Destiny - Hardcover

Parks, Tim

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1559705175 ISBN 13: 9781559705172

Publisher: Arcade Publishing, 2000

Synopsis

" 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 his life 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, this life has been his destiny.

Intensely dramatic, dark, and yet often hilariously funny, Destiny is 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."

About this title

About the Author

"Tim Parks is the author of nine earlier novels and three works of nonfiction: Italian Neighbors, An Italian Education, and, most recently, Adultery and Other Diversions. He has been awarded the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, and the Betty Trask Award. His most recent novel, Europa, was short-listed for the 1997 Booker Prize. He and his family live in Verona, Italy."

Reviews

Inside the head of yet another overheated, middle-aged Englishman in Italy (as in Europa, 1998): in his tenth novel the effortlessly inventive Parks ratchets up the tragedy and tones down the laughs for a portrait of a man plunged into despair by a schizophrenic son's suicide. A respected journalist who, seeking deeper meaning, turned from coverage of Italy's endless political intrigues to a book-length treatment of ``national character,'' Chris Burton is in London with his wife, Mara, when he receives the phone call reporting the death of their only son, Marco. His first thought, the most abiding one in the fog of days to follow, is that his 30-year marriage is over. Mara is larger than life, theatrically Italian, a downtrodden Roman aristocrat and a shameless flirt who for years has charmed and overpowered him and everyone else she encountersas she demonstrates at Heathrow by a performance that gains them seats on the first available plane home. Burton cant bring himself to tell her they're through, not even when they visit the morgue and she refuses to let him see Marco with her. Instead, grief takes them on separate trajectories, as Burton goes to stay with their adopted daughter, estranged from Mara, and discovers he's seriously ill, while his wife takes over the funeral arrangements and has Marco shipped from Turin to Rome. Meanwhile, Burton proceeds with his plan to interview disgraced former Italian prime minister Andreotti, the capstone of research for his book, while his physical condition deteriorates. Only after Marco is buried does Burton see his spouse again. Following a volatile exchange in the cemetery, he realizes their tragedy is shared and that they have somehow, impossibly, arrived at a new understanding. The male stream of consciousness is rendered no less skillfully and intricately here than in Parks's previous novel, but some essential spark goes out in the shift from comic to tragic.-- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Reading this stunning tour de force from the prolific Parks (Europa, etc.) is like riding an out-of-control roller coaster through the dark caverns of a delusional brain. The news of his schizophrenic son Marco's suicide in a clinic near Turin sends ex-foreign correspondent Christopher Burton into a tailspin. As he and his Italian wife travel back to Italy from London, the teeming fragments of Burton's consciousness recoil from the reality of Marco's death, and he frantically ruminates about his 30-year marriage, fulminating against his wife for her theatricality and flirtatiousness, and for the rancor, fury and bitterness she has displayed toward him. Slowly, some facts emerge: Burton has behaved deceitfully toward his family; he has quit his job because he's possessed by the monomaniacal idea that he will write a "monumental" book, "an extraordinary achievement" that will prove that character is destiny and that national character is predetermined as well; and he and his wife used Marco as a pawn: "We drove him mad." Most of Burton's inchoate thoughts are highly inappropriate: he obsesses about an interview he plans to conduct, the day of Marco's funeral, with ex-prime minister Giulio Andriotti, who was indicted for criminal acts while in office. As Burton's stream of consciousness approaches disintegration, he finally admits truths about himself and his behavior in what becomes a deeply affecting portrait of a man in mental anguish. Parks's skill in constructing his headlong narrative plunges readers into Burton's mind; this is, after all, a more or less universal portrait of human relationships, fueled by tumultuous emotions, devious motivations, clashing egos and love-starved hearts. (May)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Arcade Publishing
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1559705175
• ISBN 13: 9781559705172
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304