We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think
Selected Essays
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- $29.99
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- $29.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This welcome volume assembles essays, three previously unpublished, and other nonfiction writing from Hazzard (The Great Fire.) Born in Australia in 1931, Hazzard moved to the United States in the early 1950s. Now best known for her novels, Hazzard also found a role in the '50s as a public intellectual, writing for such publications as the New York Times, the New Republic, and the Times Literary Supplement. The most visceral entries here are undoubtedly the five scorching essays on the United Nations (for which Hazzard worked when she first moved to New York City) and its secretary-general, Kurt Waldheim, in the 1970s, in which she excoriates the organization for cowardice and ineffectualness. Hazzard employs language like a knife, with precision and incisiveness, and though she uses words to pugilistic effect in the U.N. essays, she also employs them in glowing, contemplative, and joyous ways, whether to praise the writers Muriel Spark and Barbara Pym or to express her belief in the value of literature. What comes through most clearly is Hazzard's delight in the English language and its capacity for expression and communication. The concluding selections Hazzard's 2003 National Book Award acceptance speech and her remarks from a 2012 New York Society Library discussion provide a gracious end to a thought-provoking collection.
