Cleaver - Softcover

Tim Parks

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0436206277 ISBN 13: 9780436206276

Publisher: Harvill Secker, 2006

Synopsis

"In the autumn of 2004, shortly after his memorable interview with the President of the United States and following the publication of his elder son's novelised autobiography, cruelly entitled "Under His Shadow", celebrity journalist, broadcaster and documentary film-maker Harold Cleaver boarded a British Airways flight from London Gatwick to Milan Malpensa, proceeded by Italian railways as far as Bruneck in the South Tyrol and thence by taxi, northwards, to the village of Luttach only a few kilometres from the Austrian border, from whence he hoped to find some remote mountain habitation in which to spend the next, if not necessarily the last, years of his life." Thus opens Tim Parks' new novel and masterpiece. Overweight and overwrought, London's most successful journalist abandons home, partner, mistresses and above all television, the instrument that brought him identity and power. His quest: to climb above "the noise line," to get beyond the e.mail and the mobile phone and the interminable clamour of the public voice of which he himself was such a master. Weeks later, snowed in at five thousand feet, harangued by voices from the past and humiliated by his inability to understand the gothic peasants he relies on for food and whisky, Cleaver discovers that there is nowhere so noisy and so dangerous as the solitary mind.

About this title

About the Author

Tim Parks is the author of more than twenty novels and works of nonfiction, including the best-selling Italian Neighbors and An Italian Education. His novels include Europa which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.  His essays have appeared in the The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, for which he blogs. Tim Park is also a renowned translator. He lives in Italy.

Review

"Scintillating and subtly nuanced narrative. The secret of its success? Masterful prose, just free-form enough to imitate the whirligig of thought. Parks deserves to take a bow" -- Alastair Sooke * New Statesman * "Tim Parks is one of Britain's most underrated authors...His latest book, Cleaver, is a dense, intriguing novel, prickly and strange...The novel's portrait of a disintegrating mind is skilful, a fine anatomy of a psyche that flickers between ordinary neuroses and megalomania, and it offers a pungent critique of the middle-class media and their obsessions. Alongside this ruthless acuity, there is as well a certain human warmth" -- Henry Hitchings * Financial Times * "One can only admire the intelligence and skill with which Parks interleaves the disparate worlds of Chelsea and Sudtirol...I have now read Cleaver three times, and each has let me with greater respect for Park's abilities" -- James Hamilton-Paterson * Guardian * "Yet again, Parks has anatomised the complexities of the heart with a skill which few of his contemporaries can match" -- David Robson * Daily Telegraph * "Parks writes tragedy well and reveals Cleaver's piteous state, raw from loss and unable to mourn.....[Cleaver] is difficult to like and easy to judge, but he draws you into his world and convinces you to stay" -- Katie Gould * Scotland on Sunday *

Edition details

• Publisher: Harvill Secker
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0436206277
• ISBN 13: 9780436206276
• Binding: Paperback