The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard with Baldovar 923 Bianco

Among all the books I’ve read and now keep stacked inside my apartment, there are several that possess such a kinetic, expansive, and rigorous energy they can be said to be the rotational center of my bookshelf. Meaning, if (or when) I slide one of these books from its delicately nestled alphabetical place, I will find myself quickly absorbed in its depths. Or, in the case of Shirley Hazzard, whirling through her cosmic feat of a novel: The Transit of Venus. As a novel it is sweeping— trailing several characters over the trajectory of many decades, rising and sinking—, acrobatic—pulled along by the tinge and texture of image, beauty, and history, turning inward and outward often in the same sentence,— precisely glimpsed, as if “every particle of light is usual, daily, and at the same time a miracle,” and, if you posses the nerve to float along her “complex stillness,” it is a novel that will most certainly leave you, the reader, gasping by nightfall. (And likely several times througho