Fighter: Essays

Writers and Literature

by Tim Parks

One of Britain's outstanding novelists, Tim Parks is also a provocative, entertaining and accomplished essayist. This new collection's title is drawn from D. H. Lawrence's fundamental belligerence, and how all the significant relationships in his life, including those with his readers and critics, were characterised by intense intimacy and ferocious conflict.

Elsewhere there are literary essays on tension and conflict in the work of Beckett or Hardy, Bernhard and Dostoevsky, amongs others. Parks is also known for his acerbic chronicles of Italian life and here are essays on Mussolini, Machiavelli and the Medici.

Besides discussing questions of history, politics and literature, The Fighter also takes on that most serious tussle: World Cup football.

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays

304 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2008

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

[Mdaly · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent pot pourri of previously published essays by Tim Parks on a range of topics from Italian politics to Beckett to translating other author's work.
The only shortcoming in all these essays is their lack of soul. Not once in any of the essays is there any mention of a spiritual dimension. It seems clear from this without researching Parks further that he is an atheist. At least he doesn't come across as anti-faith but one or two may have benefited from some transcendental exploration, particularly around Dostoyevsky and maybe Beckett.

[Supriya · Rating 3 out of 5]

Solid, clever as always, and often elegant. I wish Parks wrote more Italian history; he's intensely readable when he does.