there's ‘no plot’ in this book, but the plot unfolds in the characters’ minds and relationships and can be as exciting as any ‘thrilling’ external events. The British and Italian characters are fascinated with each other and their cultural differences, which does not prevent misunderstandings, both sad and funny. Ultimately, they go separate ways, but that dispersal seems inevitable and concludes the plot as fully as any happy-ever-afterness might do.
The city of Naples plays its own role in shaping these lives and also has a life of its own. A street may look squalid one day and enchantingly romantic the next, depending on the minds of those who behold and inhabit it. It may also simply be a home. Whether in the 1950s (Hazzard) or the 2000s (Ferrante) streets may be clean and sunlit or dark and rat-infested, according to the industrial relations of the street cleaners and city authorities. Indeed, such features of Neapolitan life are centuries old. Wealth and poverty house next door to each other and share the outdoor conditions. The reasons for those conditions may not be as obvious as a traveller thinks. (‘Oh my God,’ said Justin, glancing into a soiled courtyard. I told him, ‘It’s not all neglect, some of it’s the war still, the bombardment.’)
This was a perfect read on a summery Christmas Day.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 148 reviews