Hell and Back offers a wide range of wonderfully challenging, always provocative reflections on literature and the art of writing. The lead essay on Dante sets the tone for the entire collection: erudite, contemplative, witty, and meticulous, it constantly offers new insights in The Inferno, that most celebrated of all poems. Mixing biographical background with astute literary detection, Parks writes also of Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, Henry Green, Salman Rushdie, Jose Saramago, Christina Stead, Giovanni Verga, and a dozen others. His essay on the art of translation--he is, among other things, an eminent translator from the Italian--is simply masterful.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
British novelist and essayist Tim Parks (Destiny, Adultery and Other Diversions) meditates on literature, art, and translation in Hell and Back: Reflections of Writers and Writing from Dante to Rushdie. The book includes close readings of contemporary writers like Ian Buruma and the late W.G. Sebald, as well as high modernists like Joyce and Borges, and Henry Green. Parks is also a translator of Italian, and there are a number of sketches of Italian writers (Italo Svevo, Eugenio Montale) and a piece on fascist painter Mario Sironi
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Published previously in England, this title collects 19 essays by novelist Parks (Tongues of Flame), many of which first appeared in the New York Review of Books. In intelligent and readable discourses, Parks writes on such authors as Dante, Jorge Luis Borges, Giacomo Leopardi, W.G. Sebald, and Salman Rushdie. Fairly academic in approach, the essays aim at understanding the author in question though not at popularizing the works. In one essay, Parks discusses how he was prompted to discuss translation when one of his students failed to recognize the Italian version of a novel she had read in English translation. In another, he asks whether creative writing doesn't by nature involve "rancour" with other writers, a sort of occupational hazard. This title is of interest primarily to academic libraries with strong literature collections. Nancy P. Shires, East Carolina Univ., Greenville, NC
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A writer on writers,
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This review is from: Hell and Back: Reflections On Writers and Writing From Dante to Rushdie (Paperback)
This book contains essays on Dante, Borges, Rushdie, Leopardi, Sebald, Seth, Verga,Buruma, Svevo, Joyce, Saba,Green ,Buzzati, Neugeboren, Sironi, Montale, Bateson and Ugazio, Stead. The opening essay on Dante's ambivalence while turning from the world and at the same time intending to make himself a central poet of mankind is excellent. I took especial interest in the essay on Borges and his analysis of Borges ' engaged' modesty, the profess of self- effacement .This is Parks on Borges non- fiction his essays. " Again and again he takes on a new subject , marshals his reading his faithful friends of old, gives us fresh ways of seeing things, suggests lucid, often conflicting , frequently bizaare ways of understanding the world.It is astonishing. And though the yearnings are ever the same- the desire to annihilate time, to approach a transcendental perception of life, to grasp an ungraspable truth- Borges never stoops to wishful thinking."pp.33-34
This is an excellent work of practical criticism which without ever forming a comprehensive theory provides insights into diverse writing worlds.
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