Synopsis
HELL AND BACK offers a wide range of wonderfully challenging, always provocative reflections on literature and the art of writing. The lead essay on Dante sets the tone for the entire collection: erudite, contemplative, witty, and meticulous, it constantly offers new insights in The Inferno, that most celebrated of all poems. Mixing biographical background with astute literary detection, Parks writes also of Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, Henry Green, Salman Rushdie, Jose Saramago, Christina Stead, Giovanni Verga, and a dozen others. His essay on the art of translation—he is, among other things, an eminent translator from the Italian—is simply masterful.
Author Biography: Tim Parks is the author of ten novels and three works of nonfiction: Italian Neighbors, An Italian Education, and Adultery and OtherDiversions, which was published by Arcade. He has been awarded the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, and the Betty Trask Award. His novel Europa was shortlisted for the 1997 Booker Prize. He lives in Verona, Italy.
Publishers Weekly
British novelist and essayist Tim Parks (Destiny, Adultery and Other Diversions) meditates on literature, art, and translation in Hell and Back: Reflections of Writers and Writing from Dante to Rushdie. The book includes close readings of contemporary writers like Ian Buruma and the late W.G. Sebald, as well as high modernists like Joyce and Borges, and Henry Green. Parks is also a translator of Italian, and there are a number of sketches of Italian writers (Italo Svevo, Eugenio Montale) and a piece on fascist painter Mario Sironi (Feb.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.