Rating 3.5 stars

Italian Life takes place in a Milan university in the north of Italy. Valeria, a young woman from southern Italy, enrols together with thousands of others for a degree course that could take anything between three and ten years to complete. Then there is James, an English professor who lives in Italy teaching English to the university students. He discovers it's not what you know but who you know if you want to progress your career.

It's not quite a novel, there was a lot of telling me what was going on rather than showing. However it was interesting to read how the Italian university life works, plus how the career for academia is a challenge. I enjoy books that look at different cultures, so this is certainly something I would recommend if you like that type of book.

I felt the end was rather rushed, it screamed to an abrupt halt and was suddenly over. I felt I knew what happened to Valeria but in the case of James it seemed rather vague.

I received this book from Netgalley in return for a honest review.

Italian Life is a novel with it's roots in reality, the story of Italian student Valeria and English professor James as they navigate the politics of getting on in a private Italian University. Valeria is desperate to escape her family in the South but even on her journey by train to university in Milan her family keep an eye on her, it is only when she reaches Milan does she feel out of their reach. James has had to learn how things are done in Italy to progress in his career and that no matter how many years he lives in Italy he will always be seen by most as an outsider.
Italian Life doesn't always portray life in Italy as " La Dolce Vita" , in fact it exposes the slightly darker and less moral side of bureaucracy which can also be seen within families.

The layout of the story makes it very easy to read and follow, the cross references to fables at the start of chapters shows that we haven't changed much.

I was given a copy of Italian Life by NetGalley and the publishers in return for an unbiased review.

Italians have a reputation for being laid-back and open-minded. To some extent this is true, but anyone who has ever had to deal with the intricacies of Italian bureaucracy might question it. Tim Parks has produced a unique look at the frustrations and graft underpinning the glamour and style of Italian life!

As someone who is learning italian and had delved into italian history for my studies, this book was so useful and something i would have loved for my own studies at university. This was a great insight into areas of italian life and history i hadnt quite known, and enriched my understanding

I love Tim Parks' book, they're so funny and realistic and you never know if you have to love or cry for your country.
Italy is a place that can drive you crazy but you will always miss the way of living when you are away.
I read some reviewer wondering why you keep on living in such a crazy country: there's no answer but you know it's a place you will love regardless of its defect.
I laughed a lot and I reflected on what I read.
Trust everything is true and you learn to laugh at it, I suppose it's part of the way of living.
I strongly recommend it if you want to read a humorist and realistic description of Italy..
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.

As a half Italian who grew up in Italy, this was a very interesting book. Having attended university in English-speaking countries, in a way I have always wondered what life might have been had I continued my studies in my homeland instead. After reading this book, I feel I have dodged a bullet (or even a torpedo really!). It is not a surprise though, if I am honest.

Within the first pages of the book Tim Parks, a British writer who has lived in Italy since the early 80s, refers to Italy and "the wonderful human warmth of the place, its systematic cruelty". How accurate! The author does a good job of putting down in words the disconcertingly duplicitous nature of Italy and Italians, at once warm and cruel, as it is a hard state of being to convey to the non-initiated. Often Italians tell Tim Parks that he wouldn't understand as he is a foreigner, but in fairness, after 40 years of living in the country, he does a good job of understanding the internal machinations of the country and its people.
When Italians are good, they are really good, and when they are bad, they are really bad. But unfortunately all good Italians are inevitably victims and prey of the bad Italians and have to become implicated, in some shape or form, in the corruption spreading like a cancer from the bad Italians. Towards the end of the book this dynamic is abstracted even further, suggesting that a bad Italian would not be a bad Italian if living abroad and that even perpetrators are, to an extent, involuntary victims of the system. Indeed, there are occasions in which the protagonist, James, an English professor in an Italian private university in Milan, finds himself entangled in the sycophantic hierarchy and asphyxiating chain of "raccomandazioni" (recommendations) that his career has been depending on more than he wishes for. Parks quotes an Italian saying when referring to one of his British senior colleagues, who has become a seasoned Italian at this point: "Inglese italianizzato, diavolo incarnato" (Italianised English, devil incarnate). The idea of leaving one's country and the impossibility of returning is also touched upon at times.

James is very much an avatar for Tim Parks, similar to the extent in fact that you can only assume that Parks was looking to stave off any legal challenges by choosing to write in the style of fiction. One is from London and has studied at Oxford and Yale. The other is from Manchester and studied at Cambridge and Harvard. Both are translators from Italian into English and have had a long career in Italian academia, particularly in a private Milanese university. Both married an Italian woman who they then divorced after having children with. Both lived for many years in a provincial town (Verona in Parks' case) and eventually moved to Milan after years of commuting.

The other main protagonist is a young student from the south of Italy, Valeria, and the book follows her career from first year student to PhD student and her tentative attempts to establish an academic career. I felt this character was not as well developed.

In fact, aside from the very well executed account of the complexities and challenges of having a career in the Italian academic world (and frankly often a career in general), this book is not as successful in its realisation as a fully fledged novel. I feel that, had the author just kept this as a work of non-fiction, it would have improved in quality, but the chosen form of fiction limited it unnecessarily. Throughout the book, Parks references the reality he is immersed in with works of Italian Literature (mainly Giambattista Basile, Cesare Pavese, Ignazio Silone, Dante, Natalia Ginzburg, Niccolò Macchiavelli, but also others) and considers its recurring themes of insider/outsider and of the costs of not conforming to the community/family. I think that had Parks framed the content of his analysis solely along these considerations and illustrated these through anecdotes and observations, this would have deserved a four star rating or more. But the narrative conceit he has chosen for this (be it for legal reasons or not), I think ultimately cheapened the output and resulted in me giving it a 3.5 star rating.

