Short takes

'For sheer enjoyment, try this trip taken by Jerry Marlow and his fellow pedagogues, pluse their supporting, largely female, student body, from Milan to the European Parliament in Strasbourg…Doffing his hat to Joyce and Beckett, Parks really hits his stride'
The Mail on Sunday

'The triumph of the work is its discomforting portrayal of an agile mind hampered by the twin shackles of longing and disgust…Europa is that rare beast, a book which demands and withstands a second reading'
The Daily Telegraph

'Europa is a full and rounded and very disturbing novel…guaranteed to intrigue and more often than not, have you squirming and wincing'
The Times

Pricks and Kicks

By Gabriele Annan, New York Review of Books, 5 November, 1998

Europa is a virtuoso tragicomic tour de force, very funny, with quirky, appealing characters, an unpredictable story, and a shocking denouement. Stream-of-consciousness embraces philosophical reflection and running - no, galloping - commentary. Details of behavior and environment are, pungently, observed as they race by, and Parks's mimicry can compete for accuracy and comicality with the very best stand-up comedians - Woody Allen, say. Jerry isn't Jewish, but like Allen he is a schlemiel with too much brain and self-awareness for his own good.
The sentences of his inner monologue go on for entire paragraphs and the longest paragraphs can tumble on for pages. Yelps of recognition, dismay, pain, rage, and urgent sexual need bob along on the torrent. It's like rafting down the Upper Rhine - except that such metaphors are off limits because at the heart of this novel is a polemic against cliché, with special reference to the sanctimonious new clichés of European Union- consociativismo, for instance, a loathsome Italian coinage for 'the sad glue that keeps couples and countries and coach parties together'. Or even worse, 'United Colors of Benetton.' Actually, the topical clichés of Europe merely reflect the cliché-ridden condition of mankind as a whole.
The tempo of Park's prose mimics the journey of a chartered bus across the Alps with its endemic torture of piped music, piped video and 'the strong and nauseating smell of plastics and synthetic upholstery.' It begins when Jerry joins a delegation of foreign-language teachers and students from Milan University. They travel overnight to Strasbourg to protest to the European Parliament about Italy's discrimination against foreign 'lectors' or instructors, who don't have tenure, whereas their Italian colleagues do. Jerry has no interest in the cause. He has always seen
this job…as a mere stepping-stone, a sensible way-station, an income to tide me over, while I picked up my ticket to somewhere else (until, like my marriage, it became a desert island, a place of loathed and ultimately terrifying convenience), if I lose my job, I will have lost the last element in life, after wife and daughter and mistress that gave me any sense of role and identity.
Jerry feels no guilt about leaving his wife with that cruel explanation that he found her repulsive. He loves his daughter, whose eighteenth birthday coincides with the expedition to Strasbourg and makes him feel guilty about missing her party; his mistress left him two years ago. Still, there he is, with his beady eye on his fellow passengers. All but two of the students are girls, mostly very young, naive and touchingly well-intentioned, as well as sexually desirable. They have been collectively christened 'totties' by Jerry's crude and lecherous English colleague Colin, who makes relentless passes at them and draws Jerry into some deplorable 'tottie-talk'.
Jerry is there because of his former mistress, a French lector and a leading spirit in the delegation - desirable, enormously sexy, intelligent, ambitious, and a Euro-prig. Their affair ended when Jerry hit her after discovering that she was two-timing him with a German lector named Georg. She defended her infidelity on the grounds that Georg was having a grim time looking after his little boy while his wife lay incurably sick in the hospital; going to bed with him was part of 'the mosaic of friendship' (a prize priggish cliché) and it was immature of Jerry to object. Jerry has been pretending that he has got over her, but he knows he hasn't and 'that the very instant I took this decision was also the instant I recognized and recognized that I had always recognized that coming on this trip was one of those mistakes I was made to make.'
Until the last sentence in the book, Jerry never names his former lover.

If I never say her name, although I think of little else but her, it is partly because that name is still so powerful that its very articulation causes an emotional seizure, an immediate tension that I feel physically, but also and perhaps more importantly, because by never saying it I keep it that way, I prolong its power, I prevent its dilution in repetition, the way a word like Europe has been diluted into thin air with all the times everybody says Europe this and Euro that, though once it was the name of a girl a god became a bull to rape and half the heroes hoped to find.

