Tim Parks

Tim Parks

Tim Parks is an English fiction writer and memoirist living in Italy. He has also written a history of the Medici bank and other nonfiction works, and is well known as a translator of Italian literature and a contributor to The New York Review of Books.

cover image of the book Sweet Days of Discipline

Sweet Days of Discipline

by Fleur Jaeggy

Translated by Tim Parks

A novel about obsessive love and madness set in postwar Switzerland, Fleur Jaeggy’s eerily beautiful novel begins innocently enough: “At fourteen I was a boarder in a school in the Appenzell.” But there is nothing innocent here. With the offhanded remorselessness of a young Eve, the narrator describes her potentially lethal designs to win the affections of Frédérique, the apparently perfect new girl. In Tim Parks’s consummate translation with its “spare, haunting quality of a prose poem” (TLS), Sweet Days of Discipline is a peerless, terrifying, and gorgeous work.

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cover image of the book Last Vanities

Last Vanities

by Fleur Jaeggy

Translated by Tim Parks

“Reading time is approximately four hours. Remembering time, as for its author, the rest of one’s life,” said Joseph Brodsky of Fleur Jaeggy’s novel, Sweet Days of Discipline. Now Jaeggy has come up with seven stories, each at some deep level in dark complicity with the others, all as terse and spare as if etched with a steel tip. A brooding atmosphere of horror, a disturbing and subversive propensity for delirium haunts the violent gestures and chilly irony of these tales. Full of menace, the air they breathe is stirred only by the Föhn, the warm west wind of the Alps that inclines otherwise respectable citizens to vent the spleen and angst of life’s last vanities.

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cover image of the book Indian Nocturne

Indian Nocturne

by Antonio Tabucchi

Translated by Tim Parks

Antonio Tabucchi describes his novella Indian Nocturne (winner of the Médicis Prize in its French translation) as “an insomnia” but also a journey… in which a Shadow is sought." In his provocatively elusive but totally compelling way, Tabucchi takes us along on a nightmarish trip through the Indian subcontinent, producing sensations by turns exotic, sensual, menacing, and oppressive, as the profound weight of an ancient culture settles on the unwary traveler. A doctor warns the nameless narrator: “A lot of people lose their way in India… it’s a country specially made for that.” At the end of the journey, it’s for the reader to decide if the narrator did in fact lose his way — or perhaps find it. Tabucchi’s stories, published by New Directions in two earlier collections, Letter from Casablanca and Little Misunderstandings of No Importance, have been called “triumphs of nuance and suggestion” (Chicago Tribune) and praised as “meticulously crafted… marked by wit, emotion, memory, and lost grandeur” (Publishers Weekly).

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