Tim Parks has already had the Peter Mayle experience of becoming initiated into the social life of a different country - in his case, the labyrinthine codes of behavior in Italy. Now, he examines what it will be like for his bilingual children to learn to become Italian - how Italians teach their little Italians how to be Italian. He finds the same quirks and oddities among the young ones as among their parents - the same perverse love of theatricality in all personal relationships, the same mixture of sentimentality and calculation. This potentially inflammable mixture finds its expression in the schools, at home, at church, and on the playing fields. Parks discusses the facets of Italian societywith a practiced novelist's eye for the nuances of character, emotion, and plot.
