Born in Australia, Shirley Hazzard first moved to Naples as a
young woman in the 1950s to take up a job with the United Nations.
It was the beginning of a long love affair with the city. "The
Ancient Shore "collects the best of Hazzard's writings on Naples,
along with a classic "New Yorker" essay by her late husband,
Francis Steegmuller. For the pair, both insatiable readers, the
Naples of Pliny, Gibbon, and Auden is constantly alive to them in
the present.
With Hazzard as our guide, we encounter Henry James, Oscar
Wilde, and of course Goethe, but Hazzard's concern is primarily
with the Naples of our own time--often violently unforgiving to
innocent tourists, but able to transport the visitor who attends
patiently to its rhythms and history. A town shadowed by both the
symbol and the reality of Vesuvius can never fail to acknowledge
the essential precariousness of life--nor, as the lover of Naples
discovers, the human compassion, generosity, and friendship that
are necessary to sustain it.
Beautifully illustrated by photographs from such masters as
Henri Cartier-Bresson and Herbert List, "The Ancient Shore "is a
lyrical letter to a lifelong love: honest and clear-eyed, yet still
fervently, endlessly enchanted.
"Much larger than all its parts, this book does full justice to
a place, and a time, where 'nothing was pristine, except the
light.'"--"Bookforum"
"Deep in the spell of Italy, Hazzard parses the difference
between visiting and living and working in a foreign country. She
writes with enormous eloquence and passion of the beauty of getting
lost in a place."--Susan Slater Reynolds, "Los Angeles Times"
"The two voices join in exquisite harmony. . . . A lovely
book."--"Booklist," starred review
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