The City That Never Sweeps
Shirley Hazzard broods on the piquant allure of Naples
Michael Gorra
The Ancient Shore:
Dispatches from Naples
by Shirley Hazzard and Francis Steegmuller
University Of Chicago Press
$18.00 List Price
The picture “dissolves to life—and I enter a passageway of a street,” cobbled with lava, and the lunchtime air full of a “savage drum-roll of descending grilles” over one storefront after another. So in the opening pages of her 1970 novel, The Bay of Noon, Shirley Hazzard sends her young narrator on a walk through the historic center of Naples. Jenny Unsworth has come to Italy to work as a translator for nato, but she has
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