Cleaver

by Tim Parks

"In the autumn of 2004, shortly after his memorable interview with the President of the United States and following the publication of his elder son's novelised autobiography, cruelly entitled "Under His Shadow", celebrity journalist, broadcaster and documentary film-maker Harold Cleaver boarded a British Airways flight from London Gatwick to Milan Malpensa, proceeded by Italian railways as far as Bruneck in the South Tyrol and thence by taxi, northwards, to the village of Luttach only a few kilometres from the Austrian border, from whence he hoped to find some remote mountain habitation in which to spend the next, if not necessarily the last, years of his life." Thus opens Tim Parks' new novel and masterpiece. Overweight and overwrought, London's most successful journalist abandons home, partner, mistresses and above all television, the instrument that brought him identity and power. His quest: to climb above "the noise line," to get beyond the e.mail and the mobile phone and the interminable clamour of the public voice of which he himself was such a master. Weeks later, snowed in at five thousand feet, harangued by voices from the past and humiliated by his inability to understand the gothic peasants he relies on for food and whisky, Cleaver discovers that there is nowhere so noisy and so dangerous as the solitary mind.

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Italy

Paperback

Published January 1, 2006

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

[Lynne Spreen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a challenging book because it's written in stream of consciousness style, which might be off-putting to some. However, I found that aspect amusing because Cleaver's over-active squirrel brain reminds me of my own, leaping from subject to subject, as I typically do.

But the story is a good one wherein a decent man is played and manipulated throughout his life - although he does a fair bit of the same, achieving great heights of celebrity and accomplishment. But at about age 60 (sorry, can't remember specifically), grief-stricken and at the end of his rope, he takes his overweight and out of shape body and his tech-addicted, co-dependent mind off on a crazy quest to find some kind of peace and independence, some place in the world where he can either end it all or find himself.

He rents a very rustic cabin on the edge of the wilderness where he doesn't speak the language of the locals and thus is misunderstood, mistrusted, and insulated from humanity until the end of the book. (One of the interesting aspects of the story is the immersion in rural German culture.) Cleaver is also completely unprepared for the harshness of the winter in this mountain setting and almost dies as a result. The story is resolved when he demonstrates his core decency, stands up for himself, feels he is of value, and rejects the manipulating nastiness of those who should love him - his family. In a sense, he finds a new family in a very different place.

I could only give this book 4 stars because there were a couple of errors of logic in it which revealed a need for a bit more editing - and the book is confusing enough with its switches between tense and point of view - but I frankly couldn't put it down, and I still, ten days later, think of the protagonist as a real person. I'm glad I read it, and I heartily recommend it, but it's a challenging read. Bottom line: if you're middle-aged and you're interested in seeing a character bust loose from convention and finally, at midlife, find his own way, this is a fantastic story.

[Dpdwyer · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’m a fan of Tim Parks’ writing, but this one didn’t quite work for me. Great premise: older, high profile media celebrity--think British Dan Rather--decides to leave his career and his conflicted relationships with his wife and son, and retreat alone to a remote, media free cabin in the Swiss Alps. I was more interested in his adjustment to solitude than his withdrawal from media, and there just wasn’t enough of the former. I didn’t finish it but I’m glad I tried.

Sample quote: “Words mean less as experience accumulates, he thought. The more you have of both--words and experience--the less they seem to have to do with each other.” 83

[Stephanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

The writing and structure of the storytelling in this book was note-worthy. Indeed, I wish I were able to write like Tim Parks. But the story fell apart at the 3/4 mark, and the end was a great big flat balloon. Still, lots of good reason to read this book, especially if you're a writer studying craft.

[Lisa McKenzie · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is rare to read a book that delves this deeply into the consciousness of its main character. A brilliant study of estrangement.

[Stefaan Sterck]

f

[Christy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good read. Memorable characters.

[Lars · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tim Park's "Cleaver" is primarily about a father-son conflict. Cleaver is a well-known reporter, today he would be called "old white man": Dominant, patronizing and perpetual womanizer - somehow I always had Jeremy Clarkson in mind while reading. After his son writes a tell-all book about the family, in which the protagonist does not come off well, Cleaver flees to the solitude of a South Tyrolean mountain hut, breaks off all contact and reviews his life to date.

In exile, some sticking points come to light, such as the early death of his juvenile daughter. In addition, the reporter tries to communicate with the inhabitants of the South Tyrolean village and to find out the secrets of a peasant family - here, too, there was a daughter who died at an early age. All in all, Cleaver sees himself misrepresented by his son's book and his feelings fluctuate between anger, irony and hurt.