More generally I would highly recommend this to anyone interested in Italy and Italian life as it is very good in conveying complexities and realities that you won't find in the average "A Place in the Sun" style of books. But as a novel in and of itself, it may be more difficult for it to find a natural home in the general audience.

Tim Parks is a British novelist, translator, author and professor of literature. He moved to Italy in 1981 and has lived there ever since with his Italian wife and three children. He has written fourteen novels published in half a dozen countries. Over the years he has written extensively about life in Italy – Preceding Italian Life were Italian Neighbours (1992), An Italian Education (1996) and Italian Ways (2013).

Right from the get-go Parks states that Italian Life is not a memoirs. The fact that James, his main character is also an academic living in Italy is merely a minor similarity.

Of the 40 years he has been living in Italy, 26 of them was spent as university professor at IULM University in Milan. We can safely assume that he knows what he’s talking about when he writes a novel about Italy and particularly the academic environment. Yet, after so many years in Italy he still struggles to get a handle on the intricate workings of the notorious Italian bureaucracy and permeating corruption which lies at its core.

Full review here: https://wanderingwestswords.wordpress.com/2020/08/02/italian-life-tim-parks/

I fell in love with what I saw of Italy on Channel 4’s Football Italia in the early 90s. It was a naïve relationship based more around drinking espresso in sun-baked piazzas and headlines of Totti, than the true workings of the nation. It did lead me to Tim Parks though, initially through his football classic A Season with Verona, in which he followed the Hellas Verona ultras, and then his memoir Italian Neighbours about his own life in Italy.

His latest book, Italian Life, is less of a memoir and more an exploration of Italian culture through the eyes of the people working in a private university in Milan. Parks uses two composite characters, James and Valeria, to share the insights of his four decades living in the country and working as an author, translator and university professor. James is a British professor married and divorced from an Italian, with an Italian son, working at the same university where Valeria studies for first her undergraduate, then her higher degree and finally a Phd, having moved north from Basilicata.

The various relationships that these two central characters have are where we get to see the cultural rules and responsibilities that dominate Italian life. James with his colleagues and superiors as he tries to make an academic career for himself but struggles to come to terms with the requirement to “respect” those in authority, however incapable he may actually believe them to be. Valeria with her friends, boyfriends and the expectations of her family, as she seeks to create an independent life for herself and is eventually also caught up in the politics of academia.

Italian Life is an enjoyable and easy read, but it also asks more questions than the other Tim Parks books that I have read. It makes you wonder why he sticks with it in the face of so much frustration, how has Italy bound itself to him so that he seeks to mould into it rather than flee? As your mind drifts, it asks similar questions about your own culture and the tug of war that plays out in your life as you balance the inevitable good and bad of the country where you live. This feels very relevant to me at this particular moment in time.

Parks paints a picture of Italian culture that feels very constricting. It is easy to imagine the Italians as elegant, flamboyant Mediterraneans, but life through this lens appears to be controlled and authoritarian, with strict rules and expectations and a clear hierarchy that commands complete loyalty. It is easy to see where some of the more troubling aspects of Italian history might have found fertile soil.

A key theme in the book is the notion of insiders and outsiders. This importance of being part of the community is demonstrated repeatedly, within James and Valeria’s own stories and the various cultural references to Italian writing and folk tales. There seems to be a tension here, a desire to see someone else break out of the suffocating system, but a reluctance to be that person and a need to find a way back into its uncomfortable embrace. It is both frustrating and fascinating and perhaps that is why James persists through the decades.

For anyone with an interest in Italian culture this is a straightforward way in. It offers its insight within a recognisable setting with engaging characters and the author acts as a friendly guide, gently leading you through the traditions, confrontations and sleights of hand of the protagonists. As someone with an interest in, but little direct experience of, Italian life I found it both interesting and entertaining and would recommend it to anyone of similar circumstance.

"Power in Italy is above all the power to include or exclude others"

Parks explores Italian life through the specific lens of its university system here: in what seems like 'faction', it follows Valeria, a student, and James, an English teacher, as they both struggle within the system. There are stories that are enlightening: I didn't know, for example, that 60% of Italian students drop out without completing their degrees. Also that the wayward system means students can take up to 10 years to complete a basic undergraduate degree.

Alongside that are tales of put-upon part-time teaching staff (this sounds very familiar to anyone who has been a Graduate Teaching Assistant or Teaching Fellow, even post-doc in the UK's current educational climate), abuses of power, cronyism, bribery, sexual harassment and all the usual power plays.

The tone is sardonic but the narrative is frequently repetitive and could have been more light-touch. The fictional parts can also drag at times. So this has something of the tragi-comic air of Camilleri but without so much of the comic. Worth a read if you're interested in Italy or education systems.

I was attracted to the cover of this book, with the knowledge that Tim Parks is an established fiction and non-fiction author, known for his depiction of Italian life, having been a university professor in Milan.

This, however, is not a memoir. While is has not been directly experienced by the author, Parks takes his many years in Italy and creates a new Englishman in Italy.

This very readable book sets out to explain how Italy really works, through the experiences of James and Valeria who teach and study in a University in the North of Italy. Littered with Italian words and anecdotes only a local would know, this book exposes the vast differences between our culture and the Italian one. Being a lover of Italy and all things 'Italian', I could recognise the behaviours and idiosyncrasies depicted by Perks and enjoyed the easy reading style and often amusing nature of the book.