... an impeccably researched and deeply incisive account of Hazzard’s life and work, and the intriguing interplay between the two ... Olubas is not in the business of hagiography. She is in pursuit of the truth. She tells it straight and we trust her ... Her letters and diaries, and the biography itself, become a long list of writers and artists whom they saw in New York, Paris, London, Rome, Naples or Capri. For the reader, the onslaught is exhausting, even if it does mean hanging with Robert Penn Warren or Elizabeth Bowen or Saul Bellow. Hazzard’s diary entries during this time, Olubas writes, reveal the seriousness with which she approached these social occasions and her effort to learn how to carry herself in these circles ... Hazzard’s own books arrive in this biography whole and as mysteriously as immaculate conceptions, without a sense of having been wrestled into creation. The writer in A Writing Life is elusive. Olubas acknowledges that apart from occasional complaints about not finding time to work, Hazzard said little about her experience of writing.
As Olubas shows us repeatedly, sometimes in sections that get a little name-droppy...people easily fell in love with Hazzard ... Olubas also shows us the troubling disconnections underlying the social magic ... Hazzard's mother was a rageful and difficult woman, and Olubas leaves us to draw our own conclusions about the ways this shaped Shirley's character, or at least doesn't tuck in all the edges, which I rather appreciated ... Olubas does a fine job of showing how her work grew out of her life, as well as glossing the plots and summarizing the mostly ecstatic critical reaction at the time. Certainly one closes the biography eager to proceed to the fiction.
The Hazzard that emerges in Olubas’s exhaustive biography is rather like one of Hazzard’s characters: brilliant and cosmopolitan; living through historical events but strangely untouched by generational mores; at once supremely composed and eager to demonstrate her worth.
Lucky for Hazzard, she has found an ideal chronicler in Brigitta Olubas, whose Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life is an exemplary work of biographical criticism. Olubas is an excellent portraitist. She can capture small things, like Hazzard’s tone of voice ... But she’s just as sharp on big things, like Hazzard’s early tendency to fall, dramatically and disastrously, for married men ... This isn’t just a good account of Hazzard. With its cadenced triplet of prepositional phrases, it reads like Hazzard—a kind of free indirect criticism ... Olubas has a good ear: she hears resonances and echoes; she senses when irony (and Hazzard is a great ironist) gives way to melodrama ... I’m pleased to say that Olubas rises to Hazzard’s articulate occasion as well.
When Olubas writes about Hazzard’s relationship to Australia, the biography comes to life, even though Hazzard spent little of her life in the country. Olubas frames Hazzard as a product of a particular place in time: an insular Australia shaped by the legacies of colonialism and racism ... While Olubas’s biography does an excellent job of narrating Hazzard’s early life in Australia and her nascent career at the U.N. (both in New York, and in Italy), after Hazzard rises to prominence the biography begins to slow. The reader becomes lost in lists and anecdotes ... There’s an endless inventorying of notable people Hazzard encountered at dinner parties, with rarely any substantive detail about what they talked about, nor how those meetings might have contributed and influenced Hazzard’s 'writing life,' which the biography claims to take as its subject. At times these sections feel gossipy, while at others, it feels as if the author might have been overwhelmed by the amount of archival material ... No criticism can be made of the book in that regard — it is certainly comprehensive. But ideally, a biography forms a self-aware narrative around the life of its subject, a narrative that can draw out the themes and complexities of a life beyond the chronology and happenstance of its days. When the narrative faltered, I admit to having found the book so wearisome that I put it down and couldn’t return to it until reminding myself that the deadline for this review was looming ... There are interesting and illuminating sections, however, particularly those that deal with Hazzard’s relationships with other writers, and how those relationships influenced her own work.
