Can you know thy neighbour in the age of globish

A conversation with Tim Parks

British-born, Italy-based, Tim Parks is a novelist, critic, translator and essayist. In his latest novel, Hotel Milano, a retired British writer flies to Milan for a funeral just as the world media are beginning to report on a contagious new virus spreading from Wuhan. Borders close and he is forced to stay put in his luxurious Milanese abode when an encounter with a Middle Eastern family of sans-papiers hiding in a utility room in the hotel turns his self-obsessed, pampered life upside down.

Tim spoke with me last week on a video app from his home in Milan. We spotted we both had the same kind of Zanzibar Gem plant behind us. (“We don’t have a balcony here so I use the plants for some greenery”, he told me after we had to pause the conversation so both of us could close our windows due to city noise - a cleaning truck in Milan, construction noise in Toronto.)

LP: In your book Where I’m Reading From, you write about the global domination of English language – of American English, effectively. Only American literature is allowed to show its terroir in fiction: local references, local experiences. The Swiss, the Germans, the Dutch don't mind local American references, but it's not the other way round.

TP: My example there was Jonathan Franzen. I find it difficult to read his books. But the people who do read them like them and enjoy this slightly satirical view of American paraphernalia. It would be impossible to do that with another country and sell the book globally. But I've just reviewed for the Washington Post an excellent novel by Domenico Starnone. It's one of his older novels, but certainly his best novel, called Via Gemito. It's a big autobiographical novel that has a lot of local reference, but there were particular reasons probably why Starnone was able to publish. My own feeling is that Starnone is the writer we know as Elena Ferrante, so he has a very particular relationship with his publisher, which is basically an Italian publisher in the USA. I doubt that Via Gemito will sell very many copies, but it's a wonderful book. 

But no no, there’s always been a sort of imbalance in the way books are received and the way books circulate. And people do look at America as people watch American movies and... this has been going on for a long time. It's not even really a problem – a problem is something that you have to solve – and there's no solving this, it's just the way life is at the moment. What I was trying to do in those essays is to invite people to be less ingenuous about what was going on. An awful lot of what's going on is driven by publishers, or simply by chance, or by politics. 

LP: You point out that a lot of people writing in their own native language are already writing for the English translation and English language market - and strip the fiction of local references, consciously or not. (A Swiss writer that you like, Peter Stamm, writes lean and spare prose that is perfectly translatable.) It used to be, as you say, that a book is written for a local or national readership, and after it does well, it sells foreign rights. Now the English and other foreign rights are sold immediately with the native language book contract for some globally popular books (Stieg Larsson, Ferrante, Murakami, Pamuk, Llosa are just some of those global writers you mention).

TP: I think the problem is probably political. I mean, one only needs to circle a few international book fairs, festivals even worse, to see what's going on. Writers are opportunists, it's a natural thing, particularly younger writers and people looking to pitch their stuff on the market... I think that the smorgasbord of so-called postcolonial writing – “postcolonial” is hilarious; I see nothing post- about it – is an achievement of colonialism.

LP: They all write in English.

TP: What's happened is a lot of talented people don't write towards their own home communities but they write towards this western, international readership. That seems like the acme of colonialism rather than the opposite. There’s obviously a lot of opportunism on behalf of the academics and critics, they want to be the first into a field where they can carve out a space. And the whole of postcolonial studies was the question of carving out academic space. For an awful lot of jobs and careers. Not to say that there wasn't a lot of interesting stuff said. But it became politically difficult to question whether what was happening was a good thing or not, or whether we should be so enthusiastic about this. 

LP: You give an example of an Indian writer who writes in one of the Indian languages, who remains virtually unknown outside India, vs. any number of the postcolonial writers. It's a very different career choice, isn't it.

TP: Yeah... When I was involved in reading for the Booker International prize, which back then was still a prize for a career in writing, we've read a few novelists from India and Pakistan, as well as obviously many other countries, whose work has been translated. I know a few Indian writers and they tell me about other excellent Indian writers, who are not translated... There's clearly the whole world out there that we don’t know about.

