Parks

You KNOW I love a book about books/reading, and apparently Will from Alma Books has also caught wise on that front. He kindly emailed to offer me a review copy of Tim Parks’ Pen in Hand (2019), which is a collection of columns that Parks wrote for the New York Review of Books – subtitled ‘reading, re-reading, and other mysteries’, though there aren’t a huge heap of mysteries in there. I don’t need mysteries. He had me at ‘reading’.

The title comes from the idea that one should always read with a pen in the hand – ready to annotate, scribble, question, and respond to the book. Now, I don’t do this. I will occasionally make light, minuscule pencil markings in a book, but that’s as far as I’m willing to go. No matter, we can tolerate each other’s differences and move on together. And I was very happy to move on – I loved this collection.

I’d previously read and reviewed Parks’ Where I’m Reading From, which I understand to be essentially an earlier version of the same thing – columns from the New York Review of Books. I had certainly enjoyed it, but described it ‘maddeningly repetitive’. The same ideas and examples came up time and time again, and D.H. Lawrence was quoted so often that it felt a little absurd. Wonderfully, this has all changed in this collection. Lawrence barely gets a look in! And, more to the point, Parks manages to avoid repetition with a cat-like agility.

True, he comes back to the same authors a lot. Just as you always know that an Alberto Manguel book will talk about Borges, so it seems that Parks is never more than a few feet from a Beckett reference. But he has a fascinating range of topics that he discusses – gathered under the loose categories ‘How could you like that book?’, ‘Reading and writing’, ‘Malpractice’, and ‘Gained and lost in translations’.

The second of these is a coverall for anything literature-related that doesn’t fit in the other categories (samples: ‘Do Flashbacks Work in Literature?’, ‘How Best to Read Auto-Fiction’), and the others are relatively porous. An article about the pleasures of pessimism could have fitted anywhere. His thoughts on reading and forgetting are fascinating and, again, could have been anywhere in the book. And so forth – who cares about classification, it’s all an opportunity to get to know Parks’ readerly persona. Which is someone with a wide knowledge of literature in several languages, open to most different periods of literature, but unafraid to spike the balloon of an overly-inflated writer. His targets are not just E.L. James and her ilk (though they do get a mention), but people like Elena Ferrante, usually held protected from such things.

The final section of essays does justify its classification, as they are all about translation. Parks has lived in Italy for decades, and works as a translator – and has some pretty interesting things to say about translation. Unlike the superlatively involving and captivating This Little Art by Kate Briggs, though, Parks doesn’t have all that much to say about the theory of translation. Rather, he takes apart various different translations of Primo Levi – and it does feel a bit mean-spirited. How could it not, when he is pointing out how other translators have done the job badly, and suggests his own versions? I can’t comment on how accurate the translations are, though Parks’ versions did often read less elegantly and more ambiguously in English than the ones he was ‘correcting’. Nevertheless, I love reading about translation – and you certainly can’t accuse Parks of making his criticisms without examples.

All in all, this is a brilliant collection to dip in and out of – or to binge in one go, if you like. It’s a little more academic than the here’s-why-I-love-books-and-tea style book about reading, but certainly not to the level of alienating the general reader. I can certainly see myself reading and re-reading this – and who knows where or when the ‘mysteries’ will come into things?

You may be getting tired of me reviewing books about books – well, there are more to come, and I can’t get enough of them! Recommendations always heartily welcomed. I can’t remember where I first heard of Where I’m Reading From (2014) by Tim Parks, but I have an inkling that it might have been in the ‘You May Also Be Interested In’ section on Amazon. I do know how I got it – it was a birthday present from my friends Sarah and Paul, along with Michael Dirda’s Browsings which I’ll also be writing about soon.

Tim Parks (a name I did not know before, once I realised that I’d been getting him mixed up with Tim Pears) is a British novelist, translator, and professor who lives in Milan. As such, he is well placed to write about all manner of literary topics, from the nuances of copyright to the different ways to translate isolated sentences from D.H. Lawrence. His pieces, which previously all appeared in the New York Review of Books, are certainly engaging and thought-provoking. They are also maddeningly repetitive.

The same points come up over and over and over again – that writers outside of English aim for an international style rather than one linked to their own particular contexts; that translators have to choose between content and tone; that academic criticism is too engaged with the text and not with the author’s life. This last suggests Park hasn’t read any English Literature academic writing for about forty years, but the other two would be extremely interesting points if they didn’t each come up a dozen times. And it did begin to feel, at one point, as though D.H. Lawrence were the only novelist Parks had ever read. True, these articles/essays came out at intervals over a four year period, but he could still have gone in for a bit more variety. Michael Dirda did; that’s all I’m sayin’.

BUT I should add that, those recurrences forgiven, Where I’m Reading From is fascinating and offers much food for thought. Even acknowledging how much repetition is in the book (and now, it seems, in my blog post about it), the topics covered are many and various, and often unusually interesting. To pick one, ‘Why Readers Disagree’:

Enthusiasm or disappointment may be confirmed or attenuated, but only exceptionally reversed [by criticism]. We say: James Wood/Colm Toibin/Michiko Kakutani admires the book and has given convincing reasons for doing so, but I still feel it is the worst kind of crowd-pleaser.

Let me offer a possible explanation that has been developing in my mind for a decade and more. It’s a central tenet of systemic psychology that each personality develops in the force field of a community of origin, usually a family, seeking his or her own position in a pre-existing group, or ‘system’, most likely made up of mother, father, brothers and sisters, then aunts, uncles, grandparents, and so on. The leading Italian psychologist, Valeria Ugazio further suggests that this family ‘system’ also has ‘semantic content’; that is, as conversations in the family establish criteria for praise and criticism of family members and non-members, one particular theme or issue will dominate.

These might be bravery vs cowardice, moral vs immoral, success vs failure etc. – and these are, he argues, reflected in the qualities we look for in novels or characters. I.e. we may judge books on entirely different scales from one another. At one point Parks makes what he considers an exhaustive list, which is bizarrely brief, but it’s a very intriguing notion nonetheless.

I could either write thousands of words about the different angles and authors considered or end here – and I think it will have to be the latter. Parks doesn’t write with the eager enthusiasm of the avid reader, but rather the mildly detached intellect of the professional man of books – yet those of us who are avid readers first and foremost will find much to interest. This he certainly did – most so in articles on translation, where he resisted quoting examples that only the polylingual would understand, for which I am grateful. Perhaps one does not warm to Parks as a friendly voice (and his treatment of his parents in these articles does little to enamour me, I will confess) but he is not setting out to be a chatty companion so much as a muser. As that, he is very admirable. But he is not Dirda. More on him anon…