Italian Life: A Modern Fable of Loyalty and Betrayal
TIM PARKS
HARVILL SECKER, 368 PP, £16.99)
Tablet bookshop price £15.29 • Tel 020 7799 4064

One of the complaints levelled against the conservative liberal politicians who governed Italy before the Fascists came to power in 1922 was that so much of life involved raccomandazioni – commendations: jobs and power acquired through nepotism and favours, in return for votes, loyalty and gifts. What comes across in Tim Parks’ new book is that, a century later, ­raccomandazioni are alive and well in ­modern Italy. Their stranglehold is to be found everywhere, but nowhere more ­egregiously than in the country’s overcrowded and chaotic universities.

Few foreigners have written more or better about contemporary Italy than Parks, and his familiarity with all things Italian makes for agreeable reading. Here is a country that he knows in his bones, and that he both loves and is exasperated by, while remaining conscious that even foreigners who spend their entire lives in Italy remain for ever, on some level, foreign. Groups, clans, families, regions, villages and dialects reign over daily life. As he has one of his characters say, “Dialect is community, and community means exclusion.” Being excluded, a term with many variations, is something to be feared and avoided.