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“So inviting you might find yourself tempted to give the experience a whirl and ride the Italian trains yourself, book in hand.”—Liesl Schillinger, New York Times Book Review
Tim Parks’s books on Italy have been hailed as "so vivid, so packed with delectable details, [they] serve as a more than decent substitute for the real thing" (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Now, in his first Italian travelogue in a decade, he delivers a charming and funny portrait of Italian ways by riding its trains from Verona to Milan, Rome to Palermo, and right down to the heel of Italy.
Parks begins as any traveler might: "A train is a train is a train, isn’t it?" But soon he turns his novelist’s eye to the details, and as he journeys through majestic Milano Centrale station or on the newest high-speed rail line, he delivers a uniquely insightful portrait of Italy. Through memorable encounters with ordinary Italians—conductors and ticket collectors, priests and prostitutes, scholars and lovers, gypsies and immigrants—Parks captures what makes Italian life distinctive: an obsession with speed but an acceptance of slower, older ways; a blind eye toward brutal architecture amid grand monuments; and an undying love of a good argument and the perfect cappuccino.
Italian Ways also explores how trains helped build Italy and how their development reflects Italians’ sense of themselves from Garibaldi to Mussolini to Berlusconi and beyond. Most of all, Italian Ways is an entertaining attempt to capture the essence of modern Italy. As Parks writes, "To see the country by train is to consider the crux of the essential Italian dilemma: Is Italy part of the modern world, or not?"
- Sales Rank: #347777 in eBooks
- Published on: 2013-06-10
- Released on: 2013-06-03
- Format: Kindle eBook
From Booklist
Parks’ talents for observation don’t coalesce into a comprehensive project. Modernity, Italy’s relation to Europe, immigration, public-private corruption, byzantine pricing and routing, and resisting change are too many complex concepts to analyze from cramped compartments. Riding in trains hearing regional accents results in “slow unification of the language.” Perhaps, but then we jump off to another topic. Unlike homogeneous Italy, U.S. cities have lost “cohesion and identity”; this better describes the book. Parks believes that Italy “is a nation at ease with the distance between ideal and real. They are beyond what we call hypocrisy. Quite simply they do not register the contradiction between rhetoric and behavior. It’s an enviable mind-set.” Parks, “not native not stranger,” writes of commuting between major cities, southern Italy’s routes, station histories, buying tickets, encounters onboard. He treats this material with his tremendous novelist’s power but not curating or culling it thematically. Parks is too much of a character in this nonfiction exploration of whether Italy is a modern nation; watching sweating illegal-immigrant trinket sellers, he deems them “happy with their lot” since they are chatting. His inner monologues distract, undermining ethos from his larger vision. --Cynthia-Marie OBrien
Review
This is the best book I've ever read about Italy. Never have I encountered a more insightful and hilarious insider/outsider portrait of the country at the center of Western civilization. Tim Parks should be given a villa in Rome and the title of English ambassador. --Sean Wilsey, author of Oh the Glory of It All
There is no way that Italian Ways should work--but somehow it does work. How? Partly because the book is, as Tim Parks says, a search for the Italian character, which he evokes in dozens of gorgeously written scenes; but beyond that Parks is exploring the dynamic between tradition and innovation...Underneath everything, Parks is trying to come to a point of loving the world in all its confusion and frustration, and by book's end he does, he does. Bravo. --David Shields, author of How Literature Saved My Life
Enchanting travels with the good-natured Parks.
Fascinating [and] droll.... Parks [is] perhaps the most faithful foreign inamorato Italy has ever had. --Andrea Lee
Starred review. Delightful [and] hilarious.... Combining wonderfully evocative prose with a wry analysis, Parks provides local color while continually seeking hidden social meaning.... The result is a fascinating portrait of a society that seems rooted in place no matter how fast it goes.
