A Literary Tour of Italy

by Tim Parks

Overview

An acclaimed author of novels and short stories, Tim Parks—who was described in a recent review as "one of the best living writers of English"—has delighted audiences around the world with his finely observed writings on all aspects of Italian life and customs. This volume contains a selection of his best essays on the literature of his adopted country.

From Boccaccio and Machiavelli through to Moravia and Tabucchi, from the Stil Novo to Divisionism, across centuries of history and intellectual movements, these essays will give English readers, and lovers of the Bel Paese and its culture, the lay of the literary land of Italy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781846883910
Publisher:	Bloomsbury USA
Publication date:	11/29/2016
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.60(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Tim Parks is the author of fourteen novels, including Europa, Destiny, Cleaver, Sex Is Forbidden and Painting Death, all of them translated into many languages. As well as being a novelist and the author of several works of non-fiction, Tim is the acclaimed translator of books by Moravia, Calvino, Machiavelli, and other Italian writers. He's a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books. His last book, Italian Ways was published by Harvill Secker.

Editorial Reviews

09/12/2016
The title of this essay collection from Parks, a critic (Italian Ways) and novelist (Painting Death), is a bit of a misnomer: its selections cover artistic movements such as the neo-impressionist style divisionism, and political figures such as Garibaldi and Mussolini, as well as literature. The essays begin with ruminations on Dante’s Inferno and continue through such familiar names as Boccaccio and Machiavelli before embarking on a more intensive tour of the 20th century. Parks is an incisive essayist with a clear eye for detail, a sense for pacing, and an ability to arrive swiftly at the heart of a subject. In one of the best essays, “Fascist Work,” discussing the artist Mario Sironi, Parks convincingly explains what makes a work of art fascist. He understands Machiavelli’s “scandal” as being his argument that leadership “cannot be governed by the ethical codes that most of us seek to observe.” Every essay illuminates its subject—fascism, Italian literature, translation (one of Parks’s specialties)—but readers will wish for more dates: the publication dates of classic titles such as Alberto Moravia’s The Conformist and Giorgio Bassani’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis are more than incidental, since Parks’s perspective is so history-driven. Overall, these insightful essays both delight and inform and should be especially valuable to those looking for an intelligent entrée into Italian literature. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

There are many ways of touring the land that Italians, following Dante, call il bel paese, and Parks is as perceptive a guide as could be wished.” - TLS

“Erudite and well-written” - Financial Times

“He remains the best interpreter of Italian ways in English” - Sunday Herald

“It is an immensely learned, elegantly written rehearsal of the significance of 23 Italian writers, from Dante in the 13th century to Antonio Tabucchi in our own, and as such it amounts I think to an assessment of the Italian sensibility as a whole. Nobody is better qualified than Tim Parks to guide us through such an experience . . . He can be as entertaining as he is scholarly, and he is evidently profoundly concerned with the relationship everywhere between art and life.” - The Spectator

“Tim Parks’s new volume of essays goes where it is inaccessible to the casual tourist, deep into the literature” - The Independent

From the Publisher

Sept. 8, 2016
A prolific novelist, memoirist, literary critic, and translator investigates “Italy’s collective imagination.”British expat Parks (Life and Work: Writers, Readers, and the Conversations Between Them, 2016, etc.), a resident of Italy for the last 35 years, reflects on the nation’s literature and history in this gathering of insightful essays and reviews. All previously published, the pieces focus on writers (Giacomo Leopardi, Eugenio Montale, Ignazio Silone, and Natalia Ginzburg), a few artists (the modernist divisionists and Mario Sironi, championed by the fascists), and three monumental political figures: revolutionaries Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi and dictator Benito Mussolini. Parks aims “to pin down what it is that makes Italian life so characteristically charming and frustrating—so rich on the one hand yet irretrievably stalled on the other.” Italian identity, he concludes, comes from a sense of belonging to groups such as family, friends, region, church, and political party. He often takes issue, therefore, with biographers who fail “to draw on the disciplines of psychology and anthropology” to examine the personal and historical contexts of their subject’s life. He rescues Garibaldi, Italy’s heroic unifier, from a biographer who refuses to “give an account of the moments in battle when Garibaldi’s decisions did affect the course of history” and “has nothing to say about the passions that moved him.” In an astute preface to an edition of The Prince, Parks portrays Machiavelli as “a worldly man and compulsive womanizer” who was imprisoned and tortured, charged with conspiracy. Forced into isolation, he became “fascinated by the way certain personality traits can mesh positively or negatively with certain sets of historical circumstances.” That is a fascination of Parks’, as well, informing his review of several biographies of Mussolini, all of which, in his estimation, fail to offer “a serious psychological study of this unusual mind.” Several pieces—on Sironi, Moravia, and Curzio Malaparte, for example—provocatively probe the connection of artists and writers to fascism. The author’s deep familiarity with Italian culture informs these intelligent, perceptive essays.

Kirkus Review