The book is a bit hard to read at times, as Parks often jumps in other times from one sentence to another: what his son wrote, what Cleaver himself remembers and what is happening right now in South Tyrol. The finish ends with a showdown, the son arriving in Italy and the two men talking it out, with a more or less open ending. If there is a moral to the story, it is that they both knew much less about each other than they thought.

Overall, I enjoyed the novel, though the ending is a bit vague. But maybe that's just the message: that life isn't always black and white and not all injuries can be healed, especially when the people involved have a different view of things.

[Eline · Rating 4 out of 5]

At first I thought this was a bad translation, but apparently in English readers have trouble getting used to the weird grammar too. Nonetheless, when you've read your share of Saramago, it doesn't take very long to get used to the writing style. In fact, my brain found it fun to guess every sentence which perspective was being used. So for me this wasn't a reason to stop reading. Yes, the wide open ending, but isn't that the same for all of us every night when we go to bed? Not knowing what the hell your life is going to look like the next day? So yeah, bonus points for Parks. Minus points for the excessive blah blah about sex, like women are just things to use and then throw away. But that's the main character's point of view, of course.

[Anton Segers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wéér eens, zoals altijd bij Tim Parks, een kijk in het hoofd van een mens in crisis.
De focus komt nu nog sterker dan anders op de gedachten- en gevoelensstroom die de gemoedsrust van een mens kunnen verstoren, want de man die eraan lijdt maakt bijna niets mee. Hij heeft zich net afgezonderd van de wereld in een berghut om in de natuur tot rust te komen in zijn hoofd, wat vanzelfsprekend wishful thinking is...
Wie Parks leest herkent vaak hetzelfde bij elk nieuw boek, en toch raak je (ik) het nooit beu.
Dan moet je dus echt wel kunnen schrijven.
Thanks, Mr. Parks.

[Trevor Newman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cleaver is a well told and believable story about one man's quest for peace. The setting is both majestic and bleak. The protagonists are life-size and almost familiar in that they live normal tedious lives. The storyline takes the reader on a circular journey of discovery and disappointment, love and loss, strength and weakness, hope and fear, past and present. If escape is an attractive goal, then the costs are great.

[Audrey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Neutral positive. No regrets, but no need to read again either.

[Peter Schneider · Rating 1 out of 5]

In Details der körperlichen Unpässlichkeiten einen alternden, übergewichtigen Mannes zu schwelgen ist so uninteressant wie eklig. Habe das Buch nach 1/3 in die Ecke geworfen.

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

…just unable to feel anything for this character. If that was Mr. Parks’ intention, well done.

I just didn’t enjoy it as much as I hoped I would…

[TBV (on hiatus) · Rating 3 out of 5]

"I have no baggage, he declared. Nothing." So says Harold Cleaver upon his hasty departure from London, but he takes a great deal of emotional baggage with him.

A well known TV personality, Cleaver has a reputation of being a first rate journalist and he had just given the President of the USA a roasting, so why has he decided to take the first transport available to leave London, Amanda, his home and his family without even taking any luggage? The catalyst was the novel written by his son, titled 'Under his Shadow' in which the protagonist's life was clearly based on Cleaver's.

Clearly disturbed, Cleaver decides "I will write no letters, he thought, aware now that he was approaching the end of his journey. He had not brought a laptop. Or even a notepad. Or even pen and paper. Whatever is about to happen to me, or around me, need never be told or expressed."

And so commences a new life in another country where he doesn't know the language (except for a few rudimentary words), without any belongings, friends or family. Alone with a turmoil of thoughts he settles in a rough cottage high up in the mountains above Lutach, South Tyrol.

As the harsh winter weather sets in he reflects on his son's words and his own actions. He is in turn puzzled, angry or disturbed as he mulls over what had been said. In the silence and the cold of his new existence every sound and every thought is amplified. He encounters abysses real and imagined. He reflects on a life left behind and the possibility of a fresh start.

And just in case the reader is not aware of it, Cleaver points out that the word 'cleave' has two opposite meanings.

[J.M. Cornwell · Rating 2 out of 5]

International media personality goes into hiding in the wake of character assassination.

For the first time in his life, Harold Cleaver breaks with his usual diffident and even-handed manner and rakes the American president over the coals in a televised interview. Why? His son Alex’s book, Under His Shadow, billed as fiction, mercilessly lampoons and harpoons the corpulent Cleaver’s secrets and habits. What can he do now?

Feeling raw and exposed, Cleaver travels to the Alps on the Swiss-Italian border to a tiny backward village to lick his wounds. Cleaver will retire from the world and from the media. No television, no radio, no cell phone, no newspapers, no computer and no media contact of any kind. Cleaver goes cold turkey and off the radar – for good?