The brilliance (well…) of this passage lies in the ingenious but legitimate way it links Parks's two main themes: the eternal one of obsessive love, and the topical one of the clichéification of Europe, plus the recurring motif of the classical scholar's nostalgia for the ancient world:

the way they lived inside the natural world, at home in it in a way we never can be, the patterned constellations over their heads throbbing with deities, the deep wells they drew their water from encircled by serpents, and not a single holy text (I'm thinking of pre-Orphic times) or social manifesto, or sniff of political correctness to slip a credit card between themselves and the sacred.
Apart from the mannerly Georg and the unmannerly Colin, the lectors on the journey include a harsh Greek lady, a bland German surgeon's wife, a smug Irish novelist, and a terribly correct Italian avvocato not too correct to bed one of the students. All these characters are ironically seen to a Dickensian extent, and it seems a miracle that Parks has found room for them (and a few others) in a mere 262 pages. Even more lecherous and chronically plastered than Colin is Vikram Griffiths, a voluble Welshman with an Indian mother. He claims to be the only colored member of Plaid Cymru, the Welsh nationalist party, and is the instigator and organiser of the protest trip. He has two divorced wives, an analyst, no money, a custody struggle over his child, disgusting catarrh, and a smelly dog on whom his otherwise rejected love centers and who slobbers all over the bus. In spite of these inconveniences, Jerry manages to see and convey Vikram's considerable charm and even greater pathos, and the others see it too; besides political correctness compels them to make an effort to love the representative of not just one but two minorities.

The second part of Europa opens in Strasbourg with a memorable description of cafard. Jerry is lying on his hotel bed.

All I can see is that headlights pass at regular intervals stretching and flitting over wall and ceiling, their yellow glow softened by the synthetic mesh of the curtains, but with swift shards, as though of unpleasantly illuminating thoughts, where the material doesn't pull to at the top. Attended by a slight rise and fall in the background swell of traffic noise, the intermittent brightness passes, a split second before the auditory peak, over a reproduction of something from Picasso's blue period, a reproduction so flat in its printed melancholy and so poorly framed in what must be extruded poly-something-or-other, it immediately makes you aware of all the other reproductions of famous paintings bought in bulk no doubt for all the other fifty or so rooms of this prefabricated, out-of-town hotel so suitable for accommodating large and unprosperous groups of coach travellers - pensioners, strikers, pilgrims…

There follows a meditation on Picasso's lovers in their cheap reproduction, which ends:

You can see these two are at the thousandth attempt now, I mean at recapturing whatever it was, they're years, if not decades on, so that it's not really a conscious seeking they're engaged in any more, they're not expecting to recapture anything, but more a sort of mysterious imposition, this clasping, this rehearsal of intimacy, this placing of cheek against cheek, a blue and green ceremony they have forgotten the origins of, like the ceremonies Plutarch mentioned in Quaestiones Graecae and suggested were the most faithfully observed of all, the ones nobody could understand or explain to him any more.

Vikram gets so outrageously drunk during the delegation's dinner in Strasbourg that the lectors decide he is unfit to present their petition and they elect Jerry to do it instead. And so he does, stringing together clichés with the best of them. His excellent performance is interrupted by a shriek (in Greek) from the Greek lector: the humiliated Vikram has been found hanging in the lavatory of the parliament building. Even this is not quite the end of the story.
After identifying the body, Jerry spends four hours alone in the Parliament's piously nondenominational Meditation Room:

The thing that most terrified the Greeks was they would be deceived by the gods. They would receive a message. A dream, an oracle. Attack now, Agamemnon. Clearly it was a message. Clearly it came from the gods. But it was the wrong message. It led to defeat. Or they would be invaded by a passion Phaedra's for Hippolytus. Clearly it was an invasion.- Clearly it came from outside, from the gods. But it was the wrong passion. It led to madness. To suicide. As whole nations can be led to madness and suicide sometimes, on the back of the wrong dream, the wrong passion.

Jerry, of course, doesn't believe in the gods (though he may wish he did): he puts Vikram's death and his own infatuation down to an 'enzyme shift' (this is a complete misreading, but never mind). The only difference, for Parks, is in the nomenclature: God the Father, the Greek pantheon, enzymes - it's all the same, ineluctable and beyond human control.

Magical misery tour

Adam Mars-Jones - The Observer, 6 April 1997

Plot précis - a group of disaffected teachers seek legal redress - is peculiarly unkind to Tim Parks's remarkable new novel, Europa. The characters, variously English, French, German and Welsh, are Europeans not only in the passive sense of coming from a particular set of countries, but also as a matter of profession - they teach at the University of Milan. In the course of the book, they seek to escalate their European identity to a new level by taking a bus journey to Strasbourg and arguing their case (that they are discriminated against by their employers, who deny them the privileges that would be enjoyed by Italian nationals) in front of the Petitions Committee of the European parliament.

