my view of it...

After I had finished Europa but before it came out, the publisher Harcourt Brace asked me to write a piece for a book called Men on Divorce. They had had some success with an earlier title Women on Divorce and they wanted a repeat: basically men telling (they used the word 'sharing') the true story of their divorce, its reasons and horrors, etc. I replied politely explaining that, amazingly, I was not divorced, but suggesting that people who stayed married maybe did so because they had thought more about divorce than others. I would be happy to contribute a piece, I said, so long as I didn't have to say anything about my own life. They agreed. I rewrote the story behind Europa, a true story of adultery and divorce, but this time in essay form. It was a revelation. I became terribly excited by the way, over a distance of maybe ten to fifteen pages, you could make intellectual reflection, quotation, and a good story fizz together to generate an entirely different kind of excitement than that produced by story or essay alone. And so I put together this book, each piece written separately and where possible sold separately, but always with the whole in mind, each one trying to fasten on that moment when an experience suddenly illuminates a whole area of knowledge or reading we already had - Yes, now I understand it! - or alternatively the mental encounter when we discover a book, an author, who at last makes sense of experiences that had remained entirely enigmatic. There are also some good stories, I hope, and even better anecdotes. A ghost story, a tale of football and infidelity, an account of a trip with the Benetton public relations crew… As I worked - how wonderful it is when you come across a new way of doing things! - it seemed to me I had at last found a form which explained the relationship between a harrowing novel like Goodness and a rather amenable account of the world like An Italian Education. I wish I could do another like this, but somehow I know I can't.

...and the reviews

Short takes

'Discursive and intuitive…there are 13 pieces, all worth lingering over, leaving you with the feeling you might have if you'd spent the night drinking on a warm café terrace discussing with some well-disposed intellectuals the meaning of everything'
The Independent

'Literary essays with all the clarity and sensual detail of great fiction'
The Observer

'Each essay displays a humanity, grace and lucidity that illuminates his writing…Duty or diversion, glory or mundanity: Parks teases out the implications these weighty concepts have on our lives. That he succeeds is due to his skill as a storyteller and his lightness of touch in meting out his considerable erudition'
The Independent on Sunday

Tales Out of Italy

Tim Parks's meditative essays owe a lot to his life abroad.

By Robert Grudin, New York Times Book Review, 2 May, 1999

WHILE many contemporary poems and stories seem to strain for novelty and sophistication, the essay is a short form that imposes no such ambitious requirements(don't agree at all!). Readers of essays ask only for an interesting subject, approached in a manner that engages our attention - which may be why, paradoxically, the results can be so pleasing]y inventive and urbane.
"Adultery: And Other Diversions," Tim Parks's outstanding new collection, is an elegant demonstration of the freedom and power of the essay form. In writing about this book, Parks has modestly renounced any claim to originality of ideas; instead, citing Schopenhauer, he has re- solved to investigate the connection between "ideas, which have been fixed by mere words, and the real knowledge we have acquired through perception." Thus he sets out to examine the relationship between moral constructs and the actual experience of life.
In exploring the difference between what people think and what they do, people frequently slide into storytelling. And what could be more natural for this accomplished translator, memoirist and novelist, whose most recent work of fiction, "Europa," was a finalist for the Booker Prize? Again and again in these 13 essays, a passage of storytelling provides an entry into a wide-ranging meditation on actions and ideas.
The title essay is a perfect example of this technique. Here Parks speaks to us as the confidant of Alistair, the central figure in the story that is about to unfold. Alistair, who teaches at an Italian university, is having an extramarital(don't you love that word!) affair with Chiara, a 33-year-old Italian widow. Over beer after games of squash, he enthusiastically confides the graphic details of their relationship. ("No erotic stone was left unturned," Parks reports. "I had to listen to it all.")
These emotional outpourings, as well as Alistair's anxious reports on the travails of his marriage, are the means by which Parks undertakes a careful analysis of the psychological dimensions of adultery. Alistair finds married life stale and unexciting. He meets Chiara at professional conferences all over Europe; their sex is cathartic and obsessive(quite a combination!). Alistair exults in his own mischief; he romanticizes Chiara as a soul mate and asks her to live with him. When she re- fuses and later reveals that she has been having affairs with other men, Alistair falls apart. The much-glorified adventure becomes a mess and then a trap.
What is illuminated here? Ac he charts the history of Alistair's affair (and the corollary history of Alistair's divorce), Parks uncovers a reality that subtly contradicts his own book title. For Alistair, adultery is not a "diversion" at all. Rather, it is a compulsive mission. an unconscious attempt to repeat the very cycle of events that created his marriage - and then made it fail. Though this insight into male eros is by no means original (as Parks admits), I've never seen it so tellingly expressed.
The other essays in this collection are less emotionally arresting than "Adultery" and more broadly allusive. Parks entitles each with a seemingly simple word ("Fidelity," "Glory," "Maturity,'' ''Destiny'' and so on), which he then subjects to a shifting array of perspectives. For example, "Europe" (which draws from the same material as his recent novel) opens as follows: "In the spring of 1993 I joined a coach trip from Verona to Strasbourg to present a petition to the European Parliament. My colleagues, fellow language teachers at the university, felt they were being discriminated against by the Italian authorities."
A number of university students, mainly young Italian women, come along on the trip, partly to support their professors, partly to enjoy a cheap holiday - and partly in hopes of having a fling. By introducing this sexual element, Parks sets up an ironic paradox that will dominate the essay, evoking the idea of a unified European justice and juxtaposing against it the human factors - in this case sexual and illicit - that make social unity and justice so difficult to achieve.
Without disrupting his narration, Parks manages to enlarge on the unity-disunity issue by making references to modern cinema, Horace's carpe diem, Plato's myth of civic unity, European exchange rates, 18th-century French history, a female student who complains of not having achieved equilibrio interiore, even a popular song called "You're a Myth for Me". These and other adroitly deployed details add richness to a provocative meditation in which political unity and disunity cease to be verbal constructs and are fully realized as human phenomena.
Parks's essays are almost all set in northern Italy, where he has lived and worked for some time. In this collection, as in "An Italian Educa- tion" and "ltalian Neighbors," his books about settling down in an adopted country, the scenes from the society around him are amusingly drawn, as are the vignettes from his family life. But even more interesting is the way in which Parks presents himself as both narrator and supporting character. A passage here, a hint there, gradually build a picture of this man as son, father, husband, writer and teacher - as an individual who must, like the rest of us, navigate his way through a world of change, challenge and temptation. His extended self-portrait is decorous but honest. This word "honest" is no small tribute. Though it is so often said to be simple, honesty is a notoriously difficult quality for a writer to sustain. To write honestly is not to avoid showy language but rather to be always aware of language's power to teach or to deceive.
"Rancour," the penultimate essay, is a brilliant example of Parks's acerbic self-knowledge. Here he not only admits but dramatizes his own professional bitterness, thrashing with a figurative walking stick (courtesy of Samuel Beckett) at writers he has idolized and envied. But in a characteristic flash of revelation, he goes on to show the essential importance of anger and jealousy in the creative process. Moving as usual from abstraction to experience, he locates the spark of creative activity in "the seductive, luminous, coercive, shadowy, genial and rancorous mind."
Art, he argues, "rearranges our mental space, imposes a vision.... With the best art one suffers a sense of inevitability - which is exactly the experience of the seduced at the moment they succumb." If that is the case, the "Adultery and Other Diversions" must rank among the most artful of seductions.