These are the kind of choices that come from deep inside you. When I came to Italy you had to learn Italian (today you don’t need to) and I really became Italian. But you don't lose English because English was always so dominant. Imagine if I was from Montenegro or Albania and had children here in Italy, it might be difficult to persuade them to keep up with their parents' language, they don't see the advantage. My kids understood quickly that there was an advantage, even among their friends, to having better English. 

II.

LP: I can’t just let the Ferrante gossip go. You don't think it's a couple? Anita Raja and Starnone?

TP: I don't think it's a couple at all. Maybe his wife writes the articles they wrote for the Guardian. 

If you look at this book Via Gemito, written in 2002-3. That's some time after Elena Ferrante's first book. It's an autobiographical book mainly about Starnone's father, who is a well-known figure. Starnone's father's paintings hang in various galleries and people know who he was. The book's totally autobiographical with no names changed at all. If you go back to Ferrante's first novel, Amore molesto, Troubling Love in English, which would be before Starnone's father had died, there's a figure in there exactly like Starnone's father, with descriptions of the painting studio which are exactly as in Via Gemito, to the point of using exactly the same words. 

It's a first novel by Ferrante, and it starts with descriptions of the menstrual cycle beginning when the female narrator didn't expect it, it’s an embarrassing moment, stuff like that. I couldn't help feeling that an author was thinking, hm, what specifically female experience can I start with? 

His novels written as Starnone are better, I think. There's also a feeling [in Ferrante] of writing much more heated telenovella novels, television drama novels. I've never been a fan of Ferrante, I don't understand the interest, something's going on that I don't understand there. 

LP: In Ferrante, to go back to our starting topic, there are a lot of local references to Naples etc. 

TP: Sure. But there are a lot of people in Italy who felt that the Ferrante novels about Naples were playing on stereotypes about Napoli. Another thing about globalization is that every city gets stereotyped for global consumption. Goethe was observing Neapolitans acting as Neapolitans in the early 1800s. He said they are clearly doing it deliberately because “they know that we Germans expect them to be like this”. That happens all over the world. 

Via Gemito also has much more interesting specific stuff about Naples. I translated an old Pasolini book, Ragazzi di vita, which is coming out with NYRB Classics this year. And that's an incredibly detailed, aggressive, deeply troubling picture of the underclasses in Rome in the immediate post-war period, the kind of detail nobody wants to read. I don't think that book is destined for a best-seller status, but it's a great book. 

LP: NYRB Classics often publishes books like that. They also published Curzio Malaparte's Skin, which must be one of the maddest things ever committed to paper. 

TP: If you like Mapalarte, the better book is Kaputt. Skin is okay but by far the most devastating Malaparte is Kaputt. It was a huge international success, it was really a major book when it came out in 1944 – the first book to talk about the death camps, amazingly. It's one of the most astonishing books I've ever read. 

Although Kaputt was an important book in the 1940s, today I don't think many people read it in English – or in Italian, because Malaparte’s reputation suffered due to this impression that he wasn't sufficiently anti-fascist during the Second World War. The funny thing is, a writer like Pirandello didn't acquire that label, although Pirandello was more fascist… and it’s a curious thing, how some authors avoid that fate. But that's fine by me because I like his work. 

LP: I was interested in what you said about English writers who don't really translate well globally. And you list people like Henry Green and Barbara Pym. What has been happening with English literature? Is it also writing for global audiences now?

TP: It’s become impossible, probably from around the 1950s or 60s to state “where British literature is going” or anything like that. We have an awful lot of players and many of them have grown up reading literature from all over the world. Many of them read literature that has nothing to do with the culture that they're born into. Recently there was a big fuss in the UK, when the government looked at the curriculum in the schools and decided to stipulate that school students must read one or two Shakespeare plays, and one novel by Dickens, before graduating high school. At least that. If they wanted an A level or GCSE in English literature. And there was an enormous amount of opposition to this. People were saying, well you know we'd rather they read To Kill a Mockingbird, or we'd rather they read postcolonial writers. 