The narrator of Europa is Jerry Marlowe, who only agreed to come because he knew she would be on the bus, the woman for whom he left his wife, after the most intense affair of his life (though things were never the same afterwards). The motives of his colleagues are not necessarily very elevated - various strains of careerism, and in the case of the men the lure of young female company, since a number of attractive students are lending support - but Jerry's are a particularly miserable cocktail. He wants to show her that he's over her (the character is named only on the novel's last page), he feels a residual obsessive curiosity about her current loves and he wants to rediscover intensity even if salting his own wounds is the only way he is able to do it. These elements - the pilgrimage to a place of bureaucracy, the failed romance - Parks presents with an unusual intensity. Jerry's life is a flailing disaster for the same reasons that the trip is a piece of cynical politicking and the European union a monument to wishful thinking and hidden interests. These connections seem arbitrary and strained at first, but come to take on real force.

What does it mean to be a citizen of Europe when the Bundesbank can destabilise the lira, as has just happened when the coach leaves Strasbourg? The characters react not as European citizens, but as people whose exchange rate when buying Swiss francs to spend in the cafeteria of a service station has been sabotaged, or (in one case) as someone whose savings in a Spanish bank have abruptly swollen their power over domestic property on the outskirts of Milan.

Jerry has noticed that his colleagues, for all their residence in Italy, return home for specific purposes - as she goes back to Rheims to have her teeth fixed. In a different version of bad faith, his own memories of conversations with her conducted mainly in French - have been filed away in English. The soundtrack of passion has unobtrusively been dubbed. But then bad faith is the only faith we have. Better to start from that assumption than live a life of illusions.

There is a specific hypocrisy about the appeal to the Petitions Committee: the petitioners are demanding to be treated by the university as European citizens with rights equal to those of Italian nationals, but as a matter of tactics they will restrict their arguments to Italy. Otherwise, it might be noticed that Italian terms of employment are unusually favourable - better than the petitioners would find at home. No one has any more community feeling than the maligned Bundesbank, just a greater hope of escaping detection.

This is Euroscepticism with a philosophical foundation, based not on fear of the Other, but justified mistrust of the Self. The triumph of Europa is the grandeur and finality of its rhetoric. Jerry's loss of faith in anything but bad faith is made to seem remarkably like the shutters clanging down on the whole enlightenment.

Epigraphs to sections of the novel cite heavyweight pessimists: Zola, Cioran and Beckett. Very much in evidence, though not referred to directly, is the Austrian arch-pessimist Thomas Bernhard as much a maximalist as Beckett was ever a minimalist. At times Bernhard's supremely powerful ghost seems about to wrestle Tim Parks to the floor, but then as Harold Bloom has pointed out in his speculations on the anxiety of influence, it is only the powerful writers who are worth taking on, and Parks is still standing at the end of the book.

Anyone who uses the long sentence to express misanthropy is likely to be in Bernhard's shadow, but in the case of Europa the homage could hardly be more clear. Here are the same arias of denunciation, the same rancorous idealism raging against the modern world and all its debasements, the same disgusted relish of cliché (last, but by no means, as they say, least') the same obsessive mulling over past events.

Every now and then in the course of their vast paragraphs, Bernhard's narratives would direct their anger inwards, but it was possible to feel that they were turning the knife on themselves largely for a change of pace. Parks goes further in this line: one passage in particular in Part Two which starts off as a savaging of anonymous hotel décor with particular reference to a reproduction Picasso on a wall in Strasbourg, move on from Bernhard pastiche to something new, with Jerry's realisation that his hatred of the image is in part a projection of something he hates in himself.

At one point, Tim Parks comes up an exemplary description of his borrowed method when he refers to 'those increasingly frequent conversations where one feels that one must reconstruct the entire history of Western thought just to know the undesirable parts down again, say absolutely everything in order to say anything at all. Parks derives from Bernhard a rigour and a thickness of texture highly unusual in British writing, a mixture not conventionally readable, but thoroughly compelling.

Towards the end of the book, there is a slight concession to melodrama - when a writer gets as much as this out of minor incidents, conventional plot developments seem redundant, and Bernhard for one hardly bothered with them. But Tim Parks must be congratulated on a major feat of literary digestion, and a snake that has eaten a goat is entitled to a few hiccups.

