Europa [Hardcover]

Tim Parks (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 14, 1998

A finalist for the Booker Prize, this ferociously comic tale of love gone sour is the finest novel to date from the author of the national bestsellers, "An Italian Education" and "Italian Neighbors".

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Jerry Marlow is on a coach hurtling from Milan to Strasbourg, even though he loathes coaches and everything they stand for:

...all the contemporary pieties of getting people together and moving them off in one direction or another to have fun together, or to edify themselves, or to show solidarity to some underprivileged minority and everybody, as I said, being of the same mind and of one intent, every individual possessed by the spirit of the group, which is the very spirit apparently of humanity, and indeed that of Europe, come to think of it, which this group is now hurtling off to appeal.

Jerry, suffice to say, is not a team player--not even when it comes to saving his own job. Together with a group of colleagues and students from the University of Milan, he's off to the European Parliament to protest new Italian laws against hiring foreigners--a cause which he opposes, appealing to an institution he's not sure should exist.

So why is Jerry on the coach in the first place? Because she is there--the same she for whom Jerry left his wife and daughter and who has since broken his heart. The unnamed she in question is a beautiful French woman (of course), a hellcat in bed (it goes without saying), and an intellect of notable refinement (naturellement). She was also unfaithful, and now they scarcely speak to one another. The rest of this dark and often savagely funny novel (shortlisted for the 1997 Booker Prize) consists of one great Joycean rant, a stream-of-consciousness harangue that circles obsessively around sex, the treachery of she, and Jerry's boundless misanthropy. In between we get glimpses of the bus and its motley cast of characters, including, most vividly, Vikram Griffiths, part Welsh, part Indian, with his nervous tics and his self-consciously Welsh accent and his shaggy mutt, Dafydd. As one might deduce from the title, the dream of the new, unified Europe looms behind this tale like--well, like a big, unwieldy metaphor, given expression in the form of Jerry's affair. As a meditation on the continent's future, the novel works surprisingly well, and though it initially takes some time to sort out the looping rhythms of Parks's prose, the reader's patience is repaid in spades. --Mary Park

From Publishers Weekly

This darkly comic and inherently tragic novel by the versatile Parks (Tongues of Flame; Italian Neighbors) charts the emotional disintegration of a 45-year-old man mourning the end of an affair. In narrator Jeremiah Marlowe, Parks embodies the man of intellect in helpless thrall to his emotions. We meet Jerry on a bus traveling with a polyglot load of colleagues and nubile female students from the Milan university where he teaches to Strasbourg, where they will present a petition to the European Parliament protesting the Italian government's decision to limit the salaries and tenure of foreign professors. Although he doesn't care about his dead-end job, Jerry has come along because she will be there. His former mistress, never identified by name, is a Frenchwoman who casually betrayed Jerry after he had left his wife and teenage daughter for her. Jerry's pain, jealousy and sense of futility rise to the point of frenzy as he obsesses about his ex-mistress's cool repudiation of what he felt was the most meaningful relationship of his life. His headlong interior monologue, frantic with self-loathing and despair, is, for all its rambling rush, tightly controlled. While the book is essentially farcical, it is also profoundly sad to witness a man at the end of his tether willfully subjecting himself to the proximity of the woman who is the source of his anguish. Moreover, Jerry's agitated thoughts encapsule a brilliant meditation about the shallowness of popular culture at the end of the 20th century, made more vivid to Jerry by the bon mots of classical literature that spring to his mind at every turn of events. He mockingly compares the myths of a united Europe and of a perfect love against the realities of self-involved nations and individuals. One aspect of the dramatic denouement seems too pat, but Parks caps it with a fitting ending. Though being trapped in the head of a feverishly loquacious narrator may not be everybody's ideal of a bookish voyage, Parks's portrayal of a cerebral mind preyed upon by unbearable emotions makes a compelling story. (Oct.) FYI: Europa was shortlisted for the 1997 Booker Prize.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Arcade Publishing (September 14, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1559704446
• ISBN-13: 978-1559704441
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,326,022 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful book by a remarkable writer., March 10, 2001

By 

"gosibro" (Athens Greece) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Europa (Paperback)

I read this rather lenghty book in two consecutive days, immersed in Park's looping, breathtaking, inner monologue, stream of conscience writing. This novel is about an obsessive love afair, a troubled, alienated, at times self-loathing academic with his heart not in the academic game show at all, a tale about the "other" as another reviewer succintly put it, about the complexities of life and the self, and more. A tour de force for this remarkable but underrated writer, with a writing style unlike anything you 've read recently, managing to be literary without being tedius and artificial(see m. amis, pynchon, barth et al.for that), and a striking, powerful ending. Park's musings on life and philosophy, european history and themes are never out of place or turgid, and they make very good reading material, adding a texture to the words.