I wrote a piece around that time, I think it was for the Observer, saying that there were actual reasons why we might wish to have a shared body of literature from the culture we've grown up in so that one could begin to see the connections between those works of literature, and between those works of literature and the history that we were studying so that we had a sense of the thing that we had been, even if we didn't like it; it would give us a chance to move on from it or to understand what had been good in it and what we thought was good and bad in it... to have a sense of who we are. If we want to have a collective identity at all. But you know these are not very popular views, curiously enough. I mean I've got nothing against reading To Kill a Mockingbird, for heaven's sake.

LP: It is completely different from the British experience of race, though. 

TM: Yes. One of the curious things that's happened in the last 10 years is the way there are a number of people who try to import into Britain the same kind of race conflict that our cousin the USA has. Now I'm not saying that Britain is without race conflict, but it's clearly a different world, with its own problems. This is happening everywhere, but it seems to me an extraordinary loss, to throw away some kind of sensible study of where we come from. And there’s this ludicrous notion that older books are dull. I got invited to do a nice little job by a company in Italy called Zenichelli which does books for school students. They invited me to do a series of 3-minute videos for different major British authors who feature in their anthologies for high school maturity exams. You have 3-4 minutes to say something interesting about the prologue to The Canterbury Tales, or about a Shakespeare play. I've re-read the prologue to The Canterbury Tales after what must be forty years and it is absolutely hilarious. Funny to die laughing. In order to be entertained, you don't need to read something that was written yesterday.

Obviously you understand that I come across as conservative, but it's this misunderstanding of how culture is built up that I have to comment on.

LP: No, it's essential. I mean you can imagine how it all works for Canada. Canadian literature existed for about 30 years, and now the current generations are directly writing for American markets, and the award-granting bodies don't really care.

TP: Canada doesn't really have a chance. I remember a period when I was reading a number of Canadian authors.

LP: It's always in the past.

TP: It was about 20 years ago. Was it an older writer, Robinson or something? 

LP: Robertson Davies? 

TP: That’s it! He was a fine writer, I reviewed a book of his for the NYRB many many years ago.

LP: ..and Alice Munro was writing back then, and Atwood still occasionally writes.. Once they're gone, I think that is going to be it. 

TP: Atwood though is writing for a global audience.

LP: You're right.

TP: There’s a writer I’ve never enjoyed. 

LP: I like her work from the 1970s and 80s, when her fiction was concerned with exactly the questions we talked about, what are we doing here, who is this we, can we call this space a country. 

TP: I wouldn't deny Atwood being a very serious writer. But there's a very aggressive aspect to the way she writes, very emphatic. I've never found her work remotely subtle, put it like that. And I tend not to go for that kind of thing. Even Philip Roth, who's a writer I did enjoy a lot, would irritate me with his overemphasis. There's a nice essay by Borges, in which he says that the biggest most common fault in contemporary writing is overemphasis. It's because you are so scared that people won't listen otherwise, so you have to come on incredibly strong. If you're ever roped into reading, say, applications for a residency, which is a noble thing to do, people tend to send samples that are incredibly emphatic because it's, Here I am. You have to shout very loudly. 

LP: Maybe that’s the twenty years of the internet and the half a century of American cultural domination? 

TP: I wouldn't blame the Americans alone for this. I'm sure there are many American writers who would like to write with a little less emphasis, and do, and just disappear. I don't think there's an entity America which is responsible for this. I think this is a whole drift of western culture. America is something Europe projected. It's not an alien culture to who we are at all. I mean, yes, fine, you look at the presumption of self-importance on the part of a certain New York literary community, you notice it particularly in the area of translation. They are the centre of the publishing world commercially, so they tend to feel they are very important. But it's not the fault, as it were, of America. I do think in other countries publishers have to make money and the way they're now set up is much more on business models which were originally designed for other products. Although some publishers do defend their backlist quite nobly, many others have been so anxious to find the new best thing... the new correct thing. 

