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By Tim Parks
Published by Vintage Books
As an Italian who has been living in the UK for several years I have developed an ambiguous relationship with my home country: I have little praise for Italy but will defend it with fervent national pride if foreigners say anything negative about it. Unless the negativity is aimed at the current leadership of the country… but that’s another story.
So, when I decided to read Tim Parks’s Italian Neighbours – An Englishmen in Verona as part of the Italy in Books reading challenge 2011, I thought that I’d have to sigh and tut frequently at all the clichés I was sure to find. I couldn’t have been more wrong. I grinned, I chuckled, I laughed out loud and not one single frown crossed my face.
In Italian Neighbours we follow the writer and his wife during the difficult months of being the new people in town, which in this case is an Italian village nestled among the hills of the beautiful Veneto region. A witty and inquisitive observer, Parks’s descriptions of people and places are a pleasure to read and wonderfully evocative.
The characters that populate the pages of this book – from the local greengrocer to the lady who every morning sweeps the street in front of her house with a twig broom – are vividly portrayed. They are not caricatures but I am sure that anyone who grew up in a village with strong ties to its rural past will know someone just like that. I know I do!
Tim Parks does not offer an idyllic picture of Italy but certainly an endearing one, even when talking about potentially inflammatory topics such as public sector employees, taxes and private healthcare, which, in a different kind of book, would be at the centre of heated discussions.
A sort of survival manual, Italian Neighbours is an excellent read for both people who don’t know the country that well and for those who think they know it inside out.
By Tim Parks
Published by Harvill Secker
In Teach Us to Sit Still - A Sceptic's Search for Health and Healing, British novelist, essayist and translator Tim Parks describes his difficult path to wellbeing – both physical and mental.
Page by page, Parks details a long series of hospital tests and discussions with doctors and specialists both in Italy and in the UK, he takes us to India for a consultation with an Ayurvedic doctor and, after sleepless nights of Internet research, he shares his enthusiasm for finding a book that seems to promise an end to his pain.
The authors of this book, two Californian doctors, suggest that the discomfort in the pelvic area might be caused by muscle tension. Having found nothing wrong with his bladder or prostate – but still in excruciating pain - Parks is willing to believe this new possibility and the more he thinks about it, the more he realises that he’s been thinking too much his whole life. He’s hardly ever felt thoroughly relaxed.
He thus embarks on a journey of mental rediscovery. He starts a programme of breathing exercises in the comfort of his home. Still relatively sceptic about anything remotely “New Age”, he then goes on to see a shiatsu practitioner and, in the end, he gives in to meditation and joins those retreats that he had always sneered at.
It is a winding path of taking one step forward and three steps backwards but it is a path, nonetheless, that allows Parks to find a balance between the daily needs of his working and family life and the equally important necessities of his mind and body.
This book wasn’t quite what I was expecting but I extremely enjoyed it. Though I can see now that this was the most logical approach, I thought that Parks would concentrate on different kinds of alternative therapies without including his experience with Western medicine. I think I was sidetracked by the book cover!
A journey that starts in the middle wouldn’t be that much of a journey. And I feel almost guilty but I did find the description of the medical staff and their attitudes funny – despite, of course, sympathising with the fact that, in the grip of his pains, Parks might not have found them amusing at all. Perhaps I could have done with knowing less about the writer’s bowel movements and similar, rather intimate, details but, hey, writing is an intimate experience, right?
I had to chuckle and completely empathise with the account of Parks’s first attempts at meditation. Who hasn’t been sitting there, trying to empty their head of any thoughts and ending up having a silent but verbose fight with themselves to achieve that, only to fail? What makes this book such a pleasure to read is that Parks is not trying to show us the way, he doesn’t portray himself as an enlightened and holier-than-us person who we can only look up to. He’s simply sharing his experiences. It’s up to us if we want to learn something from them.
What I also wasn’t expecting – but then, I wasn’t familiar with Parks if not only by name – were his reflections and musings on authors, politicians, art and, generally, culture. A very educated man, Tim Parks is able to draw the most interesting conclusions and ask the most curious questions, linking subjects that you would not normally associate with each other, such as a painting by Velázquez and the prostate! This book has the potential to teach a number of things. Sitting still is only one of them!
By Tim Parks
