my view of it

Some twenty years after abandoning my PhD I found myself once again being invited to write a serious literary essay. As so often in my life the Italian connection was crucial. The New York Review of Books decided that I would be the appropriate person to write about Joyce, Svevo and Saba in Trieste. This was followed by an invitation to review a new translation of the poetry of Eugenio Montale. So difficult and exciting and above all dense were these poems, so problematic the idea of translating them, that this essay took me all of a year to put together. It was a year of reading, reading and re-reading the original and the translations and the voluminous notes until at last I felt they made a kind of sense to me, however elusive and arduous to articulate. It was also the year in which I decided that if there were more opportunities to write such essays, I would try to make each of them an engaging work in its own right, a narrative even, rather than the dry and cautious analysis of the academic publication. Montale convinced me, if only because he too was quite convinced, that the relationship between the artist's work and life is always immensely complicated, each feeding off the other, thwarting or enhancing the other, in all kinds of unexpected ways. My essays would find their energy in these conundrums.
Fortunately, the New York Review didn't confine me to things Italian. There were invitations to write about Borges and Rushdie, Saramago and Seth. Some people have asked why I didn't just choose my subjects myself, rather than always accepting commissions. But the excitement of the commission is precisely that of deciding how you think about a writer you may know little of. Sebald's novels, of which I knew nothing, were a wonderful discovery, Rushdie's recent work a huge disappointment. To understand as fully as possible why the books provoke such intense and different responses, turning them over and over in the mind, is always a pleasure and a huge challenge.
Not all the essays were written for the NYR. The New Yorker asked me to write about Dante, the London Review about Buruma. Not all the pieces are about literature. The Lancet commissioned me to review two books on the experience of schizophrenics, the NYR again wanted me to look at the paintings of Mario Sironi, the man who did most to create the images by which Italian fascism will always be remembered. Then there was the honour of being invited to write the introduction to a new edition of Henry Green's masterpiece Party Going, and again to Christina Stead's extraordinary novel Letty Fox, her Luck.
But enough of this. Here is a content list, and if you want to read the title piece just click here.

Dante - Hell and Back
Borges - The Universal Gentleman
Rushdie - Here Comes Salman
Leopardi - Surviving Giacomo
Sebald - The Hunter
Different Worlds - On translation
Seth - Sentimental Education
Verga - A Chorus of Cruelty
Buruma - Voltaire's Coconuts
Joyce, Svevo, Saba - Literary Trieste
Green - Party Going
Buzzati - The Enchanted Fort
Neugeboren - In the Locked Ward
Sironi - Fascist Work
Saramago - Sightgeist
Montale - A Prisoner's Dream
Bateson and Ugazio - Unlocking the Mind's Manacles
Stead - Christina Stead, Our Luck
Writerly Rancour - On the springs of creativity

...and the press

The Times

'At one point in this brilliant collection of essays, Parks uses a small add he has just read in his local Italian paper (for the services of a prostitute-cum-astrologer) to demonstrate the many logistical theological challenges posed by Dante's Inferno. It is entirely symptomatic of his imaginative and often extremely funny approach to literary criticism. His essay on Dante is the best I've read, placing the work in a worldwide, historical-literary context and offering examples of his continuing presence in modern literature. "Hell is gone," Parks declares, "but like New York's mental patients, the damned have been let loose among us." He is breathtakingly good on Borges and Beckett and does stunning demolition jobs of Salman Rushdie and Vikram Seth, whose work he dismisses as a "careful exercise in crowd-pleasing". An extremely tough critic, Parks writes with elegance and coruscating wit. It is difficult to find chinks in his argument.'

The Irish Times

A great writer on the great writers

by Gerry Dukes

To begin with a shameful admission: I have know Tim Parks in his capacity as the magnificent translator of the incomparable Robertp Calasso, but I have not read any of his nine novels or three previous non-fiction books (this is indeed a shameful admission!) Such negligence is unpardonable, but pardon is abjectly sought (not granted).
Calasso's The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, which Parks translated, was one of they key books of the 1990s, vivifying the mythological substratum that underlies nearly all of the imaginative production on literary culture. Parks's translation - accurate, faithful, plangent and rich - was deeply considered and self effacing, seeking and achieving the ideal transparency of the ideal translation.
No such effacement is evident here in these 19 essays. These are the records of Parks's direct engagement with other writers from Dante to Borges, Leopardi to Rushdie and many more in between. Parks's literary intelligence, his readerly skills are everywhere manifest and clear. Rushdie and Seth - the eastern pretenders - are presented as showy performers, all glitz and few literary guts. Ishiguro - the grossly overrated far eastern pretender - never peeps above the horizon at all.
One of the great joys of this book is Parks's easy conversancy with the main tributaries of European writing - or more accurately, with writing in European languages. He is a much at home writing about Henry Green as he is about GW Sebald or José Saramago. To read Parks in full flight is to be plugged into an enterprise considerably more satisfying than the aridities of the common agricultural policy (I should hope so! and more rewarding than the intricacies of monetary union. Aesthetics, in the long run, is preferable to economics, Kant is not cant, but Galbraith is.
The greatest joy is that Parks, at his most acute and serious or mischievous - the terms are almost synonymns in this case - measures writerly practice from Dannte onwards, against the performance of Samuel Beckett. No further endorsement of these great essays is needed (though the writer might welcome them). Read them and be edified.

purchases

If you want to buy this book, those in Europe click here and those in the States here. You'll get taken directly to the appropriate Amazon page.