Tim Parks

Prajapati was alone. He didn’t even know whether he existed or not.

I too am alone. It’s fairly early in the morning. About 8.30. I am translating a book by an Italian writer called Roberto Calasso. The book is called Ka and amounts to a creative reconstruction of Indian mythology. The lines above are the first lines of the second chapter. This chapter deals with the god...

Italy has just come to the end of another referendum campaign. Two general elections ago a new system of voting was introduced. Instead of the extreme form of proportional representation in force since 1948, a first-past-the-post system was introduced for 75 per cent of the seats in the lower house, while 25 per cent would continue to be allotted on a proportional basis. The recent referendum proposed to eliminate that 25 per cent and base voting for the lower house entirely on the British system.

This widespread sickness, with its recurring fevers and languorous state, had become confused, particularly in the minds of visiting foreigners, with the common perception of Rome as the city of the dead, a city where a huge amount of space was given over to ancient monuments, ruins and tombs. For many travellers, it was as if the cityscape had created the malaise. ‘There is a strange horror lying over the whole city,’ Ruskin wrote. ‘It is a shadow of death, possessing and penetrating all things. The sunlight is lurid and ghastly . . . the shadows are cold and sepulchral.’ Given the 19th century’s love of the gothic, and given Rome’s reputation for offering an abundant supply of prostitutes and sexual adventures, an attraction to the city tended to be spoken of, not without some excitement, in terms of eros and death. ‘A vampire lay on weak and backward Rome and sucked its blood,’ Herzen wrote. He wasn’t deterred. The pleasantly stupefied state of the Northern intellectual dealing with Mediterranean heat and wine, his sensual appetite heightened, was associated, consciously or not, with the fevers of local malaria victims and the grandiose wreck of an imperial past. ‘To delight in the aspects of sentient ruin might appear a heartless pastime,’ Henry James commented, ‘and the pleasure, I confess, shows a note of perversity.’

In the 13th century, Florence banned its noble families from holding public office and instituted a republic. The names of a few hundred select citizens were placed in leather bags and every two months a new government was drawn by lot. In more conservative Venice, a group of nobles simply elected one of their number doge for life. There was no question of hereditary succession. Even where...

Despite his eighty years (1893-1973) and many publications, an air of incompletion lingers about the work of Carlo Emilio Gadda. His most popular novel, That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana, is an unfinished murder story. His best work, Acquainted with Grief, is again unfinished and again leaves us with an unsolved crime (in this case we are not even sure whether the victim will die or not). Many of Gadda’s shorter pieces turn out to be fragments of unfinished novels, or of almost finished novels that he broke up into fragments, a habit which has prompted critics and editors to spend a lot of time reconstructing possible novels, always unfinished, from the various parts.