III.

LP: Hotel Milano. Did you write it during the pandemic or after?

TP: I wrote it probably at the tail end of the pandemic. It was a problem in the sense that I knew that people would not be interested in talking about the pandemic when the pandemic was over. I didn't want the book to be about the pandemic. But about something that could only happen because of the pandemic.

LP: Was the protagonist cancelled? He was sort of cancelled.

TP: It was an early, proto-cancellation example. Cancelling is the most dramatic sort of thing that happens to people, but much more normal is for people to just stop using authors when they realize that their politics are not aligned. I see that all the time. Of course the result is that you can also be paranoiac and think, they're not offering me work because they think etc. It's the kind of labyrinth you don't want to go down. 

But as I was saying, with Hotel Milano, I wanted to create a figure who is living out this fantasy that I've often had of simply eliminating the media from your life, the endless empty updates. You then have the very interesting situation that there are certain world events that actually require you to tune in. Obviously if there's a war it would be very wise to know about it, and the same thing with the pandemic. I was also interested in the kind of rhetoric that was going around in the lockdown - it’s almost a caricature of the awfulness that the media has become. The kind of witch hunts on somebody who hasn't worn a mask on a particular occasion or the mask is falling down his nose or he said that his 6-year-old son didn't need to be vaccinated... It was beyond extraordinary. I didn't want to make that centre stage but that sort of mass hysteria is going on in the background. At the centre I put the real encounters with physical people who are in difficulty, where all that rhetoric just blurs, has no meaning at all, beside the kind of decisions that you're going to have to take. 

LP: And I think it's the first novel involving the pandemic that’s comic. It's really hilarious in parts.

TP: I'm glad you say that, I thought some bits were really funny, particularly at the beginning. 

There was a funny review in a British daily, positive, generally, it says it's beautifully written etc. But you can see that the reviewer was perplexed. What are we to make of a man in his seventies who describes a young woman's legs, he asks in the review.

LP: !!

TP: Has the guy not read... vast swathes of literature of older men looking at women? I mean, is there anything wrong with noticing that somebody's body is of a certain kind? And you just feel, maybe this guy is writing with one eye over his shoulder. 

Another review was worried that the hero didn't seem very positive about the face masks. 

LP: Come on.

TP: But there were people like that. I regularly receive emails from people suggesting that I rewrite elements in previous books to make it clear that I'm not racist and you think, god, did I ever really give that impression? And you realize that you didn't give that impression but what you didn't do is shout I'm not racist! You didn't stand in front of the book and shout it out. Which of course would be the least attractive thing you could do as a writer. 

LP: Of course there's now this posthumous editing of various authors. 

TP: And you get sensitivity editing as a matter of course. I get it too.

LP: Lionel Shriver's been very vocal on this. 

TP: I know Lionel, we've met a couple of times, and chatted. She has decided to take all this on. She's decided to get out there, and make a lot of noise. Often I agree with her; not quite always but very, very often. The problem, for me, is this. If you decide to go in a certain area and start writing regularly about it, you're just going to get sucked into that. All your energy will be taken by it, because there's going to be all kinds of pushback, to which you will have to respond. I think you should go for a battle that you feel really needs to be fought or a battle where you feel you can actually make a small difference. For example, in the area of translation and the politics of translation, I'm willing to stick my neck out because I think I can make a small difference there. I'm fairly well known in that field and some people will listen to what I say. But I'm not gonna get involved in newspaper culture wars about gendering or things of that sort.

LP: But you're in Italy where you only get the ripples of the madness, whereas in the angloworld, it's full-blown.

