Product Description

Overweight and overwrought, Howard Cleaver, London's most successful journalist, abruptly abandons home, partner, mistresses and above all television, the instrument that brought him identity and power. It is the autumn of 2004 and Cleaver has recently enjoyed the celebrity attending his memorable interview with the President of the United States and suffered uncomfortable scrutiny following the publication of his elder son's novelised autobiography. He flies to Milan and heads deep into the South Tyrol, fetching up in the village of Luttach. His quest: to find a remote mountain hut, to get beyond the reach of email, and the mobile phone, and the interminable clamour of the public voice. Weeks later, snowed in at five thousand feet, harangued by voices from the past and humiliated by his inability to understand the Tyrolese peasants, he relies on for food and whisky, Cleaver discovers that there is nowhere so noisy and so dangerous as the solitary mind.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #347866 in Books
• Published on: 2007-02-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Sunday Telegraph, rev'd by Sally Cousins
`A vividly told story, with terrific local colour, is also a
superb character study'

From the Publisher
Profound and comic, the story of London TV journalist and interviewer Harold Cleaver, who suddenly walks away from his life to hide in the mountains of the Tyrol.

About the Author
Tim Parks studied at Cambridge and Harvard. He lives near Verona with his wife and three children. His novel Europa was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and Judge Savage was longlisted in 2003.

Customer Reviews

Superb novel
Cleaver, like the fairly similar "Judge Savage" before it, is a wonderful insight into a troubled mind as it tries to evaluate its past. Cleaver, a famous television presenter, escapes into the Italian mountains to live entirely alone for several months after his son releases an "autobiography" of sorts in which he openly criticises every aspect of his father's life before killing him off at the end.

Alone with his thoughts, Cleaver allows his mind to wander through his past, contrasting his son's observations with his own memories and trying to apply his view of life and relationships to the curious family from whom he is renting a dilapidated cottage, high up on a Tyrolese mountain-side.

As he finds the quiet he craved, the noise of his own thoughts become ever more deafening as he dissects his life and tries to come to terms with the death of his daughter, some fifteen years ago, and his own son's apparent hatred of him.

This is a wonderful book. A little unsettling at times. Certainly a difficult read if you have never attempted to read any Tim Parks fiction before; he frequently intersperses dialogue with internal monologue without the punctuation you might expect to help you tell one from the other. It sounds impossible, but it works brilliantly once you get used to it, and helps to maintain the flow and the illusion of seeing into the character's subconscious. Stick with it and you WILL be rewarded.

Finely detailed tale of mountains and the mind
This book follows the journey of a man who at the height of his journalistic career, vilified by his son's newly published semi-autobiographical novel, flees the overwhelming demands of both his public and private lives to find refuge in a remote village in the mountains of the Tyrol. Here he battles with the demons of his past and present while struggling with a semi-hermetic existence on the fringe of a small village community.

This is an engrossing read, the past and present of the main protagonist unravelling before the reader as the characters around him are slowly drawn in more detail. Highly recommend this book; I shall seek out others by Tim Parks.