This reverie is so inviting you might find yourself tempted to give the experience a whirl and ride the Italian trains yourself, book in hand. --Liesl Schillinger
[Parks is] a perfect guide--an outsider, but one with a deep familiarity and respect (plus a dash of exasperated skepticism)--to the country's celebrated eccentricities. Parks has a charming voice and a novelist's eye. --Chloe Schama
This is not a "railway book" in any conventional sense. It is sharp-eyed and sharp-tongued about the absurdities of 'Italian ways.' --John Lloyd
Incisive [and] hilarious. --Alexander Aciman
A movable feast to say the least. --Richard Eder
[Parks] deploys his anecdotes like a garrulous seatmate you might find in a train compartment. --Liesl Schillinger
Presents a picture of Italy you won't get from any tourist board... sympathetic and lively. --Micahel Upchurch
Charming and fascinating. --Alexander Stille
[S]o inviting you might find yourself tempted to give the experience a whirl and ride the Italian trains yourself, book in hand. --Liesl Schillinger"
This mix of piercing social observation and undying affection for Italy is classic Parks. --Rachel Donadio"
[A] treat equivalent to a ride on the Orient Express Italian Ways is no Ferrari on rails but instead something much better: a slow train so thoughtfully appointed that one never thinks to look out the window or care about the destination. --Ben Downing"
Enchanting travels with the good-natured Parks. "
Tim Parks has reinvented the narrative of the train journey with an epic voyage into the essence of Italy itself. With a novelist s keen eye he mines absurdity and deep meaning from small, overlooked moments and gestures. --Tom Vanderbilt, author of Traffic"
[Parks is] a perfect guide an outsider, but one with a deep familiarity and respect (plus a dash of exasperated skepticism) to the country s celebrated eccentricities. Parks has a charming voice and a novelist s eye. --Chloe Schama"
This is not a railway book in any conventional sense. It is sharp-eyed and sharp-tongued about the absurdities of Italian ways.' --John Lloyd"
Fascinating [and] droll . Parks [is] perhaps the most faithful foreign inamorato Italy has ever had. --Andrea Lee"
Starred review. Delightful [and] hilarious . Combining wonderfully evocative prose with a wry analysis, Parks provides local color while continually seeking hidden social meaning . The result is a fascinating portrait of a society that seems rooted in place no matter how fast it goes. "
Incisive [and] hilarious. --Alexander Aciman"
Relaxed, humorous, meandering [and] charming. --Brigitte Frase"
A movable feast to say the least. --Richard Eder"
Presents a picture of Italy you won t get from any tourist board sympathetic and lively. --Micahel Upchurch"
Charming and fascinating. --Alexander Stille"
This is the best book I ve ever read about Italy. Never have I encountered a more insightful and hilarious insider/outsider portrait of the country at the center of Western civilization. Tim Parks should be given a villa in Rome and the title of English ambassador. --Sean Wilsey, author of Oh the Glory of I"
There is no way that Italian Ways should work but somehow it does work. How? Partly because the book is, as Tim Parks says, a search for the Italian character, which he evokes in dozens of gorgeously written scenes; but beyond that Parks is exploring the dynamic between tradition and innovation Underneath everything, Parks is trying to come to a point of loving the world in all its confusion and frustration, and by book s end he does, he does. Bravo. --David Shields, author of How Literature"
Tim Parks has written a book about Italian railways that is engrossing, entertaining, and wonderfully revealing about the country and its people. It makes perfect armchair travelling a delight from beginning to end. --David Lodge, author of Changing Places
Most helpful customer reviews
14 of 14 people found the following review helpful.
An Anglo-Saxon in a Latin Land, 3.5 stars
By Lavendula
Tim Parks, an English expatriate living in Italy since 1981, offers a book that attempts to explain aspects of contemporary Italian life through the country's train system. He discusses his purpose to some Sicilians he dines with by saying, "I'm of the opinion that a culture... manifests itself entirely in anything the people of that culture do." Given the fact that he takes the train to work everyday, Parks decides to write about how Italian culture manifests itself through the train system.
The book is very well written and proved to be a quick read -- aside from some slow-moving meditations on timetables, station announcements, etc. (a lot of which might fall completely flat on a reader who has not been in Italy, or not frequently, since much of what he observes has changed over the past ten years). As other reviewers have remarked, the first half, largely comprised on observations made in Parks's home base in Verona/Northern Italy, is more complex and engaging, while the second half of the book, especially the sections regarding the south of Italy are a bit shoddier and feel almost forced. Some of the earlier chapters could stand on their own as self-contained essays, and I'd recommend them without hesitation. They are insightful and humorous.
The book's unevenness aside, there are larger problems. First, at its core, the book is an investigation of"national character," akin to what numerous Anglophone writers (primarily English, but also Americans) have done over the centuries with Italy (and other "exotic" lands) and even what an Italian, Luigi Barzini did as well back in the 1960s. For me, it's a dated endeavor, and I can't help but think of what my reaction would've been if Mr. Parks had been written about my culture, my hometown of New York City or my Italian American neighborhood. I would probably cringe, and say, no, that's not true; or, oh, yes, I can see that. But, ultimately, what purpose does such a book serve? And who does it serve?
Then there is the subject matter, the vehicle, if you will, to understanding this national character: trains. How they are organized, how stations are laid out, details about railway personal, etc. What happens on trains: who brings what to eat, how close people sit to one another, what people talk about, etc. Occasionally, Parks might remark on the passing landscape or interject an historic factoid. At times it can be repetitive, even boring. The sections that I enjoyed the most, the early ones, offered the richest, most layered telling of the story: history, landscape, station, train, people, etc.
