BOOK REVIEW

Adultery & Other Diversions
by Tim Parks

Reviewed by Graham Dickson

Being asked to read a book of essays is potentially akin to finding oneself on a long flight sitting beside a grey man in an anorak who steers along an eight hour long monologue on the deficiencies on modern times with the words, 'And another thing.....' One might hope for Montaigne yet find oneself allocated a seat beside an accountant.

In fact with Tim Parks your first reaction might be that he doesn't give much of a shit anyway. Not that he feels that way about his subjects here: his family, his work as a translator and lecturer in Italy, but perhaps towards the expectations of his readers. Don't expect 'A Year in Provence' style reflection on North Italy: too brutally honest. Nor a celebration of family life: too vividly descriptive of the temptations outside and the exasperations within. He has a sure touch with narrative but admits defeat in the end as the analogy he makes between Verona's troubled season in Serie A and his friend's marriage breaks down. 'If two things were alike in every way' he concludes, 'they would cancel each other out.' Tim Parks, on the evidence here, is not out to curry favour with us.

You do however get a painfully honest view of Parks' preoccupations. Two themes in particular crop up, the self-built 'prisons' of family and work. In 'Adultery' he portrays the affair of his friend, relayed to him during squash matches first with relish then with despair. Parks doesn't waste our time with moral judgements here, either for or against, but instead pares away the excuses and easy analyses to reveal 'the call of Dionysus', the age old temptation to push things to the limit until, amongst an ordered life, 'something' happens. He is particularly good at pinning down that lurking suspicion that someone somewhere is having more fun than you. He knows and we know why that is too, but that doesn't make it any more palatable. The phrase, 'the long haul' crops up more than once.

Elsewhere he turns his attention to Europe. No one could conceivably want to die for the European Union he notes, wearily, standing under the carefully, arbitrarily ordered row of national flags in Strasbourg. That, he then points out, is its great hope.

In 'Ghosts' he, curmudgeon that he is, rips up the neat accepted wisdom we have of ghosts with an unsentimental tale of his father. 'All's well that ends' he quotes before deciding that it isn't.

If any piece of this book gives a clue to why it stays with you, rattling around inside your head long after finishing it, it is the piece I went back and read again, twice. Commissioned to translate 'Ka' by Robert Calasso he describes in 'Prajapati' his morning's work picking his way through one awkward passage. Should 'before the mind' mean 'in front of the mind' or 'prior to the mind' he wonders. Each word is picked up, turned over and over before being slipped into the right place. Which is how this whole book feels, pared down to the minimum required to bear the weight of his ideas.

Nothing new here, he claims in the introduction. Perhaps, but everything in this three-way collision between narrative, autobiography and essay feels gloriously like a revelation.

UK Edition: Amazon.co.uk