Perhaps I can just add my ha'pennny's worth on the relationship with Bernhard. First, there were elements typical of Bernhard already in my writing, particularly Goodness, before I came across the Austrian author. So, no doubt he came as a revelation, and clearly his voice is so strong that one thinks twice before borrowing from it. Three things persuaded me it was possible. First, I had read this German author in Italian, whereas I write in English. This translation at two removes guarantees a certain transformation. Second, Bernhard never wrote about sex, and this story is a story of erotic obsession. Third, aside from Holzfellen, Bernhard, as Mars Jones remarks, uses little plot. My work has always been extremely densely plotted, and this because I actually feel life is dense with surprise and incident and revelation. In this regard it is a misreading to suggest that there is 'a concession to melodrama' at the end of the book. The narrator's memories are full of melodramatic incident, his state of mind constantly threatens a possible explosion in action. The irony that that action eventually comes from elsewhere, unpredicted by anybody, only suggests that perhaps other individuals close to the narrator are going through the same mental hell, perhaps worse, without his being aware of it, as no one is aware of his predicament.

Review of "Europa" by Tim Parks
by Katherine A. Powers (Boston Sunday Globe, Sept 27, 1998)

The English ex-patriot, Tim Parks, has written nine novels since 1985, works that are similar to each other chiefly in being brilliant black comedies, each progressing a little further in its investigation of the nature of identity and the existence--even possibility--of self. If this does not seem promising material for comedy, let me say that his heroes are both keen observers of the follies of others, and as unlovely a collection of selfish men as you could hope to meet anywhere. Their observations, their taking of umbrage and sublime self-absorption make me laugh, but have offended readers who are deaf to irony. Because of this, I guess, Parks's reputation has been made less by his ambitious and astonishing novels, than by two memoirs of living in Italy: "Italian Neighbors" (1992) and "An Italian Education" (1995). Fine and entertaining, and penetrating, as far as they go, these little books don't stop you dead in your tracks as the novels do. Still, it may be that Parks's reputation as preeminently a novelist has finally been secured with his having been shortlisted for the Booker Prize last year for "Europa," just now being published here.
In this novel, Parks has moved from black to bleak comedy, setting it in that most boreal of places, the mind of a man undergoing what we like to call a mid-life crisis. Jerry Marlow is a low-ranking teacher of English at the University of Milan; he is 45 years old, divorced, and shattered from a disastrous love affair. He is on his way from Milan to Strasbourg on a bus with a group of teachers and student supporters whose mission is to present a petition to the European Parliament protesting their second-class status at the university. The whole thing makes him sick with its phoniness and irrelevance; but he's there because she's there, the woman who blasted his life, whose name we only divine at the novel's end.
What follows is not only an excursion into the vast mindscape of jealousy with its rich veins of loss, anger and disgust, but also a sustained meditation on modern awfulness. The novel might be considered a latter-day Lamentations against the exaltation of unity, standardization and replication, against the clap-trap of problem solving, consequenceless responsibility and the incessant moralizing that, when not utterly irrelevant, is fraudulent and self-serving to the core. Like the prophet Jeremiah, Jerry can't deplore the ways of the world without making brooding observations on his own suffering: his observations on the state of Europe resonate powerfully with his reflections on the history of his terrible love affair.
As he showed most spectacularly in his last novel, "Shear," Parks is a master at uniting character and plot with subtly recurrent themes, at deft allusions and resonances between inner and outer action. Here the themes are the large ones of unification and openness, so-called, in both Europe--where they are a travesty and a boondoggle--and in his love affair, where he had deluded himself into thinking the two of them as being one in spirit and passion, where she had insisted on "honesty." The novel is shot through, too, with smaller, more cunning themes, ones such as the role of Napoleon in both Europe and Jerry's tumultuous affair.
After somewhat heavy-going in the first half--during which it is hard to know what exactly this book is about--the novel suddenly snaps into focus and its themes coalesce. Standing in the square outside the "rigorously floodlit" cathedral at Strasbourg, Jerry is overwhelmed with revulsion for mass culture, his thoughts on it alternating and feeding off the memory of his having succumbed to the urge to reveal all to his wife, to come clean. That heartless act of supposed honesty and openness now appears identical in its speciousness with the sanitizing impulse of modern Europe: to neuter and make anodyne everything ancient and medieval by sandblasting, cleaning and illumination.
Looking at the cathedral's facade, he reflects that it is impossible "even to imagine these stony martyrs being in the gloom now, impossible to imagine these angels and gargoyles in a dark wind or under moonlight....Impossible to see them...potent in the gloom, sacred in darkness or starlight....These monuments have been neutralized by light,...Squares where people hanged and lynched and guillotined each other and, in general, committed all sorts of irremediable crimes, are now attractive areas of floodlit public art,... Apposite to this, he wonders, "Will I ever be able to sandblast and floodlight her image," and turn it "into an attractive, decorative landmark in my mental landscape[?] Will my wife ever be able to do the same with me...?" [154]
For all this light, events take a dark turn. Jerry's colleagues appoint him to be their spokesman before the Petitions Committee, delayed because of an emergency meeting on Bosnia. In a scene of ruthless bathos, Jerry relinquishes his integrity, invokes the spectre of Bosnia and gives an address of minding-boggling, cynical drivel. It is received rapturously, proving what Jerry, in his earlier, recalcitrant self on the bus, had observed as his fellow passengers surrendered themselves to "The Dead Poets Society, "we all enjoy feeling that we're on the right side and revelling in our sentiments." A final tragedy and a shocking revelation push the novel into the darkest region of irony. It is a triumph.

