Tim Parks – författare

The 1860 Expedition of the Thousand, in which a group of volunteers led by Giuseppe Garibaldi sailed from Quarto, near Genoa, landing on the west coast of Sicily and advancing to its capital Palermo in a bid to liberate the island from Bourbon rule, is perhaps the defining moment of the unification of Italy, and a testament to the bravery, resilience and vision of the country’s last condottiere.Drawing on a wealth of contemporary diaries and other first-hand accounts by the protagonists of the events, and interspersing them with his own penetrating remarks, best-selling author Tim Parks retraces the journey of the “Mille” through the ragged landscape of Sicily under the blazing summer heat, bringing back to life an entire world in all its intricate complexity. Along the way he revisits old controversies and provides answers to many unresolved questions – as well as offering a vivid commentary on the Italy of today.

"Am I giving the impression that I don't like the Veneto? It's not true. I love it. But like any place that's become home I hate it too."How does an Englishman cope when he moves to Italy - not the tourist idyll but the real Italy? When Tim Parks first moved to Verona he found it irresistible and infuriating in equal measure; this book is the story of his love affair with it. Infused with an objective passion, he unpicks the idiosyncrasies and nuances of Italian culture with wit and affection. Italian Neighbours is travel writing at its best.

How does an Italian become Italian? Or an Englishman English, for that matter? Are foreigners born, or made? In An Italian Education Tim Parks focuses on his own young children in the small village near Verona where he lives, building a fascinating picture of the contemporary Italian family at school, at home, at work and at play. The result is a delight: at once a family book and a travel book, not quite enamoured with either children or Italy, but always affectionate, always amused and always amusing.

'Delves into the very essence of being a fan, while seamlessly exploring Italian history, politics, culture and society,' GuardianIs Italy a united country, or a loose affiliation of warring states? Is Italian football a sport, or an ill-disguised protraction of ancient enmities?Tim Parks goes on the road to follow the fortunes of Hellas Verona football club, to pay a different kind of visit to some of the world's most beautiful cities. This is a highly personal account of one man's relationship with a country, its people and its national sport. A book that combines the pleasures of travel writing with a profound analysis of one country's mad, mad way of keeping itself entertained.

One of Britain's outstanding novelists, Tim Parks is also a provocative, entertaining and accomplished essayist. This new collection's title is drawn from D. H. Lawrence's fundamental belligerence, and how all the significant relationships in his life, including those with his readers and critics, were characterised by intense intimacy and ferocious conflict.Elsewhere there are literary essays on tension and conflict in the work of Beckett or Hardy, Bernhard and Dostoevsky, amongs others. Parks is also known for his acerbic chronicles of Italian life and here are essays on Mussolini, Machiavelli and the Medici.Besides discussing questions of history, politics and literature, The Fighter also takes on that most serious tussle: World Cup football.

How have the modern world, technology and our addiction to information changed who we are? What effect does it have on our relationships, minds and bodies? What can the simple act of sitting still teach us about ourselves? When Tim Parks fails to find a cause for his crippling chronic pain, he turns to meditation. This is, however, not your average self-help book or conversion story; instead, it is a refreshingly honest and profoundly moving introspection of one writer and his quest to overcome the inner battle between mind and body. A revelatory read with delightful cultural and literary references, Teach us to Sit Still by Booker-shortlisted author Tim Parks examines how the philosophy of 'sit still, relax and stop worrying' can be profoundly life-altering.‘Teach us to Sit Still made me laugh; it made me cry; and it made me seriously think about taking up Vispassana meditation’ The Times

Morris can't get over Mimi. But then he should have thought of that before he murdered her and married her sister. Now Mimi's back, as a ghost, and she seems to be suggesting the way to redemption for Morris. He must help the poor immigrants of Verona; but if anybody should get in his charitable way then so much the worse for them...

Bored and broke, Morris Duckworth, an English teacher in Verona, stumbles on a plan for financial salvation – to marry Massimina, one of his lovelier students. And if his intentions are frustrated by a suspicious, conservative family, is it any fault of his that the girl chooses to elope?Obsessed by self-advancement and excitement, Morris’s dreams of blackmail, theft and murder plunge him deep into a chilling nightmare of deception and violence.