TP: It's very interesting observing from here. For example the whole pronoun thing is happening a little bit in Italy on a lower level. Some people would like to introduce a gender-neutral noun ending, schwa. (Unfortunately, as so many of these imposed grammatical changes, they're ugly.) In academic circles they might invite you to declare pronouns. But it does seem to happen here as a kind of echo of something that's going on somewhere else and it never seems to get quite essential, although I have heard from a lot of parents about the kind of sex education that's been introduced in schools. I don't know much more about it but I have heard that there’s a movement there that sort of invites children to reflect on gender.

LP: And whether they feel they're the opposite sex…

TP: Yeah, as if adolescence wasn't difficult enough. Obviously for the one in very, very many who does have a problem, presumably they'd already be aware of that. I just remember when I was a young man, say, between 12 and 15, almost any kind of suggestion drove me crazy. You know? “Maybe I'm gay?” I thought a number of times. You feel so insecure and you don't know what's solid about you. Now, looking back on it, knowing myself a bit better, I laugh though it's not laughable, but when you're younger it was quite difficult to handle all that, and it was the 1960s so there was a bit of stuff going on too. 

LP: Let me steer us back to Hotel Milano.

TP: Yes, right: humor was very important. The fun of the luxury hotel being turned into a kind of prison camp. And we all remember how during covid the people with menial and humble positions suddenly had huge amounts of power put into their hands and some of them really enjoyed it. 

But apart from the media aspect that I mentioned, which was important, the thing that really interested me about Milan is that this is a city with many ethnicities, none of whom meet each other in any way. I live in an area just outside Milan's second circular road, so this is where house prices plummet. Our block is pretty much the only gentrified in an area which looked like it was ready for gentrification when I bought the place here and then there was the crash – we got left here in this sort of arcipelago, It's an area which is very Chinese, very North African Arabic, with probably about twenty percent Italian working class. Sri Lanka, India, loads of ethnicities. Romania. Egypt is very big. In the room opposite, which I see from the open window, there's a large room which is clearly let out regularly to, I think, Egyptian building workers. They lean out the window, speak on the phone. They're all very friendly, it's all fine. But the interesting thing is that none of these ethnicities really meet, you know? And there's always talk about inclusion and stuff but in Italy you haven't seen any of that mixing that you're having in Canada or Britain... If it's beginning, it's only just beginning with some of the kids who go through Italian schools. 

So what was interesting about the beginning of the pandemic, everyone is on the streets here, we shop regularly, there's a Bangladeshi shop just behind us and an Indian shop just up there, and an Arab shop which is really good for all kinds of nuts. And they're all watching the TV from their home nations when you go in. When you go to the Indian shop, they're watching India play England in cricket, with the Indian commentary. But they never mix. And instead with the pandemic, particularly in the beginning, we realized that actually, amazingly, we live in the same world. We're gonna have to recognize each other when we pass each other on the street, and be aware of each other in a different way. In Hotel Milano, there are these more ‘luxurious’ ethnicities of the guests and the people doing the cleaning work in the hotels who are all from these other communities. And I wrote of a genuine, dramatic relationship forming between the people from those two sides. 

LP: Do you find writing and speaking Italian liberating, constricting?

TP: Certainly it can be liberating. I wrote this comic noir called Cara Massimina, which is all about somebody for whom a life of crime becomes possible when he moves to Italy. Not because Italians are particularly criminal but because he's freed of all the inhibitions attached to his language and to his background. Obviously if you stay in Italy a long time, you begin to accumulate the inhibitions that you hadn't originally noticed in your new language. And those are very interesting moments. I remember when I wrote my book on football fandom, A Season with Verona, which is really a book about Italy and the community, the first chapter was about how this community, traveling overnight in a coach, almost depends on constant blasphemy. You just have to blaspheme constantly because the tifosi are a counter-culture to the slightly pious Veronese culture. A community of blasphemy and drinking... and some of the guys were sniffing cocaine. And when the book came out there was this immense shock. The bishop of Verona denounced the book and invited the Veronese to burn it. And I kind of realized that you don't publish blasphemies in Italy, and that this was actually quite new and that nobody had done this before on such a dramatic scale. I remember saying to a guy who was interviewing me very aggressively about this, I said to him, OK but you guys are reading Irvine Welsh and you're all getting off on this and saying what wonderful literature it is (Trainspotting was big at the time). You like it because he's saying what people in the underclasses of Glasgow are saying and I'm just saying what the guy's saying on the bus and everybody knows this, you know this. 

