Tim Parks’s Across Sicily with Garibaldi’s Thousand is out now.
In 1870 Hans Christian Andersen published his last novel, Lykke-Peer (‘Lucky Peer’). Felix and Peer are born in the same house on the same day. Felix leads a conventional existence of wealth and privilege. Peer’s life is all struggle, though he’s a talented singer and composer. He goes to the city and experiences every kind of hardship and temptation, but will not...
‘From the start,’ David Szalay writes of the protagonist of his first novel, London and the South-East (2008), ‘he had felt his way towards a more subtle style – offhand, low-intensity.’ Although style, in this instance, relates to Paul Rainey’s telesales manner, the words seem to anticipate the evolution of Szalay’s writing towards the lean and...
Life, for the narrators of Joseph O’Neill’s five novels, is experienced as a series of reversals as unexpected as they are humiliating. James Jones, the protagonist of This Is the Life (1991), once served as a pupil barrister to celebrity QC Michael Donovan. He had thought he was in line for a position at the chambers, but was overlooked at the end of the pupillage. Donovan...
Hisham Matar doesn’t need to look far for his subject matter. In his remarkable memoir The Return (2016) he explained that a privileged childhood in a wealthy Libyan family turned to nightmare when his father, leader of an anti-Gaddafi insurrection, was kidnapped in Cairo in 1990 and imprisoned in Tripoli. He eventually disappeared, never to re-emerge. As a result Matar’s...
Three hundred characters in 260 pages. How do you possibly keep track of so many names, so much intrigue? It’s hard to imagine a reader of Camilo José Cela’s masterpiece, The Hive, who hasn’t asked this question – who hasn’t wondered, after twenty or thirty pages, whether or how to go on. Do you just accept the confusion? Or, alternatively, keep...
At some point in his mid-forties, the novelist Tim Parks developed a terrible pain, near-constant and located in embarrassing places: his lower abdomen and crotch. ‘I had quite a repertoire...
Tim Parks’s latest novel opens in the forests of the South Tyrol, where a group of white-water enthusiasts are taking a kayaking holiday. The river is overflowing with melt water from a...
‘Can this beautiful young model be thinking?’ Tim Parks asks at one point in this book. ‘One hopes not,’ the argument continues, as Parks’s narrator looks through an...
Italo Calvino was born in 1923 and came to prominence in post-war Italy as a writer of neo-realist and politically committed short stories, some of them published in the Communist paper
This is Tim Parks’s sixth novel. He has also done some serious translation – Moravia, Calvino, Calasso’s The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony – and written a lively book...
Mythology was once defined by Robert Graves as the study of whatever religious or heroic legends are so foreign to a student’s experience that he cannot believe them to be true. Mythical...
Readers of John Updike’s previous novel, The Witches of Eastwick, will not have forgotten Darryl Van Horne’s bottom: how, at the end of a game of tennis, Darryl dropped his shorts and...
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