From the bestselling author of Italian Ways and Italian Neighbours comes a darkly comic new novel of murder in Veronese high societyMorris Duckworth has a dark past. Having married and murdered his way into a wealthy Italian family he has now become a respected member of Veronese business life. But it’s not enough. He comes up with a plan to put on the most exciting art exhibition of the decade, based on a subject close to his heart: killing. But as Morris meets stiff resistance from the director the museum, everything starts to unravel around him. His children are rebelling, his mistress is asking for more than he wants to give, his wife is increasingly attached to her ageing confessor, and worst of all it’s getting harder and harder to ignore the ghosts that swirl around him, and the skeletons rattling in every cupboard…

‘All Italy is here’ Sunday TimesFrom the bestselling author of Italian Neighbours, An Italian Education and A Season with VeronaLonglisted for the Dolman Travel Book AwardIn 1981 Tim Parks moved from England to Italy and spent the next thirty years alongside hundreds of thousands of Italians on his adopted country’s vast, various and ever-changing networks of trains.Through memorable encounters with ordinary Italians – conductors and ticket collectors, priests and prostitutes, scholars and lovers, gypsies and immigrants – Tim Parks captures what makes Italian life distinctive. He explores how trains helped build Italy and how the railways reflect Italians’ sense of themselves from Garibaldi to Mussolini to Berlusconi and beyond.

The Literary Agenda is a series of short polemical monographs about the importance of literature and of reading in the wider world and about the state of literary education inside schools and universities. The category of 'the literary' has always been contentious. What is clear, however, is how increasingly it is dismissed or is unrecognised as a way of thinking or an arena for thought. It is sceptically challenged from within, for example, by the sometimes rival claims of cultural history, contextualized explanation, or media studies. It is shaken from without by even greater pressures: by economic exigency and the severe social attitudes that can follow from it; by technological change that may leave the traditional forms of serious human communication looking merely antiquated. For just these reasons this is the right time for renewal, to start reinvigorated work into the meaning and value of literary reading.The Novel: A Survival Skill is the fruit of a lifetime's search for a different, more immediate, but again systematic and serious way of talking about literature. Developed over many years, it offers a completely new account of the relationship between a writer, his or her work, and the reader. As such it radically undermines traditional literary criticism and the various criteria used for evaluating a work of fiction. Drawing on ideas from systemic psychology, Tim Parks suggest that both the content and style of a novelist's work, the kind of stories told and the way in which they are told, form part of a more general strategy or simply habit of communication that the novelist has learned within his or her family of origin. The reader reacts to these in very much the same way he or she would react to the same communicative strategy in a real life encounter, different readers reacting differently depending on their own backgrounds and habits of communication. Looking at the different value structures that can dominate in any family--good/evil, independence/dependence, success/failure, belonging/exclusion--this book looks at how a number of major writers position themselves within these value structures, how this positioning is manifest in their writing, and how readers have responded to this depending on their own positioning in the same semantics. Thomas Hardy, for example, a man eager to believe himself courageous but terrified of the consequences of any socially 'unacceptable' behaviour, constructs stories which are courageous in their willingness to debate difficult issues, but which constantly suggest that any attempt to behave courageously is condemned to disaster. Hardy as it were imprisons himself in a world where it is folly to take risks. He is thus exceedingly conservative in his life, while at the same time able to think of himself as courageous in his writing. The Novel: A Survival Skill looks at the way different readers in different periods respond to this depending on their own position with regard to fear, courage, social convention and so on.

In this brilliant collection, a renowned critic vividly depicts the dynamic relationships between authors, their work, and their readersAcclaimed novelist and critic Tim Parks has long been fascinated by the complicated relationship between an author’s life and work. Dissatisfied with the dominant modes of reading he encountered, he began exploring the underlying values and patterns that guide authors in both their writing and their lives.  In a series of provocative, incisive, and unflinching essays written over the past decade and collected for the first time here, he reveals how style and content in a novel reflect a whole pattern of communication and positioning in the author’s ordinary and daily behavior. We see how life and work are deeply enmeshed in the work of writers as diverse as Charles Dickens, Feodor Dostoevsky, James Joyce, Anton Chekhov, Philip Roth, Julian Barnes, Peter Stamm, and Geoff Dyer, among others. Parks further shows us how readers’ reactions to these writers and their works are inevitably connected to these communicative patterns, establishing a relationship that goes far beyond aesthetic appreciation.  This original and daring collection takes us into the psychology of some of our greatest writers and challenges us to see with more clarity how our lives become entangled with theirs through our reading of their novels.

