Hell and Back: Reflections On Writers and Writing From Dante to Rushdie

Writers and Literature

by Tim Parks

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 into The Inferno. Mixing biographical background with astute literary detection, Parks writes also of Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, Henry Green, Salman Rushdie, Jose Saramago, Christina Stead, and a dozen others. "Writerly Rancour"—which Parks calls "the fizz of contradiction . . . at the heart of the writing endeavor"—is itself worth the price of admission.

Author Biography: Tim Parks is the author of 15 works of fiction and nonfiction. Arcade's most recent publication of Parks's nonfiction is A Season with Verona. He and his family live in Verona, Italy.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Literature

360 pages, Paperback

First published January 7, 2002

About the author

Born in Manchester in 1954, Tim Parks grew up in London and studied at Cambridge and Harvard. In 1981 he moved to Italy where he has lived ever since, raising a family of three children. He has written fourteen novels including Europa (shortlisted for the Booker prize), Destiny, Cleaver, and most recently In Extremis.
During the nineties he wrote two, personal and highly popular accounts of his life in northern Italy, Italian Neighbours and An Italian Education. These were complemented in 2002 by A Season with Verona, a grand overview of Italian life as seen through the passion of football. Other non-fiction works include a history of the Medici bank in 15th century Florence, Medici Money and a memoir on health, illness and meditation, Teach Us to Sit Still. In 2013 Tim published his most recent non-fiction work on Italy, Italian Ways, on and off the rails from Milan to Palermo.
Aside from his own writing, Tim has translated works by Moravia, Calvino, Calasso, Machiavelli and Leopardi; his critical book, Translating Style is considered a classic in its field. He is presently working on a translation of Cesare Pavese's masterpiece, The Moon and the Bonfires.
A regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, his many essays are collected in Hell and Back, The Fighter, A Literary Tour of Italy, and Life and Work.
Over the last five years he has been publishing a series of blogs on writing, reading, translation and the like in the New York Review online. These have recently been collected in Where I am Reading From and Pen in Hand.

Reviews

[Sara]

The bloom of fire dance alone under red cloud
protect what lift at heart
many dangerous inefrnow was discreap
our home was prayer at our heart
chain to old holy earth
ours
never danti enferno discrip what lift at pic
its yallow jews eyes must kill
never we lift our home to spasm enemy
never will enjoy than drink blood of divil
fight three divil alawyes our ride
just holy wind take our soul and throw it in our direst home
as some jasmen flower lugh to our sky
never lonily death fear us
just high head road will take over thee inferno
we phinqe have many dove cary many olive by thee mouth
just over pain and lose we win
that earth our
and we will there inferno have it
old city sing over river of blood
kill the beast under green moon
y still at ma soul best roses
ma home syria
i will dance and write to every roof soil mountin
and never end the poem of love
still y at ma heart lebanon
and i will sing at yr door
win songs
never cold danti red storm hold war step
dangerous breath drew at cloud
but we writ at our earth by blood at any season
Our
the star of star
the sourd syrian enjoy the sun rise
shine at every moring
our oth over many pain and lose
our
ma home love ya

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of stimulating, literary essays from Tim Parks, a writer with many strings to his bow: novelist, translator, literary critic & expert on Italian contemporary life as seen & interpreted by an ex-pat Englishman...still not the devil incarnate...but suitably flexible in dealing with his neighbour's idiosyncrasies. I gleaned so much from these pieces that I now have another field of literary blooms to wander through...lonely as a cloud.

[Pat · Rating 2 out of 5]

What started as a well thought out idea turned into a series of book reviews over various topics. The only major connection between these reviews were either that the original author was Italian or the work was translated into or from Italian.

[Bryan--The Bee’s Knees · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is primarily a collection of book reviews written in the 1990's--my first impression, gained solely from the fiery title, was that these essays were held together by a unified theme, as in that the authors under discussion were examined using the lens of sin, or Hell, or religiosity as a starting point. Instead, they are, like almost all of these kinds of collections, a gathering of previously written material (mostly from the New York Times Review of Books, I believe) and other occasional pieces, and the only unifying theme is that Tim Parks wrote them.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. I wasn't familiar with Parks before this--he is both a novelist and a translator--and I bought this book simply because I found it in a bargain bin for a buck. I like essay collections, lit crit, what have you, though I don't read it as much as I used to. I tend to wonder why I'm reading about these authors and not reading the authors themselves. Yet I do think there are two good reasons: one, as an introduction to authors or books that I hadn't heard of before, and two, as potentially reevaluating those books and authors I might have discounted.

There's some of each in this collection, and, given the nature of the format, some essays too that are less interesting to me personally, though I think the quality is high throughout. If you have ever read any of the in-depth book reviews from Harper's or the Time's reviews, then you'll have a pretty good idea about what you'll find here. Inclusion in those venues alone should give one an indication of the quality, but one of the aspects that elevates this collection over some of its peers even is that Parks is also a translator (of Italian to English), and so he brings a dual perspective to a few of the essays, which I thought interesting in an academic way.

But, if you don't like reading book review collections in the first place, then you may as well give this one a pass. On the other hand, if you do, then I can recommend this one as a very enjoyable example of the type.

[Annabelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

I admit, I have not had the pleasure (nor the inclination) to have read most of the books dissected here. But I found myself enjoying it, especially the first chapter, on Dante. And like the blurb says, it has made this reader want to pursue the reading material. Most of it anyway--not too keen on Rushdie. In any case, this book is now eternally lost to Sawi, who has so graciously exchanged it with 3 books, the titles and authors of which are alien to me.