'Disquiet'; 'The Ancient Shore'; 'The Taker'

Dispatches From Naples

Shirley Hazzard and Francis Steegmuller

University of Chicago Press: 144 pp., $18

If you haven't already discovered Shirley Hazzard (especially her novel "The Transit of Venus"), then you really owe me big time. Here are some of her best pieces, including a New Yorker essay by her late husband, literary critic Francis Steegmuller. Hazzard grew up in Australia. At age 15, she traveled to the Far East with her parents and lived there for several years. As a young woman working for the United Nations, she went to Naples in the 1950s. Hazzard was fascinated by the beauty, the postwar decay and the precariousness of life in the shadow of Mt. Vesuvius.

Deep in the spell of Italy, she 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:

"[T]hose who have never experienced solitude in a strange and complex place -- never arrived in the unknown without credentials, without introductions to the right people, or the wrong ones -- have missed an exigent luxury. Never to have made the lonely walk along the Seine or Lungarno, or passed those austere evenings on which all the world but oneself has destination and companion, is perhaps never to have felt the full presence of the unfamiliar."

Steegmuller's essay on being knocked down by muggers on motorcycles and of the warm, human care he received in an Italian hospital (in contrast to the care he received back home in New York) adds another easily surmountable obstacle to strengthen the couple's love for Naples and Italy, a place where a writer, any artist can flourish, a place "that still esteems the individual effort of art."

Disquiet

A Novella

Julia Leigh

Penguin: 122 pp., $13 paper

Enter the dreamscape; a place outside of time in a book with the barest outline of a plot. More moment than story; characters misshapen like formations in a desert, worn and warped by the things that have happened to them. They find themselves in a castle in rural France: their mother's castle, home of their childhood. Olivia comes with her two children, her arm in a sling, beaten up for the last time by a brutal husband (her mother, in her infinite if chilly wisdom, warned her). Her brother, Marcus, is also visiting with his wife, Sophie. Here's where it gets bizarre: Sophie clutches her recently stillborn baby to her breast. Ida, the old servant, throws a fit when the baby is lodged in the freezer.