Life and Work
Writers, Readers, and the Conversations between Them
-
- $36.99
-
- $36.99
Publisher Description
Acclaimed novelist and critic Tim Parks has long been fascinated by the complicated relationship between an author’s life and work. Dissatisfied with the dominant modes of reading he encountered, he began exploring the underlying values and patterns that guide authors in both their writing and their lives.
In a series of provocative, incisive, and unflinching essays written over the past decade and collected for the first time here, he reveals how style and content in a novel reflect a whole pattern of communication and positioning in the author’s ordinary and daily behavior. We see how life and work are deeply enmeshed in the work of writers as diverse as Charles Dickens, Feodor Dostoevsky, James Joyce, Anton Chekhov, Philip Roth, Julian Barnes, Peter Stamm, and Geoff Dyer, among others. Parks further shows us how readers’ reactions to these writers and their works are inevitably connected to these communicative patterns, establishing a relationship that goes far beyond aesthetic appreciation.
This original and daring collection takes us into the psychology of some of our greatest writers and challenges us to see with more clarity how our lives become entangled with theirs through our reading of their novels.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Parks, a prolific literary critic and celebrated novelist (Painting Death), compiles 20 previously published essays and book reviews (mostly from the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books) into a smart, engaging collection. His announced intention is to explore the "tensions between competing values" in the works reviewed and the way they "shape the relationship between reader and writer that forms through the work." To that end, he examines James Joyce's sense of "belonging and not belonging" to Ireland and the "fear that heightens the desire to live" in Philip Roth's late novels. Most of the entries center on white male authors (with the exceptions of Muriel Spark, Haruki Murakami, and E.L. James), but Parks's subjects are varied in other respects, and include a canonical English Victorian (Charles Dickens), a French detective novelist (Georges Simenon), a South African literary darling (J.M. Coetzee), and a recent Swedish publishing powerhouse (Stieg Larsson). His analyses of them are invariably intelligent and complex without being intimidating. Despite the book's subtitle, Parks never really delves into the conversation between authors and readers; the only conversations on display are between him and the works he surveys, but these exchanges are fascinating to witness.
