![]() ![]() But, he thinks, handing Sophie a glass of wine, “she was nothing extraordinary, either.” Yet, though they haven’t spoken, she is already altering his experience of his own body. Tancredi recognizes that his own paunch and bland handsomeness puts him at a physical disadvantage in contrast with the old man’s distinguished vitality. In this attitude he was like an old crusader, his noble face and his long, lean body and his stillness conveying some figure on a perpendicular tomb. Old Giovanetti, sitting upright in a plush armchair, clasped both his hands over the knob of a black walking stick that was planted at his feet. Still, she inspires a sort of fresh perspective for him, and for the first time he really sees the old painter, a man he’s known all his life. ![]() He complains to himself that his sister is not doing tea properly (there is no actual tea), ashamed that Italians don’t know how to entertain in their houses in the late afternoon, “so one is likely to be confronted, as on this afternoon, with half a bottle of sweet vermouth and a plateful of stale macaroons.” He doesn’t acknowledge-and in fact may not know it himself-that he is seeing this afternoon already through eyes of the foreigner, Sophie, whom he first assumed was the archetypal Englishwoman until he learns she’s half Italian and whom, either way, he finds unremarkable. I raise it like a sacred text, let it fall open where it will. I reach for it when I am stuck, scared, or bored, when I am at loose ends or bound up tight. Normally he would be at the office at this hour, but it is the Feast of the Ascension “and here he was pinned to a sofa among the women and the aged, like someone left behind during a war.” With the one word pinned, Hazzard conjures Eliot and all of Prufrock’s existential ennui. Tancredi is living with his sister in the Italian countryside because his wife has left him and this afternoon he is stuck in her living room with her guests, the old painter Giovanetti, his wife Renata, and a young foreign woman the Giovanettis have brought with them from town. Gabriella might as well have said, “Tancredi, go fall in love for once in your life!” and her brother would have given her the same reply. “All in good time, my dear,” he replied irritably. “Tancredi,” Gabriella said to her brother, “you must show them the fountain.” But ultimately what moves me most about The Evening of the Holiday is the way Hazzard captures love on the page: falling in love, being in love, losing love. Hazzard makes an art of restraint, of feelings withheld then revealed in one staggering brushstroke. Or one of her falcon-like narrative dives from a great omniscient height deep into someone’s heart in the space of sentence. I might land on a fragment of poetic detail: “a blaze of flowers by the hotel window” or a little boy “eating an ice cream cone aloud” or a woman wearing “a simple dress of a splendid color, the sort of dress that might turn up in one of his memories.” Or a reference to Petrarch or Pisano or Renoir, the Second World War or 1416. I have kept a copy of it on the desk where I write for more than twenty-five years. One of the greatest loves of my life has been the short novel The Evening of the Holiday by Shirley Hazzard. It’s easier to know it, to feel it, than to explain all the ways. Loving a book is a lot like loving a person. ![]()
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