Tim Parks’s books on Italy have been hailed as "so vivid, so packed with delectable details, [they] serve as a more than decent substitute for the real thing" (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Now, in his first Italian travelogue in a decade, he delivers a charming and funny portrait of Italian ways by riding its trains from Verona to Milan, Rome to Palermo, and right down to the heel of Italy.Parks begins as any traveler might: "A train is a train is a train, isn’t it?" But soon he turns his novelist’s eye to the details, and as he journeys through majestic Milano Centrale station or on the newest high-speed rail line, he delivers a uniquely insightful portrait of Italy. Through memorable encounters with ordinary Italians—conductors and ticket collectors, priests and prostitutes, scholars and lovers, gypsies and immigrants—Parks captures what makes Italian life distinctive: an obsession with speed but an acceptance of slower, older ways; a blind eye toward brutal architecture amid grand monuments; and an undying love of a good argument and the perfect cappuccino.Italian Ways also explores how trains helped build Italy and how their development reflects Italians’ sense of themselves from Garibaldi to Mussolini to Berlusconi and beyond. Most of all, Italian Ways is an entertaining attempt to capture the essence of modern Italy. As Parks writes, "To see the country by train is to consider the crux of the essential Italian dilemma: Is Italy part of the modern world, or not?"

"Reading time is approximately four hours. Remembering time, as for its author, the rest of one's life," said Joseph Brodsky of Fleur Jaeggy's novel, Sweet Days of Displine. Now Jaeggy has come up with seven stories, each at some deep level in dark complicity with the others, all as terse and spare as if etched with a steel tip. A brooding atmosphere of horror, a disturbing and subversive propensity for delirium haunts the violent gestures and chilly irony of these tales. Full of menace, the air they breathe is stirred only by the FÜhn, the warm west wind of the Alps that inclines otherwise respectable citizens to vent the spleen and angst of life's last vanities.

Arising from a dissatisfaction with blandly general or abstrusely theoretical approaches to translation, this book sets out to show, through detailed and lively analysis, what it really means to translate literary style. Combining linguistic and lit crit approaches, it proceeds through a series of interconnected chapters to analyse translations of the works of D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Henry Green and Barbara Pym. Each chapter thus becomes an illuminating critical essay on the author concerned, showing how divergences between original and translation tend to be of a different kind for each author depending on the nature of his or her inspiration.This new and thoroughly revised edition introduces a system of 'back translation' that now makes Tim Parks' highly-praised book reader friendly even for those with little or no Italian. An entirely new final chapter considers the profound effects that globalization and the search for an immediate international readership is having on both literary translation and literature itself.

'Parks...offers detailed cultural observation, witty yet eagle-eyed, of what makes Italians so Italian' The TimesHow does Italy really work?When Valeria travels from hot, dusty Basilicata to begin her studies in a northern university town, she has little idea of the kind of education she will find there. Italian Life is her story, and that of the students and professors around her: a story of power and corruption, influence and exclusion, and the workings of a society where your connections are everything.Written with flair and insight, Italian Life joins Tim Parks' bestselling books about his beloved and paradoxical adopted country. It is a gripping, entertaining, behind-the-scenes account of how Italy actually happens, and the ways it can surprise those who know it inside out.'A satisfyingly truthful, entertaining and provocative comedy' Daily Telegraph

'Elegantly written, full of wit and charm, this is travel writing at its very best' Orlando FigesIn the summer of 1849, Giuseppe Garibaldi, Italy's legendary revolutionary hero, fled Rome and led 4,000 of his men hundreds of miles through Umbria and Tuscany, then across the Apennines, Italy's mountainous spine, toward the refuge of the Venetian Republic. After thirty-two exhausting days of skirmishes and adventures, only 250 survivors reached the Adriatic coast.This hair-raising journey is brought vividly to life by bestselling author Tim Parks, who in the blazing summer of 2019, followed in Garibaldi's footsteps. A fascinating portrait of Italy past and present, The Hero's Way is a celebration of determination, creativity and desperate courage.

From the bestselling, Booker-shortlisted chronicler of Italy, a classic novel about a man's emotional reckoning in a changed world far from homeFrank's reclusive existence in a leafy part of London is shattered when he is summoned to Milan for the funeral of an old friend. Preoccupied by this sudden intrusion of his past, he flies, oblivious, into the epicentre of a crisis he has barely registered on the news.It is spring, his luxury hotel offers every imaginable comfort; perhaps he will be able to weather the situation and return home unscathed? What Frank doesn't know is that he's about to make a discovery that will change his heart and his mind.Hotel Milano is a universal story from a unique moment in recent history: a book about the kindness of strangers, and about a complicated man who, faced with the possibility of saving a life, must also take stock of his own.

Is Italy a united country, or a loose affiliation of warring states? Is Italian football (which we Americans know as "soccer") a sport, or an ill-disguised protraction of ancient enmities? After twenty years in the bel paese, Tim Parks goes on the road to follow the fortunes of his hometown soccer club, Hellas Verona, to pay a different kind of visit to some of the world's most beautiful cities, and to get a fresh take on the conundrum that is national character.

