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Parks's Italian Neighbors chronicled his arrival in Italy and his initiation into the byzantine complexities of Italian social and cultural life. Never a tourist, no longer a "transient," he focuses, this time, on his children, born and bred in Italy, and on the other children in the small village near Verona where he lives. Parks builds a fascinating portrait of Italian family life: its often bizarre foibles and its extraordinary solidity, the moral contradictions, the rituals and rites of passage. With the eye for detail, intrigue, quirky connections, and character that has brought him so much acclaim as a novelist, Parks brings out the splendidly, sometimes dangerously, theatrical nature of Italian relationships, finding the roots of that explosive Latin cocktail of sentiment and calculation in his children's adventures at school, at home, in church, on the playing fields, in the countryside, in the shops and museums. And the whole panoramic journey winds up with a deliciously seductive evocation of an Italian beach holiday that epitomizes everything that's best about life in Italy and everything that makes it so different from our own.
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| $99.99 | Digital |
| WonderClub |
Charles Bostic
reviewed Italian Education: The Further Adventures of an Expatriate in Verona on October 28, 2014 Italian Education
Italian lullabies, like "Ninna Nonna, Ninna O / Questo bimbo, a chi lo do?" Nap my gramma, nap OH, This baby, to whom shall I give? Or Italian recipes, rather imaginative ones (111). Wonderful on Italian contradictions: the assumption that all workers are shiftless, whereas all thieves are most efficient, competent. Then, public speaking, always read off cards or prompters: no merit here to speaking or thinking on one's feet. However great Italians perform in private, they plod in public. Proudly. (Doubtless the effect of plodding schooling, I add, having watched my grandkids grow in Milan. Latin and Greek at classical public HS: 160 forms of the Greek verb. Any real translation? No. )
So much Italian education, for a century, has emphasized orthodox ideas expressed in extravagant, exhortatory, prideful tone. The same in 1915 women's textbooks, 1938 fascist eulogy, and in 1996, Gino d'Arezzo's poem on the New Man.
Many Italian cultural mysteries enter into this book, usually through the author's ironic lens. Medusa. The Certificato di verginità , etc. I have quoted Tim Parks whenever I joined a discussion of English Composition as a Department Chair, or nationally: In the 30's in Italy, the criterion of judging "good composition" was, How well does the student praise Mussolini? (One priest in Treviso I think, just praised M on the 70th anniversary of his death. That priest was hoping for a promotion--in the 30's.)
The point is: English Composition has always been judged by extraneous criteria.
Parks's It Ed is revealing, and well told.
By the way, Tim Parks just delivered the Traverso Italian Studies lecture at SUNY-New Paltz that I gave in 2013, on my usual current subject, Giordano Bruno.
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