Items related to Destiny
A masterful, completely compelling new novel by the best-selling author of Europa,whose previous work of fiction was a finalist for the Booker prize. Destiny,Parks' best work of fiction to date, is his breakthrough book. Christopher Burton, the protagonist of Tim Parks's masterful new novel, is one of Britain's foremost foreign correspondents, the acknowledged world expert on Italian affairs. Three months after returning to London with his Italian wife for an extended stay, Burton, while standing at the reception desk of the Rembrandt Hotel in London's Knightsbridge, receives a phone call informing him that his teenage son has committed suicide. Why, upon receiving this terrible news, does he immediately conclude that his marriage of almost thirty years is over? And why is grief so slow in coming? Burton feels his pious, mercurial wife may have given him his life in Italy--even his prestigious career--but she has also made it impossible. Was their troubled son somehow the victim of their long, explosive love-hate relationship? Looking back, Burton sees in his life a web of contradictions, unanswered questions, and confusions. And yet, it has been destiny. Intensely dramatic, dark, and yet often hilariously funny, Destinyis a seamless, beautifully plotted story and a profound meditation on marriage and identity, at once romantic and callous, brilliant and blind. In Destiny, Parks offers us a searing account 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.
Review:
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
Some three months after returning to England, and having at last completed that collection of material that, once assembled in a book, must serve to transform a respectable career into a monument -something so comprehensive and final, this was my plan, as to be utterly irreftuable - I received, while standing as chance would have it at the reception desk of the Rembrandt Hotel, Knightsbridge, the phonecal that informed me of my son's suicide.' So unfolds the opening sentence of Tim Park's tenth novel. But why, on receiving this terrible news, does Christopher Burton immediately decide that he must leave his Italian wife of almost thirty years standing? Why does he find it so difficult to focus on his grief for his son? Burton feels his pious, raffish and mercurial wife gave him his life in Italy and his career as the foremost journalist on Italian affairs. But surely she ia also the person who has made life impossible for him. Was their son somehow a victim of their explosive love and hate? Or is that thought simply the expression of a deep paranoia?
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- PublisherArcade Pub
- Publication date2011
- ISBN 10 1611451418
- ISBN 13 9781611451412
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages256
- Rating
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