Caught up in an unsatisfying marriage, a dead-end lifeless job, a failed yet once passionate and potentialy life-changing love affair, conflicting feelings and instability, Jerry the protagonist somehow agrees to take a trip to the European parliament to express his disagreement with the wage cuts on his job, which he does not particularly like, with a few fellow academics and a number of female students at his Italian university, and, of course, the french woman who is the cause (or is she just the pretext) for his recent worries. Riding on a bus through Europe and at the same time travelling intensely in his thoughts and memories, Jerry Marlow finds himself thinking more and living less in the present. While all too human interaction takes place, he stays a shadowy figure for the most part of the book for any outsiders to his consciousness. Memory mingles with outer reality, obsession takes hold of him, until they finally arrive to their destination (to his destination possibly) where the last act is played.

The mental images from the various settings of the book come back to me very vividly as I write these lines. This is a really good book and I am not going to spoil it any more for you with my mediocre analysis. I hope I made clear that this is not your average type of novel.

Do read it.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Gates is nuts. This is a terrific book., October 30, 1999

By 

MEG VARLEY (U.S.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Europa (Hardcover)

In addition to all of the (positive) things said in the other reviews posted here, what struck me about this novel was that it was about a man who moves from being alienated (a man who only falls for "foreign" women, a man alienated most of all, from a mileu that celebrates, PC-wise, "difference" and "the other")--to...something else. The point being that he IS moved to something. I was afraid the book would end with one of those winky winky ironic, desolate flourishes--it does not. These are large, relevant themes--alienation, relativism, personal (and national) morality--and in the end, this book and this author is on the side of meaning, as so many post-modern, ironic novels are not. When everyone is "other," when every action can be rationalized as valid within the framework of an irrefutable (because unjudgeable), private morality, there is no meaning. When only words, or the way that we SAY things happen, our PERSONAL (or national) interpretations count, rather than what we have actually done, there is no meaning. No real connection or communication between every "other" (individuals, nations.) Interestingly, one human response to that (on the main character's, Jerry's part) is violence--he will MAKE something happen, make his actions mean something, even if it isn't the meaning he wanted, SOME meaning is better than none--which has got to be the only reason there is for random, apparently senseless violence. Besides all of this (ie, that it seems to me a thoughtful, philosophical but not pretentious, relevant, redemptive novel), Parks' writing is gorgeous, his characters human and familiar.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Ruminations on a disastrous love life and the EC, May 9, 1999

By 

"brybo" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Europa (Hardcover)

I've just finished an excellent book: Europa, by Tim Parks. It's the story of one Jerry Marlow, a 45-year-old divorced English language instructor on a bus trip from Milan to Strasbourg with a number of colleagues and students (the bus is dubbed the Shag Wagon by one of the instructors, for the number of nubile co-eds who've come along in a youthful show of solidarity and, it is hoped, a sense of adventure) with the goal of convincing the European Parliament to save their jobs with the Italian university. The instructors charge they are being discriminated against, in contravention of the new law of Europe, the EC. Marlow thinks it a dubious notion, and perhaps has agreed to go along merely because his ex-mistress is among the volunteers for the trip, and he is tugged against his will (if such a thing is possible) to be near her, despite her faithlessness, despite the "debacle," the "retreat from Moscow" that was their breakup. As an introspective examination of the aftermath of Marlow's marriage and affair, the book is only a mild success. But Parks manages to weave the betrayal of a wife, the betrayal by a mistress, the seemingly predestined mistakes the man makes, into a stinging commentary on Europe and modern social orthodoxy, that is to say, the numbingly bland popular beliefs of the apparent elite. Nothing is morally wrong, short of fascism-- not infidelity, not manipulation, not humiliation, not negligent reasoning.

Parks' narrative style is stream of consciousness, long sentences full of self-interruptions, reiterations, movements back and forth in time, and, above all, commas. The apparent attempt is to mimic the disjointed way an obssessed person actually thinks. Although clever and observant, I grew tired of the method at times. But when Parks directs Marlow's thoughts to larger issues of the mystery of self-deception and of continental politics, and away from the self-pity of an unfaithful husband and man shocked at his own violence towards an unfaithful mistress, the book shines. I can't help but be reminded of War and Peace, with the main story's relationship to a larger point about the politics of the seeming center-of-the-universe (at least to the protagonists): Europe.

The secondary characters are lively. Vikram Griffiths, the Welsh-Indian, emphasizing his difference to gain acceptance; "as if he had got himself born half-Indian in Wales on purpose." Then there's boring Doris Rohr, "whose own lessons one imagines must be the last word in the dusty formality of the day unseized." But the narrative is at its best with observations like, "I could no more go back to the church than to my wife." (Because that's partly the point, isn't it?) Later, after a particularly hypocritical speech full of aggrandizing homilies, Marlow recalls, "...[I]t is perfectly clear to me now that one need only open one's mouth in a public situation and the words will come...Orthodoxy is in the air." The story's conclusion in front of the Parliament in Strasbourg is entirely well-conceived and fitting.

My recommendation? If you think you will enjoy an introspective, stream of consciousness novel about sex against the backdrop of feel-good European ecumenical politics, you'll enjoy this read. If not, you'll be safer steering clear. I, for one, enjoyed it.