Cleaver is a thinly veiled diatribe against President G. W. Bush and the media circus that governs our views and our lives in the personage of Harold Cleaver, master media manipulator. Tim Parks comes out swinging but Cleaver, Parks’s main character, sidles out whining and defensive. It is hard to sympathize with a character that walks away from wealth and power and fame to buy his way into another life, haunted by the ghosts of his past deeds and the voices of his mistresses and long time partner, as he stumbles farther and farther from everything he knows and has achieved.

In an often tedious stream of consciousness, Parks shuffles the deck of Cleaver’s excuses and justifications, adding little to the character or the forward movement of the story. I had to backtrack many times to figure out who said what and what was really going on. A good bit of the dialogue is written in German and I had only a hazy idea of what was happening. The vernacular German adds another depth to an already barely fathomable tangle of lies and alibis. Watching an iconic personality adept at effective sound bites brought low by another man’s truth is revealing and disappointing. The human qualities that make even the most callus talking head sympathetic are absent in Parks’s Harold Cleaver, making Cleaver disordered, disorganized, cowardly and petulant.

Cleaver takes too long – nearly the entire book – to become an interesting and poignant character study of a son who detests what his father has become and finds himself following in his footsteps.



###

[Paul The Uncommon Reader · Rating 2 out of 5]

Imaginative plot, unlikable and uninteresting protagonist?

Something didn't quite click for me here, what was he running away from? And would his son"s writing really have so upset this otherwise thick-skinned man?

As a fan of all things Alpine, I did enjoy the scenery, as it were, though the setting did seem untenably remote... This is 21st century Europe, folks! (Though the author has lived and worked in Northern Italy for ages, so he probably knows his settings up there.) Plus the novel was written in 2006; Europe is shrinking fast thanks to the Internet (the novel has aged already, blanket WiFi has rendered sections of this plot implausible...)

Not a very memorable or enlightened read for me, but my last thought, as a pan-European, is how good it is to think of Parks, a British-born author, now a long-time resident (and probably, post Brexit mess, citizen) of Italy, writing about the German-speaking regions of the Alps (the South Tyrol, near the Austrian border, itself a multi-ethnic region: historically German, now Italian).

For how much longer will this be even possible? And why is it being made so difficult? It's turning the clocks back 50 years, and it is madness.

[Michele · Rating 4 out of 5]

A man decides to live off the grid in order to escape certain unpleasant realities, including the fact that his eldest son has written a scathing book about him disguised as a novel. We're reminded of said novel about a million times but, putting that aside for a moment, what happens when you're a famous TV newsman who decides to go not just cold turkey but frozen when you escape to the northernmost part of Italy, near the Austrian border? Well, if you don't have enough practice being alone with your own thoughts, probably nothing good. As they say, wherever you go, there you are. And so, too, are reminders of the unpleasantries of life, present and past, which commence to knock louder and louder on Cleaver's door. I liked the journey portrayed in this book, which culminates in Cleaver's ironic realization that he was never quite as far off the grid as he thought. One section at the end was a little disappointing but I understand that it needed to be there for the book to conclude.

[Liedzeit Liedzeit · Rating 2 out of 5]

Der Fernsehjournalist Cleaver, berühmt für ein freches Interview mit dem amerikanischen Präsidenten, der vielleicht Bush jr. war, zieht sich schmollend in die Stille von Tirol zurück, weil sein Sohn einen Schlüsselroman, Im Schatten des Allmächtigen, geschrieben hat, in dem er, Cleaver, nicht so gut weg kommt. Naja, der erste Teil, meint er, nicht so schlimm. Ein wenig schurbelig das Ganze. Da gibt es eine nicht geheiratete Frau, von der man sich traurigerweise nicht scheiden lassen kann, eine tote Tochter, jede Menge am Rosenkranz aufgezählter Geliebte, davon eine Inderin etc.
Im Dorf, glaubt er, interessiere sich die lokale Dorfschönheit für ihn. Auch da gibt es eine geheimnisvolle Tote. Schließlich taucht der Sohn auf, fängt sich eine für das Buch, erzählt dann von geheimer Gattin und Affäre mit deren Mutter, dazwischen verschwundener Geliebte. Macht das auch nicht viel attraktiver.
(5/10)

[Bettie · Rating 2 out of 5]

In the autumn of 2004, shortly after his memorable interview with the President of the United States and following the publication of his elder son's novelised autobiography, cruelly entitled Under His Shadow, celebrity journalist, broadcaster and documentary film-maker Harold Cleaver boarder a British Airways flight from London Gatwick to Milan Malpensa, proceeded by Italian railways as far as Bruneck in the South Tyrol and thence by taxi, northwards, to the village of Luttach only a few kilometres from the Austrian border, from whence he hoped to find some remote mountain habitation in which to spend the next, if not necessarily the last, years of his life.

