You KNOW I love a book about books/reading, and apparently Will from Alma Books has also caught wise on that front. He kindly emailed to offer me a review copy of Tim Parks’ Pen in Hand (2019), which is a collection of columns that Parks wrote for the New York Review of Books – subtitled ‘reading, re-reading, and other mysteries’, though there aren’t a huge heap of mysteries in there. I don’t need mysteries. He had me at ‘reading’.
The title comes from the idea that one should always read with a pen in the hand – ready to annotate, scribble, question, and respond to the book. Now, I don’t do this. I will occasionally make light, minuscule pencil markings in a book, but that’s as far as I’m willing to go. No matter, we can tolerate each other’s differences and move on together. And I was very happy to move on – I loved this collection.
I’d previously read and reviewed Parks’ Where I’m Reading From, which I understand to be essentially an earlier version of the same thing – columns from the New York Review of Books. I had certainly enjoyed it, but described it ‘maddeningly repetitive’. The same ideas and examples came up time and time again, and D.H. Lawrence was quoted so often that it felt a little absurd. Wonderfully, this has all changed in this collection. Lawrence barely gets a look in! And, more to the point, Parks manages to avoid repetition with a cat-like agility.
True, he comes back to the same authors a lot. Just as you always know that an Alberto Manguel book will talk about Borges, so it seems that Parks is never more than a few feet from a Beckett reference. But he has a fascinating range of topics that he discusses – gathered under the loose categories ‘How could you like that book?’, ‘Reading and writing’, ‘Malpractice’, and ‘Gained and lost in translations’.
The second of these is a coverall for anything literature-related that doesn’t fit in the other categories (samples: ‘Do Flashbacks Work in Literature?’, ‘How Best to Read Auto-Fiction’), and the others are relatively porous. An article about the pleasures of pessimism could have fitted anywhere. His thoughts on reading and forgetting are fascinating and, again, could have been anywhere in the book. And so forth – who cares about classification, it’s all an opportunity to get to know Parks’ readerly persona. Which is someone with a wide knowledge of literature in several languages, open to most different periods of literature, but unafraid to spike the balloon of an overly-inflated writer. His targets are not just E.L. James and her ilk (though they do get a mention), but people like Elena Ferrante, usually held protected from such things.
The final section of essays does justify its classification, as they are all about translation. Parks has lived in Italy for decades, and works as a translator – and has some pretty interesting things to say about translation. Unlike the superlatively involving and captivating This Little Art by Kate Briggs, though, Parks doesn’t have all that much to say about the theory of translation. Rather, he takes apart various different translations of Primo Levi – and it does feel a bit mean-spirited. How could it not, when he is pointing out how other translators have done the job badly, and suggests his own versions? I can’t comment on how accurate the translations are, though Parks’ versions did often read less elegantly and more ambiguously in English than the ones he was ‘correcting’. Nevertheless, I love reading about translation – and you certainly can’t accuse Parks of making his criticisms without examples.
All in all, this is a brilliant collection to dip in and out of – or to binge in one go, if you like. It’s a little more academic than the here’s-why-I-love-books-and-tea style book about reading, but certainly not to the level of alienating the general reader. I can certainly see myself reading and re-reading this – and who knows where or when the ‘mysteries’ will come into things?
