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?
I, too, am very fond of books about books (Francine Prose’s Reading Like A Writer is one of my favorites). I seem to have read a review of Parks’ book somewhere or other and have been waiting for its U.S. publication, which is in August. I’ll definitely check it out.
That’s gone on my reading list immediately!
Skimming your review because I’m reading this at the moment, too, and absolutely loving it! Wonderful essays! :D
Looking forward to your thoughts!
I think I have to read this if only to find out what he says about (my beloved) Elena Ferrante! How dare he! :D
I do love these books, though they are kind of like popcorn for me. I don’t really have any memory of them a couple of months down the road. I think the one exception to this (so far at least) is the Ann Fadiman collection Ex Libris. I don’t remember every essay but there are a few that still stick out in my mind.
I was underwhelmed with Ferrante, I’m afraid, but do feel like it was a lacking in me rather than in the book. And yes, some stick in the mind (including the Fadiman) but others are fun and gone.
This is one I will be buying because I’m another who can’t resist books about reading. Like you though I don’t go for the ‘make notes in the margin’ recommendation unless it’s an academic work that I’m using for study purposes. It’s post it notes for me or any odd bit of paper that happens to be nearby
I often now just make notes on my phone, because I never seem to have a pencil anywhere near me…
Great piece, but… hm… not sure this one is for me. Thanks!
Oh, I *love* this! I’m all about reading with a pen in hand, though I could never bring myself to make a mark in the margins of a book (I keep a designated notebook on hand while reading, all my scribbling goes in there). Thank goodness he gave Lawrence the flick in this collection, I’m growing quite weary of that guy 😅 This one sounds great, thank you!
Haha! Yes, a little goes a long way with our David, doesn’t it?
I’m coming a bit late to the conversation through Janakay.
I do love books on books, and books on translation. I like that you mention he doesn’t write about theory of translation. Eco’s book on translation I’m reading right now, it’s the same in that Eco talks about his experience as a translator himself, and someone who has been translated into different languages and who talks and solves problems with his different translators.
All the different topics you mention that the book deals with, I’m fond of. I’m adding this book to my books of interest as well.
This you say here: 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’.
I don’t intend to sound pretentious, but YOUR comment bears a lot of weight, if as a reader the other translations come to you more elegant, THAT’S IT. Translation’s accuracy is a chimera.
Elegance is a very important category in the case of fiction. To him, his translation may convey better what he’s reading, but you have equal right as a reader to make your judgment call and defend the quality of other translations on the basis of elegance.
And good to know you were underwhelmed by Ferrante. Now I’m confused, LOL, (no worries, I’m just collecting opinions among good readers, -since I have not read any of her famous trilogy but I have the first one-, and that opinion is very divided.
We’ll see.
Thanks for a nice overview of what to find in this book..
Definitely a book I want to read! Great review, thanks