17th
Interview with writer Tim Parks
The six people waiting in line for Tim Parks’ autograph would be enough for many writers after a standard reading to acolytes over warm chardonnay in a boutique book store.
But it’s a little disappointing to see such poor reward for one of the planets most accomplished writers, and one of a handful who is capable of entertaining at a literary festival. He has just offered uninterrupted laughs and insights on DH Lawrence to more than 1000 people, most of whom had never heard of Parks, at Adelaide’s Botanic Gardens.
At the end of the event he has no new work to sign. His 14th novel, Dreams of River and Seas, has yet to reach Australia, so the merchandise tent offers his year-old essay collection, The Fighter.
Next to him at the signing table is Siri Hustvedt: former model, wife of Paul Auster. She has at least 60 people queuing for autographs, all reading the blurb on the back cover of freshly purchased copies of her new novel, The Sorrows of an American.
The Englishman later stares at the grass under him in when asked of any of this bothers him. The question is more irritating than the issue.
“When you start talking about the mechanics of all of this, you’re heading for a dull, depressing conversation, basically. I’m aware of it but try to stay away from it,” he says.
“I could complain that my books aren’t selling as well as Ian McEwen’s but at the same time I’ve been published for 20 years, I’m still publishing and people tell me my books are nice.”
They also tell him he’s among the best essayists, they give him his share of prizes and they’re mightily impressed by his translations of Italian writers such as Alberto Moravia and Machiavelli.
The Associate Professor of English Literature at IULM University in Milan, Italy, where he has lived since 1981, stands out among the writers in Adelaide. We could put that down to the superb beige cotton suit, immaculately pressed and complimented by a dark blue shirt, of the same cotton, and panama hat, whose rigid brim provides a roaming verandah in the South Australian heat. But we could also say that around Parks is the feeling that the other self-consciously dowdy writers – McEwen, Auster, Peter Carey – might tip their hats in his direction if they had the nerve to wear more than a baseball cap.
They would certainly be wary of taking on this polymath who has no qualms about dismissing magic realism, pointing out the flaws in James Joyce’s “project” or describing Jose Saramango as “a writer of absolutely no importance”.
Parks is rarely interested in giving his readers likeable characters, so why would he beg people to buy his books, or create a Tim Parks brand that publishers could work with?
“It’s very curious to me to see a writer like Ian McEwen, who is constantly producing books which do have a certain amount of similarity. I’m looking to change a lot, constantly, because I fell that if I don’t I won’t find the interest and energy to do it.”
The allowed has helped him produced eight non-fiction titles on the art of translation, 15th century Florence and his best-known effort, A Season With Verona, about his favourite football team.
The dominance of marketing and publicity in publishing means a literary journalist could easily specialise in polishing the images of young debut novelists freshly spat from industry-oriented creative writing degrees. Finding a writer on the publicity circuit flogging more than 20 books, as well as 16 translations, who has avoided a template and the reliance on the bigger awards, shouldn’t be so remarkable.
“There have been periods in recent years where I’ve felt my energy levels were a little low,” Parks says. “But if you look at the body of work and the rhythm at which it’s come out you’ll see that really what’s going on is that I’ve varied immensely the kind of work that I do.
“To embark on the football book, to bring in an area of my life which had just been about going to the stadium for home games every other week because I was a season ticket holder, you get a huge influx of energy when you start going to the away games (to write A Season With Verona). I wouldn’t have got that from starting another tough novel.
“A lot of my books come in twos or threes. The first couple of books, Tongues of Flames and Loving Roger, were very much a young person’s first-person narratives, very much based on influence I was getting from an Italian writer, Natalia Ginszburg, a certain deadpan, wilfully innocent kind of thing. Then I wrote two books that were epistolary novels, a complete change of position. Then a couple of books which were densely metaphorical.
“In all of this you do begin to realise there’s something staying steady in it all – a voice of mine that nevertheless comes through. That’s a nice thought.
“So, having over three novels – Europa, Destiny, Cleaver – built up a very particular style that puts a major mental figure at the centre of the work, with a strangely fragmented, obsessive narrative style, I just completely dropped that for the new book, which is just narrative. It’s an absolutely straight, metaphor-free, simile-free, narrative. Everything depends on the rhythm, the pacing, the sequence in which the information is given. It’s something completely different.”
The first information the reader is granted about the central consciousness of Dreams of Rivers and Seas is that he’s dead. Anthropologist Albert James writes to his days before he passes away in Delhi: “For some time now, I have been plagued, perhaps blessed, by dreams of rivers and seas, dreams of water.” The son, John, flies to India to arrange his father’s cremation. His mother keeps her distance. A biographer becomes interested in Albert’s unusual work. John’s confusion over his understanding of his parents is exacerbated by being cut off from his homeland.
“It had become important not to set another book in Italy,” Parks says. “This book has to happen in a very foreign country. That really put me on the spot a bit because I don’t travel very widely. But I had been to India for a very long conference. So last summer I went back there for a month on my own.
“All I did all day was walk the streets of Bombay and Delhi alone. This book makes no attempt to explain India or anything, but just to be confused and disoriented in India for a few weeks. I did just about get enough to talk about being in a place where culturally you’re outside.
“I was interested by what happens to a woman in her early 50s who’s widowed. The marriage in the book is a very particular and weird marriage and the book is really about a decision on her part. I won’t tell you what it is.
“But as you go on you start to realise that actually there are other things that the book is about. The book is about my own death and what will come after it and what kind of legacy you leave to the people around you. And it’s also about the business of having done everything not to influence your son’s life - it might be much worse than having engaged with your son and trying to influence his life. You might have influenced him far more profoundly and negatively by this desire not too exist. The other question is: how far is the death of the man a suicide?
“People write books in different ways. There are guys who really know what the stuff’s about at the beginning and they do it. I take my hat off to them. But I wouldn’t be able to write the book that way. It has to be for me that I’m riding a bicycle somewhere and I don’t know where it’s going. I’m exploring a path.
“I don’t like to walk along the same places all the time or even have the map tell me exactly what I’m going to see before I get there.”