Finally, there is Mr. Parks, the Englishman, the Anglo, the white man. Parks tells us repeatedly that he's been in Italy for 30 years (since his late 20s). He appears to have married an Italian woman, raised his children there, and been generally successful. But, his feathers are ruffled every time an Italian takes him for a foreigner, which they always do upon hearing his accented Italian, but even more annoying to him: they almost always know he's a foreigner (that is, an English/American/Canadian) just by laying eyes on him. Why he is irritated by this is baffling to me (and I have lived in other countries for extended periods, speak other languages, and grew up in a family of Italian immigrants who spoke broken English -- we all want to fit in, but we can rarely escape our roots, the places that formed us, nor would many of us want to). At times, he projects his sense of irritation with being the perpetual foreigner onto immigrants in Italy. He remarks in two or three places that there are no black ticket collectors, and looks forward to the day when the children of immigrants in Italy (in particular African immigrants) will be go through school to become railway workers. In these instances, the text is too thin, and glosses over so many complex issues facing Italy at the moment, not the least of which is a demographic change, whereby a country that was 30 years ago, entirely native-born (a place that people emigrated from, not immigrated to) to a country that has seen a foreign-born population grow from nothing to 10%. Parks doesn't give the reader much context here, and so one could easily mistake Italy's race problems with those of America or England, imagining they come from the same root. Here, the text is confusing and contradictory. The very things that Parks seems to dislike about Italy are inextricably linked to the things he seems to love: its provincial mentality, its strong local cultures, its dialects/languages, its traditions, familial ties and friendships, the weight of its history, etc. Parks appears to love all this, remarks on numerous occasions that such things have died out -- if they even ever were -- in England and in much of continental Europe. It's usually precisely those places with strong local cultures that seem to attract expatriates, often privileged folks who wish to partake of that which they never had, namely a strong community with "colorful" customs. Such is what distinguishes the expatriate from the immigrant; the former is drawn to a place because of its culture, while the latter seeks primarily to earn a living and may go anywhere to do so.
In the end, as it is with so many books about "national characters" or books about one's adopted lands, we ultimately learn more about Parks, his system, his character, and his prejudices than we do about the Italian people, north to south, or of the country's rail system. He's not a bad guy by any stretch of the imagination, and a few off-handed remarks aside, he does write lovingly about Italy. While not a wasted endeavor, the book is easily recommended to some already well-aquatinted with Italy, but to others who are curious about the landscape, the people, the history, the language, or the contemporary challenges, I would suggest looking elsewhere.
14 of 15 people found the following review helpful.
Trains and Culture
By Book Lady
What can you learn about a culture from its trains? Tim Parks, an Englishman by birth who has lived in Italy for more than 30 years, uses his vast experience as a customer of the Italian train system to draw conclusions and inferences about Italians and Italian culture. The first half of the book, which was written some time ago, was the most interesting to me, since it used experiences with the bureaucracy and the individuals who make it up to draw these parallels. His frustration is generally palpable and often funny. The second half, which was written more recently, went off on historical tangents triggered by the route of the train, and this was less interesting since it was somewhat random and appeared to be less heartfelt. The work will be most interesting to those with a passion for trains or for those interested in learning more about how Italians behave and why. Very well-written, as you would expect from a professor of translation and an author short-listed for the Booker Prize for another work.
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful.
Not a Foreign Experience
By James F. Vano
As a second-generation Italian-American, when I first visited the former homeland of my immigrant grandparents' in ciociaria, I felt a stir, like I had come home. That is the same feeling I had reading Tim Parks' Italian Ways. The book was recommended by "The Smiling Eggplant." It did not disappoint.
I could identify with so many of Parks' observations on the Italian psyche - and his experiences with the ticket vending and validation machines. At times, I laughed out loud. I couldn't help myself. When I tried to read some passages aloud to my son, I would start laughing so hard the words I tried to repeat became unintelligible.
This is not a book about trains, although there is a great deal of interesting and, perhaps, useful information about Italian railway nuances included. It is a book about many universal themes, including variations on the sense of smell. That, of course, is what makes it art. It is by no means an anti-Italian or mean-spirited book in any way. Yes, he draws fun from stereotypical behaviors, but shows us the soul of Italy - its people. Everyone can criticize their government - any government. Parks points out so many instances where the Italian governments, the railway system, beurocracies and beurocrats of all types give folks plenty to criticize and bemoan. But, he shows us a railway that can homogenize a still very parochial people - all with the same kinds of passion, loyalties, hopes, frustrations, disappointments, and their matchless Italian ability to accommodate and rise above those systemic irritants. His railway brings a realization that things do not need to be the way they are - they just are, for now.
Parks is a likeable and readable passenger with a wonderfully twisted eye for detail. He takes so many human encounters on life's railway and weaves them into the uniquely Italian experience, it is hard to believe he is uno straniero. I suppose thirty years in the country should do that to a person. The voice is so Italian. Ya gotta love him, even if you have to allow him a little hurried self-indulgent meditation/relaxation at the end of the book - for which he was late. After all that he has been through, he deserves it.
I highly recommend this easy and enjoyable ride while you wait to accumulate più soldi for your next trip to Italia. You'll love your fellow travellers, unless of course they've soiled their britches or something. You will find most definitely a little Italian within yourself. It is just plain fun.
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