Product Description

An Englishman, married to an Italian, is informed of the suicide of his son. He decides to leave his wife of 30 years standing in this exploration of marriage and destiny whilst treading a narrow line between sanity and psychosis.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #174389 in Books
• Published on: 2000-07-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 248 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
This complex and intriguing novel opens with an Englishman learning that his only son has committed suicide in Italy. His first emotion is not grief, but rather relief as he realises that he will at last be able to leave his wife to whom he has been bonded by their son's schizophrenia. As they travel back to Italy the narrator describes how his flamboyant wife, who both appals and delights him, lapses into "miserable and uncooperative mutism" as punishment.

Tim Park's protagonist is a fifty-something, disillusioned political journalist who is trying to write a book on Italian national character in order to predict the behaviour of the inhabitants of his adopted country, especially his wife's. "You cannot marry a woman in one language and think in another", he muses, convinced that what he once found vehement and exciting about her, and indeed Italy, has been revealed as shallow and distasteful. If he can discover how national character determines choice, then he will be able to act differently and leave. Mistaken for German in Italy and American in England, the Englishman articulates beautifully the dilemma of living in another tongue, seeing it as a "faulty contact" which inhibits true understanding. "The language is national destiny", he decides and so he and his wife are destined to confound one another.

Destiny is a highly astute study of the inappropriate behaviour that accompanies grief as well as a blistering account of a marriage of peers, of the failings of commitment and monogamy and of the endless loss and retrieval of love. The fractured, claustrophobic narration perfectly suits the narrator's ugly confusion and sublime lucidity as he evades then shoulders responsibility for his mistakes. An intelligent, enthralling novel about the meaning of identity and our maddeningly conflicted motivations. -- Cherry Smyth

Customer Reviews

Quite impressive
While reading this I was certain that I had stumbled across the most original living writer in English literature. I really enjoyed the style and the 'atmosphere' that the book put me in: books which are constructed, as this one, in a manner of direct thought, force you to move to a lower state of consciousness to absorb them: this cannot be read in a lucid state of consciousness. What is remarkable is the manner in which sentences jump between time frames, and quite credibly, as if they are direct transcriptions of actual thought, and each chapter seems to follow both the narrative of the present-time events, and reminiscences of the recent-past. This is how the story is told, and the technical virtuosity is quite impressive and consistent how Parks jumps between the two story lines to create one whole of the narrator's life, and it is an effort (though pleasurable) to keep up, as it were, of exactly where the narration is in the sphere of time. That is what I have to say in terms of technique and style; in terms of narrative and form, I found, after having read the book, that Parks was almost forcing his plot into a certain mould, one that might suit the judges of the Booker prize, say. This dissapointed me; the style became, by the end of the book, somewhat mechanical, and certain 'unrealist' plot occurences 'forced' the book in a direction I was unhappy with. That said, I do still consider Parks to be a highly original writer; you will need to be able to appreciate 'internal' writers such as Woolf and Sebald to enjoy this - or else you will quickly become impatient.

The furious contents of one head beautifully displayed.
Although the narrator, a man viewing the wreckage of his marriage and the suicide of his son, is not especially sympathetic - few characters are - and little effort is made by the author to make his obsessions and concerns chime with those the reader may be supposed to share, the writing - very short on relief and long on paragraphs - seems so close to the act of thinking, or the way that thoughts present themselves unbidden to us, that I found the experience of reading this enormously pleasurable. Entering so fully into the mind of someone like the narrator, whose helpless pleasure lies more in pinning down past events with words inside his head than in ever effectively acting upon the present, makes for a very absorbing, intense sort of reading. It may perhaps require a reader with similar tendencies towards indecision and endless internal monologue to fully warm to the book - but for those who delight in this sort of thing, this is definately the sort of book they will delight in.

One of the Best Novels of 1999
How this virtuoso performance by Tim Parks could have been passed up by the Booker judges is beyond this reader. Parks writes what is arguably the finest novel of this year. Chris Burton, the protagonist, represents a character study that is one of the finest in contemporary fiction. A reader has to go back to the 1950s and Michel Butor's "A Change of Heart" to find anything similarly accomplished.

Highly recommended!