Italian Neighbors
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3.3 • 10 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year: A deliciously entertaining account of expatriate life in a small village just outside Verona, Italy.
Tim Parks is anything but a gentleman in Verona. So after ten years of living with his Italian wife, Rita, in a typical provincial Italian neighborhood, the novelist found that he had inadvertently collected a gallery full of splendid characters. In this wittily observed account, Parks introduces readers to his home town, with a statue of the Virgin at one end of the street, a derelict bottle factory at the other, and a wealth of exotic flora and fauna in between.
Via Colombare, the village’s main street, offers an exemplary hodgepodge of all that is new and old in the bel paese, a point of collision between invading suburbia and diehard peasant tradition. It is a world of creeping vines, stuccoed walls, shotguns, security cameras, hypochondria, and expensive sports cars. More than a mere travelogue, Italian Neighbors is a vivid portrait of the real Italy and a compelling story of how even the most foreign people and places gradually assume the familiarity of home.
“One of the most delightful travelogues imaginable . . . so vivid, so packed with delectable details.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A 10-year resident of a village close to Verona, British-born novelist Parks here celebrates the endearing and exasperating traits of his adoptive home and the ``magical duplicity'' of its people.
Customer Reviews
Atrocious In Every Way
If you are in search of a vicarious vacation and a pleasant read, do not expect to find it here.
The portraits painted of the neighbors of Mr. Parks are disparaging, unflattering, and, at times, just cruel, especially of the woman in window he refers to several times throughout his tale. Generally, they are reduced to just shards of his harsh judgement, they are flattened, as he never really renders a rounded synopsis of their personalities. His descriptions only make them appear as silly and mad characters. He and his wife are interlopers in a small town in Italy, not because they chose it after acquiring knowledge of the culture there, but because they could not afford to live in his home country of England. He seems to feel the need to state that he is well traveled, but then is so shocked to the intricacies and idiosyncratic Italian ways in which the pedestrian quotidian responsibilities and duties demand. How he cannot have had a basic understanding of the ways of Italians, especially given the fact that he is married to an Italian, speaks, perhaps, to an innate English condescension? Further telling of his character is his one and only thought of how to handle a very mistreated neighbor’s dog that would howl due to hunger, neglect, cold and cruelty - to POISON it. No thoughts to intercede with kindness, food and compassion, but with poison. In addition, it appears as though, if anyone at all edited and proofread this book, it must have been a drunken chimp. If the aforementioned wasn’t enough to put one off, there is the absolutely atrocious and prolific syntactical errors, typos, clunky and odd sentence structures the heavily litter the book, adding further to the misery of trying to just get through it, hoping that there is a apotheosis or a denouement to redeem it, if only slightly. I would have settled for some appreciation and tenderness on the part of Mr. Parks towards his town and its inhabitants. Sadly, it never came in actuality. Unbelievably, he claims that Italy has “become home”?