Product Description

Drawing on anecdote and autobiography, Tim Parks explores various subjects, such as ghosts, Indian gods, Verona Football Club, adultery and the EC. The aim is to make the reader appreciate the relationship between intimate experiences and the larger world of ideas.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #453024 in Books
• Published on: 1999-09-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
This is a collection of pieces which lie somewhere between essays and narratives. The first is called "Adultery". It tells the story of the author's friend and squash partner who, after nine years of marriage, has an affair. The man is transformed by the romance of this new encounter. The writer feels its reverberations in his own life: what would happen if he had an affair? How can a marriage possibly remain exciting? His friend is risking everything, and for what? This is the starting point for Parks' journey of enquiry which takes in, amongst other areas, "Fidelity", "Maturity", "Europe", "Glory" and "Charity". He takes his subjects, which can sound dry, and spins them into a series of fascinating expositions which draw on personal, philosophical and cultural examples. Though he has a massive frame of reference, he doesn't wield his knowledge with bombastic authority. He is not interested in knowledge but in understanding experience, and when he calls in Wittgenstein or Shakespeare, they provide useful connecting tissue only where relevant to the issues in his own life. He teaches without didacticism and entertains while revealing truth. The book is funny, unpretentious and compelling, and combines the gravitas of philosophy with the thrill of good gossip. --Hannah Griffiths

Review
Writing with the simple, elegant style that brought him a Booker Prize nomination for Europa, Tim Parks delves into the extremes of passion and belief in a spellbinding range of essays that combine clarity, intellectualism and a sense of humanity. Through tales of adulterous friends, impassioned football fanatics and Indian gods, he crystallizes the moment when personal desire is confronted by, or is in union with, a wider ideology. This is a truly original collection of essays that charms and challenges in equal measure. (Kirkus UK)

Mixing meditation and the mundane, this collection of 13 essays (several of which appeared in the New Yorker) looks for philosophical inspiration in the quotidian, but sometimes finds only banality. The self-described task novelist Parks (Europa, 1998, etc.) has set himself here is "to dramatize an intimate relation between reflections that are timeless and the ongoing stories of our lives." In the best pieces, such as "Adultery" (the kind of awed and fearful musing on the seductiveness of extremes only an Englishman could write) or "Ghosts" (a delicately etched reflection on death and remembrance), Parks is letter-perfect. He combines the sensibility of a poet with a philosopher's ratiocination and a novelist's awareness of the world's profusion of exceptions and contradictions. But there are deep traps in mining the ordinary, and in at least a few essays, Parks falls in headfirst - for example, "Analogies," in which he contrasts a faltering Italian soccer team's luckless season with a friend's teetering marriage to utterly affectless and contrived effect. Elsewhere, such as in "Maturity," he flounders about desperately in domestic habitudes, trying to grasp at any passing profundity, no matter how little apropos. There is also a certain crimped, European Union smallness and dull homogeneity to some of the material. Parks may be a well-traveled Englishman living in Italy, but his Europe seems quietly dreary and uninflected. In essays such as "Europe," that is perhaps his unspoken point. The "end" of history has left us with only our own niggling, unsolvable, eternal problems, which seem almost more picayune now that they can no longer be juxtaposed against great events. But even when Parks is unable to focus or is focused too deeply on his own omphalos, his questing intelligence and humanity shine clearly through. A largely agreeable diversion. (Kirkus Reviews)

Customer Reviews

More than just the thinking person's Nick Hornby
I was recommending this excellent book to my family over Christmas. My mother knew him as the bloke who keeps writing in The Guardian about that Italian football team, and for my sister he was the author who occasionally appears on Radio 4's 'Home Truths' talking about his children who all have cute Italian names. Strange, because I tend to see him in rather more elevated terms as an acclaimed novelist and translator, champion of writers like Thomas Bernhard, Henry Green and Christina Stead... In this collection the down-to-earth and rarefied versions of Tim Parks come together - incidents in his life are the occasion for witty, perceptive and sometimes erudite analysis that would not quite work on Radio 4 (maybe Radio 3?) There's a great essay about translating Calasso, and a lovely one about a walk with his family in the mountains, and yes there is one at the end about going to watch Hellas Verona, but he's more than just the thinking person's Nick Hornby.

A curate's egg
A bit of a curate's egg this one. The first essay 'Adultery' is very good, but then you have to wade through increasing dross until you get to last four essays all of which are superb. It should have been a smaller book - but when it is good, it is very very good. Parks writes best when it is about his adulterous friends or his father (who would not have dreamt of being unfaithful - to woman or to God). The magic of 'Conformity', in which he tries and fails to work out how to explain to his son that it is wrong to hit his classmate, even if he talks so much it prevents him from listening to the teacher. Or 'Analogies', in which he compares a friend's affair and indecision over whether to leave his wife and children to the antics of the lowly football team they go to watch. Or 'destiny' - on the pain of having to choose between things, and thereby being fated to always feel one is missing out. What better analogy for the desire to be adulterous?!

delightfully witty
Adultery and other Diversions is a delightful essay whose witty prose allows the reader to have aboveall a reflexion on the act of writing, plus of course to enjoy Tim Parks's beautiful handling of different subjects. A book to read as soon as possible!