...plus a rare interview

This is Jasper Rees in, I think, the Independent

In Piazza delle Erbe, the market square in Verona, the sun is thawing the crisp mountain air, and shoppers ward against the chill with that barboured, tweeded look which northern Italians suppose to represent lo stile inglese. It so happens that a more authentic example of English dress sense is on the scene. Tim Parks has thrown on a pair of jeans that may soon collapse from exhaustion and a leather jacket whose better days perhaps coincided with those of the Capulet family. Later it will be warm enough to get in Parks's second car, meander up to a restaurant on a hill overlooking the city, and share a bottle of Soave. For now, a shot of caffeine is required. Given that he has on average two cappuccinos a day, this is something in the order of his 12,000th since he migrated to Italy 17 years ago.
Like sundry English writers before him, Tim Parks has alchemised fantasy into fact, and elected to live in Italy. And indeed he has taken the dream a good deal further than his forebears, and gone largely native: he has an Italian wife, three Italian children, a job in an Italian university, and two penetrative, crowd-pleasing books to his name about the complex business of being Italian. He sprinkles his English with nugatory Italianisms. "Ma..." he says at the beginning of sentences where he might once have said, "Well..." And the vowel sound in "no" has been shortened, in alignment with Italian pronunciation. As in, is this the life it appears to be, an act of escapism made flesh? "Ma ... no."
Of course it doesn't look like fantasy from the inside. Parks's two books on Italy - Italian Neighbours, followed by An Italian Education, which is out soon in paperback - could only have been written by someone dispirited by much of what he not only observes but is obliged, from the need to make money and bring up children, to participate in: buying a flat, getting on with family and neighbours, learning the ropes of parenthood all'italiano. He took off the blinkers and marvelled, not altogether approvingly, at the way Italian culture routinely allows public appearance and private reality - the lionisation of the family vs and the tumbling birthrate, for example - to co-exist in blissful contradiction.
The books made enough of an impression in Italy to turn their author into a celebrity who gets recognised in the street, in a way that an Italian who wrote a book about the British clearly would not. "I was on TV a lot," he says, "down in Rome every week. And the funny thing is it took me about three months to realise that it was a complete waste of time. The Italians are very manichean: they keep seeing their own activities in terms of virtues and vices, and they were eager for me to list those. I don't see them as in any way separate. Italian virtues, those things that please one, are in fact entirely wrapped up with their vices."
An intriguing split occurs within Parks's own literary personality. The two books about Italy tell of his own more or less comfortable integration into a social tradition that focuses on the hearth. "They were intended to be me at my most charming," he says. Then there are a series of novels in which families are seen to implode, marriages to combust, moral structures on which we all base our lives to have perilously rickety foundations. If they have an overarching design, his novels are almost all about the struggle to be good, or at least to appear to be, while at the same time giving in to appetite: that old Italian dichotomy. One novel is even called Goodness: in it a Thatcherite go-getter's predatory instincts are reined in by the birth of a disabled son, whose death he nonetheless lovingly plots. Cara Massimina and Mimi's Ghost, a pair of comedic romps set in Verona, chronicle the efforts of Morris Duckworth, a penniless English language teacher, to ingratiate his way into a rich local family even as he systematically murders its members. Shear tells of the age-old tug-of-war between wife and mistress in a quasi-thriller about geology.
In Europa, his latest novel, death and adultery are still on the menu. Jerry is on a coach bound for Strasbourg, where he, his fellow language teachers and a gaggle of supportive, mostly female students will petition the European Parliament to save their jobs. Among his fellow passengers are his French ex-mistress, whom he cannot bear to name, and the German academic who entered through the revolving door of her bedroom even as Jerry left by it at the end of an intellectually and sexually passionate affair. He is estranged from his Italian wife and his daughter, whose 18th birthday he is about to miss, and it's a symptom of his collapsing psyche and moral paranoia that he even suspects his daughter of having a lesbian affair with HER (as he calls his erstwhile inamorata). He refers to the girls on the coach as tottie, as he does to all casual encounters whom he can recall only by a distinguishing characteristic (Operatottie, Psychotottie). And all the while he gives vent to scepticism about the European ideal, centred in a building in Strasbourg to which these motley linguists are appealing not because they share that ideal but for the more squalidly animal motive of self-preservation.
