Parks, Tim Destiny ISBN 13: 9780099284949

Destiny - Softcover

9780099284949: Destiny
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Three months after returning to England, Christopher Burton, receives a phone-call at the reception desk of the Rembrandt Hotel, Knightsbridge that informs him of his son's suicide. But why on receiving this terrible news, does Burton immediately decide that he must leave his Italian wife of thirty years standing? Why does he find it so difficult to focus on his grief for his son?

Intensely dramatic, dark and, against all odds, hilariously funny, Destiny is a satisfying story and a profound meditation on marriage and identity. Parks gives us a frightening experience of what it means to tread the narrow line between sanity and psychosis.

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Review:
This complex and intriguing novel opens with an Englishman learning that his only son has committed suicide in Italy. His first emotion is not grief, but rather relief as he realises that he will at last be able to leave his wife to whom he has been bonded by their son's schizophrenia. As they travel back to Italy the narrator describes how his flamboyant wife, who both appals and delights him, lapses into "miserable and uncooperative mutism" as punishment.

Tim Park's protagonist is a fifty-something, disillusioned political journalist who is trying to write a book on Italian national character in order to predict the behaviour of the inhabitants of his adopted country, especially his wife's. "You cannot marry a woman in one language and think in another", he muses, convinced that what he once found vehement and exciting about her, and indeed Italy, has been revealed as shallow and distasteful. If he can discover how national character determines choice, then he will be able to act differently and leave. Mistaken for German in Italy and American in England, the Englishman articulates beautifully the dilemma of living in another tongue, seeing it as a "faulty contact" which inhibits true understanding. "The language is national destiny", he decides and so he and his wife are destined to confound one another.

Destiny is a highly astute study of the inappropriate behaviour that accompanies grief as well as a blistering account of a marriage of peers, of the failings of commitment and monogamy and of the endless loss and retrieval of love. The fractured, claustrophobic narration perfectly suits the narrator's ugly confusion and sublime lucidity as he evades then shoulders responsibility for his mistakes. An intelligent, enthralling novel about the meaning of identity and our maddeningly conflicted motivations. -- Cherry Smyth

Review:
"This brilliant work fizzes with bleak humour and a crackpot energy... a powerfully affecting novel of married life and cultural incompatability... Parks is an exceptionally acute observer of modern life" (Daily Telegraph)

"Tim Parks masterly new novel is... intellectually sophisticated, formally ambitious, and belongs to a cosmopolitan European tradition. But it is one that pays honour to the heart as well as to the mind" (Sunday Times)

"Complex but captivating and exactly observed... A book to digest slowly and savour" (The Times)

"A wilful, hypnotic novel... Destiny gleams with insights into the trade-off between the personal and the political... a stylish, ambitious novel of a life in freefall" (Time Out)

"He can write, at will, like a modern Henry James, proceeding with composure through the labyrinth... Indeed, this is a novel that seems to exist on the brink, on the edge of insanity" (Literary Review)

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  • PublisherVintage
  • Publication date2000
  • ISBN 10 0099284944
  • ISBN 13 9780099284949
  • BindingPaperback
  • Number of pages256
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Other Popular Editions of the Same Title

9781559705752: Destiny

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ISBN 10:  ISBN 13:  9781559705752
Publisher: Arcade Pub, 2001
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    Secker, 1999
    Hardcover

  • 9781559705172: Destiny

    Arcade..., 2000
    Hardcover

  • 9780099293224: Destiny Poster

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  • 9781611451412: Destiny

    Arcade..., 2011
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