What a long first sentence - matches Eliot in length for sure, but eloquence? Nah! not so much at all.

[Armand · Rating 3 out of 5]

A well written novel that has all the earmarks of greatness including a intellectual with an internal crisis, mountains, and people speaking German.

I stopped at around page 125.

I think that at another point (maybe even a few months ago) I would have read this cover to cover- and I might still someday- but at this point in my life I'm suffering from an overload of work and commitments and the novel- which is essentially a map of the main character's (Harold Cleaver') soul- is too slow and too thoughtful and too much of an interior monologue to hold my attention.

It's a solid book; but it's not the right book for me right now.

[Rushda · Rating 2 out of 5]

Okay to be honest, I picked up this book as I haven't read any of Tim Parks' novels but that of his interesting articles on the nybooks blog. In Cleaver, the reader is invited to whirl around Harold Cleaver's son's word vomit stacked under a fictional book that results in Cleaver to abscond. It starts off with poise but as we progress, it remains hazy and the subject of alienation waits there in long digressions dozing in the Rosenkranzhof packed with nothing but a bunch of European strangers Cleaver encounters. A little annoyed because I didn't come to find element, pace or a nicely wrapped perspective altering literature that enamour us as readers, not alienate us.

[Khristian Vanier · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is written in a very hard-to-follow style, as Cleaver one minute is thinking about something, then is recalling something his son said, then recalling something his wife said, to actually doing something... all within the same paragraph. It took me half the book to finally get an idea of what was going on. Most of the dialogue Cleaver has throughout the book is in German, and it is difficult to figure out what is being said or what is even happening in many situations. I will admit I got sucked in towards the end as things begin to escalate very quickly.... Just for the ending to be so completely underwhelming (while leaving many loose ends) that I almost threw my iPad in anger.

[Cassidy Brinn · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn't find Harold's obsession anywhere near as compelling as Jerry's in Europa. It also peeved me that he had only read his son's book once, yet could quote long passages from the entire thing by heart. Still, it was an entertaining cynical look at what happens when the rich retreat into isolated scenic spots to try and purify themselves.

Parks writes a fair amount of dialogue in German and in an Austrian dialect, I wonder what the novel would be like if that was all gibberish to me - might be better, actually, by creating a stronger sense of the culture clash.

[Philip Raby · Rating 2 out of 5]

I almost gave up on this book, as it plodded along with no direction. However, towards the end it got my attention only to reward me with a disappointing ending.

The concept is good but spoilt by the pretentious writing style. It jumps from past to present tense within sentences, goes from first to third person and, most annoyingly, the spoken dialogue isn't contained within speech marks. I cannot see the point of this, it's bad grammar and makes the book harder to read without adding anything. Back to school, Parks!

[Jeff Russo · Rating 3 out of 5]

The premise of this vaguely reminded me of my own three night trip to the Fortress of Solitude. So, there's that.

This never quite revved up for me. Not bad, not great. I was annoyed by all the German being said. I realize that may be a part of the point, to put us in a disorientation similar to Cleaver, but... see, that's why I've never gone to a country where they don't speak English. To me it's the Horror of Horrors that someone will talk to me, or that I'll read a sign, and not understand it. It defeats the whole purpose.

[Penny Little · Rating 3 out of 5]

This novel irritated me at first as it jumps from past to present tense frequently and even in sentences. However as I persisted I found that it worked for this story, as did the short sentences in German and Austrian. It portrayed the mixed up mind of the main character well, even though I thought he was rather a pain.

[Christoph Fischer · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Cleaver" by Tim Parks was a perfectly fine book with a lot of wit and power of observation but for some reason or another I just could not get into the character and his personal crisis. It might be a case of wrong expectations but unlike Park's other work, which I love, this was comparatively un-engaging.

[Christian Deysson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ganz schön enttäuschend. Hatte mir vom diesem Autor und vom deutschen Titel "Stille" mehr und Nachdenklicheres erwartet als die geschwätzige Introspektion eines eingebildeten, selbstverliebten Affen, der sich obendrein auch nach einem Fünftel des Buches immer noch nicht entscheiden kann, ob er seine SMS auf dem Handy öffnet oder nicht. Genug... Ich höre jetzt mit dem Lesen auf.

[Freek Dech · Rating 2 out of 5]

A successful journalist, who is disillusioned by life and his son, escapes to a Tyrolean mountain to explore solitude and find himself, but ends up finding back his son.

[Manaudou · Rating 2 out of 5]

Think of the most annoying talking head on TV. Would you want to read an entire story about him as he "finds himself" somewhere in the mountains?