So far, so Parks. Where Europa departs from its predecessors is in the extraordinary stylistic decision Parks has taken to drive the first-person narrative forward in sentences of epic length. It's the voice, often very funny, of an ungovernable obsession, of a restless, overheated intellect confronting its own ugliness and redundancy.
"I've been looking for a long time for ways to change stylistically," says Parks. "I wanted to find a voice that would really be new and different. It's a voice of obsession. And it's a voice of exclusion. Basically I was interested in dealing with a particular state of mind, the state of total disillusionment and outrage with just the simple fact that in this case is exemplified by the faithlessness of this woman, but also his own faithlessness and the way the world changes and the way it isn't what you wish it to be."
He is keen to establish that, although he teaches at the university of Milan, holds some of the same opinions as Jerry and has also lived through phases of depression, this is not his story. (The affair is actually a friend's). "In something fictional," he says, "who knows whether you're writing about yourself or not? The point is you are and you aren't. But I wouldn't be married to my wife if this was my story."
His fictional career, initiated soon after he and his wife Rita traded Acton for a quiet Veronese village, had an autobiographical beginning. Like Jeanette Winterson, he used an upbringing among charismatic Christianity in the north of England as source material for his debut. "Nobody was more religious than I. Baptised in the spirit, speaking in tongues, I've been there." He moved through "a period of radical atheism" which was still strong enough to ensure that his children skipped religious education - although his older daughter now goes to a catholic school.
The Parks family moved from Blackpool to London when he was ten. He went to Cambridge, then studied at Harvard, where he met Rita (who has translated several of his books into Italian). She made him swear that they would not go back to live in Italy. So, here they are, a thousand miles from the epicentre of the literary establishment at which the younger Parks used to nurse a certain resentment. Although Tongues of Flame won two literary prizes, and its successors have brought in more, the broader readership enjoyed by some contemporaries has somehow eluded his work. "Of course I used to be very very worried about that when I was 32. I was working my ass off doing commercial translations and figuring to myself, `If I got one of those hundred thousand quid advances I could spend more time reading.' Now I must say I worry about that very little. I'm so happy with the way I've set up my life at the moment, I don't really care what they think about me any more."
That contentment has several sources. He is writing a fulfilling series of long pieces for the New Yorker. He has just translated Ka, another of Roberto Calasso's vast mythological fictions (the first, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, was hugely lauded.) A series of essays on translating that distill his teaching in Milan are to be published this summer by Cassells. Cara Massimina, initially adapted by Dennis Potter only for the project to die with him, will now be made into a movie with the piping hot Jude Law in the title role. And Europa, a invigoratingly frank dispatch from the frontier of bathetic male middle age, is his best shot yet for a Booker nomination.
The one thing Parks does miss about England is the pub - "that whole business of living near a place where you could find maybe a few guys you knew and just kind of chat about football". So, having chatted his way through philosophy and literature and morality towards the dregs of the Soave, and in a segue perfectly natural to the Italian intellect, we move onto Paul Ince, the other prominent Englishman at work in northern Italy. "Good to see old Incey still very much Incey," says Parks, who had watched Ince's Internazionale play in midweek from his hotel in Milan. "I like his character. He's obviously crazy." In fact Parks seems to have located a mirror image in his footballing compatriot. "One of the things that upsets me about myself is that I get very heated in games, and that's why I sympathise with Ince, because I understand that he would like not to be an animal, but he is." And the same could be said of almost any of Parks's fictional voices, raging against the crowded midfield of experience.

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