... meticulously researched, intricately detailed, and calmly paced 467 pages implicitly try to make the case that Hazzard is due more serious recognition than she has so far been given ... Though her later life was peripatetic and rich with friends and beautiful places, it did not contain much eventful drama to mark the passing of the years ... this book is not, I think, best served by looking to the life of its author for help in unraveling its full significance. As much as Hazzard loved poetry, her novel is not elliptical like poetry; the meaning is already subtly layered into its pages. More broadly, seeking clarification in biography is perhaps a paradoxical approach to understanding art. Instead of allowing a work’s enigmas to expand outward into the larger world, to reverberate in strange ways, the effect is to fix its meaning to the confines of a particular existence...This is the deflation I couldn’t help feeling when I emerged from Olubas’s account, though it is as scrupulous and well written as any subject could hope a literary biography to be. The person behind the fiction stands revealed as so much smaller than the fiction itself, less interesting, less important, less distinctive. The spectacle-seeker in me was sad to learn no big secrets and discover no great mysteries; the more serious reader in me was disappointed too. I was no more convinced than I had been before reading the book that Hazzard had wielded notable sway in her cultural moment. She has, though, left other writers who, like me, adore The Transit of Venus feeling awed and inspired in an intensely intimate way. Which is, in the end, how literary influence thrives. We have Hazzard’s books. We don’t need to know how much her life figured in her writing to respond to the vitality beating just below the surface of her art.
Olubas seems determined to prove that Hazzard is to Australia what Joan Didion is to America: a literary icon ... Given complete access to Hazzard’s diaries and journals, Olubas was able to climb into her subject’s mind and heart and find the answers to how Hazzard felt at various times and why she said what she said and did what she did — the kinds of questions that perplex many biographers, forcing them to guess and surmise. Brigitta Olubas has made glorious use of her years as a Shirley Hazzard scholar, too, and in this biography, she eloquently presents all that was won and lost in Hazzard’s writing life.
... Olubas has given readers the towering and richly empathetic biography this recondite author has always deserved ... That long relationship is the heartbeat of the book, and its incremental decline gives these pages an autumnal feeling even as early as the half-way point ... Among its many other joys, this big biography reveals Hazzard’s 2000 memoir Greene on Capri as even more of a plangently joyful masterpiece than it seemed at the time ... turning up revelations and shards of insight so regularly that the reader starts to expect them. This obviously can only happen if the right subject has met just the right chronicler, and that’s what happened here. Virtually every chapter is full of photographic vignettes that are skillfully pulled together from all the sources at the author’s disposal, and all of them put the reader right in the moment.
Brigitta Olubas’s new biography of Hazzard runs to more than 500 pages and I must admit that I approached it with trepidation ... But it turns out that I was wrong ... Olubas has developed an enviable tenderness; a way of linking her subject’s life and work that is both unobtrusive and unerring. This is a fascinating, searching, compassionate book. It moved and transfixed me. More importantly, it has sent me back to Hazzard’s writing, which is so good I don’t think I could love someone who didn’t also adore it ... Olubas is good on all of it, carefully contextualising ... All this is quite perfect. Absorbing the glamorous details, I felt like the Frenchman who, in a signing queue, told Hazzard delightedly that she looked to him exactly as she should. But it’s for her heart and her mind that you really read this book, in my case in two greedy, exhausting sittings. Olubas brings you close to both and it is exciting and painful.
Olubas’s biography feels the drag of these early years; it too is pinned down until Hazzard begins writing ... [she] dedicates a chapter to the novel, but oddly shares very little about the process of its composition ... tender but unsparing.
Opens the door to Hazzard’s mind and private life ... A perfect companion piece to Hazzard’s written works, this collection will help readers to better understand the writer and the exciting life she led. Readers will end up with a deeper understanding of how place and events impacted her ... Olubas also uses interviews with Hazzard’s close family and friends to flesh out the narrative and provide a fuller picture of her experiences ... Fans of Hazzard will greatly appreciate this well-researched biography of her life through the places she lived.
Exhaustively researched ... Olubas constructs a fascinating portrait of Hazzard’s early life in Australia, and throughout she weaves in astute suggestions of biographical experiences that influenced Hazzard’s fiction ... While sometimes too detailed, this is an impressive, revealing, and worthy biography of one of the most important writers of the last century.
Illuminating ... Olubas offers a discerning, cleareyed perspective of Hazzard’s complex character and a persuasive appraisal of what distinguishes her work. An absorbing, well-crafted profile of a supremely gifted writer.