It was a moment of “growth” for me. 

I think it's one of my most serious books, a book on how collective psychology works. You can see a number of different individuals with clearly serious problems in their private lives, using this fandom as a way of making their own lives easier to go back to after a weekend of football.

IV. 

LP: In one of the essays in Where I’m Reading From you write about the psychologist Valeria Ugazio who argues that novelists inherit the basic modus operandi, the script from their families of origin, and work out that script through their writerly opus. You expanded on this in your book of literary criticism, The Novel: A Survival Skill.

TP: I think The Novel is my most serious critical book, about the role that novel writing has in how a novelist is managing his or her life. And the way in which the writer and their work seam together. Not that the work is the writer's life copied, but the work is making the writer's life possible or shifting it in certain ways or becoming a trap for the writer. 

For Dickens, his fame and reputation definitely brought him to an early death. He was just unable to step back from that and rearrange his private life in a way that would have been unacceptable to his readers. And you can see this in books like Little Dorrit, desperately making appeals to move the moral compass in a different direction that would make it possible for him to live in a different way. But he was unable to go there. 

Nobody really wants to take on board that the wonderful book that they've read is part of a larger thing that's going on that is no doubt much more interesting than the book. And it will probably deeply change your vision of the book itself. I don't think you need to know an author's life to enjoy the book but when you do know aspects of the life, the book changes. 

For example, imagine if it came out that the Elena Ferrante books are written by a man. You can see the kind of difficulty that would be for a lot of people because there's been so much invested in her femaleness. Maybe I'm wrong about all this. But it's an interesting question – it would be a big moment of reflection for everybody, that actually this was possible for someone to do.

LP: Then there's the chapter in The Novel on Thomas Hardy. Narrators who are trying to break free but deciding to remain within their inherited bounds and live conservatively. 

TP: I spent a lot of time with that chapter on Hardy. And on Thomas Hardy's negotiations with the Victorian world, really, and with what could be said. He was a terrified man, always. For some people the question of whether one is courageous or not is crucial for self-esteem. He wanted to be courageous as a writer, and was. I mean Jude the Obscure was one of the most courageous books ever written. But when the critics came down hard on him, it was terrifying and he stopped writing novels because of the criticism of Jude the Obscure. Why am I doing this just to get shot at?

LP: His protagonists too get punished for attempting things.

TP: D.H. Lawrence has this wonderful take on that; he says you can see that these are the things that Hardy would like to do, so what he does is he writes a story when somebody does that and gets so badly punished that he would never do it. Hardy spent a very long part of his married life flirting with other women who were interested in him but never really going the whole way. Stepping back constantly. And then as soon as the wife died, he married his secretary who he'd been wanting to have a relationship with for many years. 

When you start a Hardy novel, you know by the end of the first page that you have to be terrified about what's gonna happen. He makes you feel that something awful is going to happen. You read the first page of Tess of the d'Ubervilles and you know that you're heading for something awful. I think Far From the Madding Crowd is the only exception: there, the awful things happen but get rectified. Which of course was written at the happiest moment of Hardy's life: he just got married. 

It's a very curious mindset, yes. And there are other mindsets I look at in that book about the novel. I've written pieces about Beckett and Joyce and Dostoyevsky and Virginia Woolf and the wonderful, wonderful George Eliot, which ask the same questions: how is this material being used to negotiate a life.