We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think
Selected Essays
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Spanning the 1960s to the 2000s, these nonfiction writings showcase Shirley Hazzard's extensive thinking on global politics, international relations, the history and fraught present of Western literary culture, and postwar life in Europe and Asia. They add essential clarity to the themes that dominate her award-winning fiction and expand the intellectual registers in which her writings work.
Hazzard writes about her employment at the United Nations and the institution's manifold failings. She shares her personal experience with the aftermath of the Hiroshima atomic bombing and the nature of life in late-1940s Hong Kong. She speaks to the decline of the hero as a public figure in Western literature and affirms the ongoing power of fiction to console, inspire, and direct human life, despite--or maybe because of--the world's disheartening realities. Cementing Hazzard's place as one of the twentieth century's sharpest and most versatile thinkers, this collection also encapsulates for readers the critical events defining postwar letters, thought, and politics.
About this Author
Shirley Hazzard won the National Book Award for her 2003 novel The Great Fire and the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Transit of Venus. She is the author of The Evening of the Holiday and The Bay of Noon, which was nominated for the Lost Booker Prize; Greene on Capri, a memoir of Graham Greene; and People in Glass Houses, a short-story collection based on her time at the United Nations. She lives in New York City and Capri.
Brigitta Olubas is professor of English in the School of the Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales. She is an editor of the Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature and the author of Shirley Hazzard: Literary Expatriate and Cosmopolitan Humanist.
Format: Trade Paperback
Pages: 248
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2018-02-27
Reviews
A rich, urbane, insightful collection.
With magisterial clarity and froideur, Hazzard excoriates the U.N.'s complicity in censoring Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago," its whitewashing of Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim's Nazi past and its wider silence about countless human-rights abuses.
Absorbing.... Illuminating.... Throughout this brief, captivating collection, which also includes essays on literature, history, and travel, Hazzard is articulate and humane.
An elegant and cultured collection.
We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think manages the difficult task of making old-school, mid-century liberal humanism feel alive, urgent and necessary once again.
Hazzard employs language like a knife, with precision and incisiveness.... What comes through most clearly is Hazzard's delight in the English language and its capacity for expression and communication.
Breathtaking and challenging.
This book shows that Hazzard is a fierce defender of the humanistic belief in the efficacy of literature (especially poetry) and art to illuminate the truth and to provide meaningful insight into the mystery of human existence.
Hazzard's essays are full of crystalline turns of phrase and aphoristic expressions of her core humanist principles--as well as of revealing, often fascinating, political contradictions. Scholars and students of Hazzard will strike gold.
In these essays there is a lovely sense of witnessing a brilliant and judicious mind at work. Shirley Hazzard has a way of finding the right phrase, and capturing a tone and a rhythm, that offer a sort of sensuous pleasure to the reader. She cares passionately about writing, the life of the mind, and also the public realm. As in her novels, her essays display the quality of her sympathy, her ability to make distinctions as well as connections, and her acute analysis. She is an inspiring presence in our literary lives, and having these essays is both a gift and a revelation.
Her fiction, with its stylistic elegance and intellectual verve, is quite enough to warrant our admiration.
From We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think, Shirley Hazzard emerges, to paraphrase Olubas, as eloquent, thoughtful, civil, and intellectually generous.
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