Marriage hurts. But what do we expect it to do? hmm

Scott Bradfield - The Observer, 6 December 1998

According to this smart, beautifully written book of essays, people don't live life so much as tell themselves stories about it. Stories about faithfulness and infidelity, love and hate, charity and rancour, redemption and loss. Taking his lead from Schopenhauer, novelist and travel writer Tim Parks sets out to explore whether people ever actually 'experience' the world at all. Perhaps they simply inherit ideas about it, and live their lives accordingly. In other words, interpretation may be much more than a feat of critical acrobatics. It may be the only true act of consciousness anybody ever knows.
Parks reflects on the spaces where books and life intersect. Armed with quotations from Yeats and Nietzsche, he tackles the formidable chaos of his daughters' bedroom, and wonders how old a man must grow before he starts being outdistanced by his children. He takes a trip to the European parliament with some fellow language teachers and a Penguin edition of Plato's Republic, while pondering both the nature of utopias, and the appropriateness of his train car's nickname, the 'Shag Wagon'. And he confronts the disheartening complacency of V.S. Naipaul at a literary conference, which causes him to recall his own apprenticeship in an Acton bedsit in the Eighties, pounding out novels nobody wanted to publish.
These are literary essays with all the clarity and sensual detail of great fiction. The ideas never grow too abstract from the world around them. And even the most philosophical speculations are made urgent by Parks's concern for those whose lives he uses to exemplify them. As the book's title makes clear, Parks's primary focus is the idea of marriage itself. The idea of a good marriage, of a bad marriage, and all the places people go when marriages don't work. As he argues in 'Destiny?, the 'family' isn't necessarily something people construct. Sometimes it's an idea which grabs hold of them and never lets go:
The parents of my own sister-in-law married, divorced, remarried, then divorced again. The mind is liquid, fickle. Who is not familiar with its sudden kaleidoscopic rearrangements of the past? Speaking of beliefs, causes, commitments, the ferocious Max Stirner was quick to scorn people for wanting nothing better than something they could enslave themselves to - religion, love, patriotism… and indeed it may well be that secretly e seek nothing more of marriage than to be securely locked away there, as many, entering some extravagant new supermarket, will close their minds and trust to old brand loyalties.
The son of evangelicals in northern England who no lives most of the year in Italy (I love that 'most of the year', as if I had houses elsewhere!), Parks writes well about men and women creating their own traditions, both inside their houses and inside their heads. But the most startling thing about his first book of essays is that most of them reflect upon the sort of rarefied topics that most intelligent readers spend their lives avoiding, and some might easily bear knotty titles such as 'the Role of Metafiction in the contemporary Family'. Yet despite such familiar subjects, the candour and clarity of Parks's prose makes this book as absorbing as any novel or travel-memoir. Like the work of Parks's obvious role models, Calvino and Calasso, Adultery and Other Diversions never remains simply a series of reflections about books. Life, filled with mess and convolutions, is always in it, spilling out at the seams. Whether Parks himself likes it or not.

purchases

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