The Evening of the Holiday — Shirley Hazzard (1966)
The Evening of the Holiday is a simple, beautifully written love story of a middle-aged, married Italian man (separated from his wife) and a young British woman abroad in Tuscany, Italy. While simple in plot, the novel beautifully and sympathetically captures the halting approach of these individuals to each other and the bittersweet understanding of the young woman that it will inevitably end — and that she has the burden of taking the decisive steps for both ends of the relationship.
The writing of the author, Shirley Hazzard, is spare and suggestive. She evokes the rhythm of the unidentified Tuscan town – of the café on the plaza, the annual festival of its patron saint, the local duomo, and the desultory summer heat of the local hotel where Sophie, the young woman, stays during a visit to her Italian relatives.
She opens the novel with a brilliant description of Tancredi, an architect in his 40s whose beautiful wife has left him (together with their children), as he forces himself, barely, to polite parlor conversation with an older couple visiting his sister on a hot afternoon. He resents the intrusion and the social effort he is obliged to make; after all, by rights as an Italian of professional class, he should have every afternoon to himself for rest. But, the older couple has brought along Sophie, who they apparently met several years earlier while she was in Italy for school. While Sophie is no great beauty, it seems to Tancredi that she may be worth pursuing, for, at the very least the chance of a diversion in his life.
Sophie, for her part, understands the situation, and goes along with his attentions, almost as a matter of politeness and perhaps some curiosity, but with no intention of engaging in an affair.
Most of all, I enjoyed Hazzard’s descriptions of the inner dialogue of Tancredi and Sophie during their conversations. While the descriptive writing of Hazzard is evocative of time and place, the dialogue is clipped and short as the characters hide their thoughts. In some ways, the conversation and inner voices remind me of Hemingway, with the mix of cryptic conversation, omniscient inner thought, and scene description. Here, the end of a chapter as Sophie refuses Tancredi’s first attempt at a kiss:
“I’ll be in the piazza tomorrow” he said – but without confidence, for the first time.
“Please,” she said. “I won’t come.”
The walls of the town were in sight over the slope of the road. He asked her: “Is this because I tried to kiss you?”
“No.” And for the first time she searched her thoughts to give him an honest reply. “It’s because, if things had been different, I would have let you.” The fields dropped away, and they entered the city by the Roman Gate.”
The affair stiltedly unfolds, but to no end, of course, because divorce in Italy at the time is not available. Sophie knows it must end, and she is the stronger of the two. She does what she must do.
Hazzard’s book is a brief 138 pages, written a half-century ago. It perceptively captures mood, a sense of place, the balance between obligation and opportunity, an appreciation of beauty, and the understanding of the poignancy of an affair that is impossible.
Note: The Evening of the Holiday was Hazzard’s first novel, published in 1966. She was born in Australia, spent time in many countries and eventually settled in New York City. Her 2003 novel, The Great Fire, won the US National Book Award.
Bob Fall 