Over a period of many years, the celebrated English novelist Tim Parks and the Italian philosopher Riccardo Manzotti have been discussing the nature of consciousness. Not long ago, Parks suggested to his friend that they condense their exchanges “into a series of focused dialogues to set out the standard positions on consciousness, and suggest some alternatives.” Fifteen of the resultant conversations were edited by Parks and published in The New York Review of Books online—one of its most popular features ever.Now collected into one slim but thought-provoking volume, the dialogues reveal the profound scholarship of the two men. Their talks touch upon Aristotle and William James, the Higgs boson and Descartes, and include topics such as “Where Are Words?”, “The Body and Us”, “The Reality of Dreams”, “The Object of Consciousness”, and finally “Consciousness: What Is It?”. For those of us searching for insight into some of life’s most basic puzzles—how do we think? how do we perceive one another, and ourselves?—Dialogues on Consciousness will take its place alongside other classics of philosophy.

Should you finish every book you start?How has your family influenced the way you read?What is literary style?How is the Nobel Prize like the World Cup?Why do you hate the book your friend likes?Is writing really just like any other job?What happens to your brain when you read a good book?As a novelist, translator and critic, Tim Parks is well-placed to investigate any questions we have about books and reading. In this collection of lively and provocative pieces he talks about what readers want from books and how to look at the literature we encounter in a new light.These pieces were originally published as columns in the New York Review of Books.

‘Somehow it seemed to him the only thing that would really solve the problem would be to return to the sea and find the old ring with their names and the wedding date engraved inside, in 22-carat gold, and put it on again and then the world would magically return to what it had been before. Many years before.This did not happen.’Thomas and Mary have been married for thirty years. They have two children, a dog, a house in the suburbs. But after years of drifting apart, things – finally – come to a head. In this love story in reverse, Tim Parks recounts what happens when youthful devotion has long given way to dog walking, separate bed times, and tensions over who left the fridge door open. Lurching from comedy to tragedy, via dependence, cold re-examination, tenderness and betrayal, Thomas and Mary is a fiercely intimate chronicle of a marriage – capturing the offshoots of pain sent through an entire family, when the couple at its heart decide it’s all over.

Is my experience real?Or just a movie in my head?Am I no more than a super computer? You are your brain, neuroscientists tell us. Everything happens in there. Yet even the most sophisticated brain scan cannot tell us who we are. Nothing in our neurons remotely suggests the rich nature of our experience, the colours, sounds and smells that make up our lives. When Tim Parks came across a radical new theory of consciousness, he set on a quest that moves through one sparkling encounter after another to arrive at the deepest of questions: what stuff exactly is consciousness made of? And where is it? Inside or out? ‘An exceptionally witty and compelling look at the nature of consciousness… Parks is a delight to read’ Iain McGilchrist‘[It has] wit, humanity and insight… Parks is an entertaining companion throughout’ Mail on Sunday

How do we find calm in our frantic modern world? Tim Parks – lifelong sceptic of all things spiritual - finds himself on a Buddhist meditation retreat trying to answer this very question. With brutal honesty and dry wit, he recounts his journey from disbelief to something approaching inner peace and tackles one of the great mysteries of our time – how to survive in this modern age.Selected from the book Teach us to Sit Still by Tim ParksVINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS.A series of short books by the world’s greatest writers on the experiences that make us humanAlso in the Vintage Minis series:Swimming by Roger DeakinMotherhood by Helen SimpsonWork by Joseph HellerLiberty by Virginia Woolf

Daniel Burrow once began a beautiful walk from Konstanz to Como with Julia, mercurial professor of literature, mother to two of his pupils, married, and the love of his life.After years of their secret affair, they stepped out together on top of the world, full of delight in one another and in the future they imagined. Or was it only Dan who imagined it, really? He never had the chance to find out, because a few days into their adventure a single phone call changed everything.Now, at the height of summer, with only a rucksack, a few pages of DH Lawrence that had been Julia’s, and his private strata of memory and forgetting, Dan is back on the trail. Step by step, with a tumult of emotions jostling with the demands of the dramatic Alpine landscape, he reckons with what his life is and what it might have been, had he been a different man with different choices.'A writer operating at the height of his powers. One follows the twists and turns of this story of discovery and self-discovery in a sustained state of delight' J.M. Coetzee'An intensely satisfying novel, superbly crafted' Nicholas Shakespeare