- Paperback: 208 pages
- Publisher: Flamingo; New Ed edition (27 Oct 1988)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0006542492
- ISBN-13: 978-0006542490
- Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 12.4 x 1.3 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 2,418,807 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Review
Self-scrutiny by Britishers in Italy who (often in the form of letters to one another) ponder what's going to become of their lives in the entropy-touched 80's. By the English author of Tongues of Flame and Loving Roger. In her early 30s, Julia Delaforce leaves the stability of her teaching post (and her married lover Lennie, as well as her clutch of party-loving and comfortably close friends) in London and goes to Verona to teach English in the university. Things are shaky there (she soon loses her job due to a politically motivated purge), and her life faces one uncertainty after another as she meets other expatriates: the aspiring writer Alan Bexley (and wife Elaine); Bexley's feminist/lesbian sister Flossie; the blustery and left-wing Scotsman Colin Tinsley (and wife Marina); the handsome and half-sinister seducer Sandro (who's not English, but Italian-Canadian). Bit by bit, uncertainties increase, disasters strike, seductions occur, partners are switched, marriages collapse. Elaine leaves the aspiring writer Bexley - not long after he accidentally kills a child on the road. Marina leaves the populist-talking Colin Tinsley - after she's been seduced by the narcissitic and unscrupulously double-dipping Sandro. And back home in London, not only does Julia's mother suffer a debilitating stroke (later to die), but best friend Diana gives birth to a severely retarded baby. And Julia, amidst all this turmoil? Why doesn't she return home to bland but willing lover Lennie (now conveniently divorced) and recapture the middle-class comforts that still might await her? In the novel's endgame dalliance with melodrama, the reader learns that a decade earlier (in 1975), Julia aborted a child by Lennie; and this earlier death, she gradually realizes, makes her feel "as if I had aborted the life impulse, vitality itself. . ." At novel's end, as characters cope in one way or another, or flee in one direction or another, Julia remains in Italy, uncertain how she will survive, but expiatively unwilling to return to the now-battered charade of home-life as it was. Bexley's self-involved passages of writerly woes are tedious, but other pleasures are more often light-footed and compactly told in this occasionally comic glance at the sociology of late Thatcherism. (Kirkus Reviews)
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Product Description
Julia has left home. She has gone to Italy. She has left her lover, her job, her flat, the closely-knit group of friends who meant so much to her. Why? And the motley group of ex-pats she finds in Verona, the Oxbridge brigade, the revolutionary Scot, the cool Canadian, the feminist Flossy - why do they find it so impossible to return home, as if their very identities depend somehow on this thousand-mile displacement? Centred around a love story full of twists, turns and revelations, Home Thoughts explores a world of lost directions, wavering commitments and misplaced ambitions as Julia's adventurous departure confronts her more mercilessly than ever with the problem of what on earth she is to do with her life.
--This text refers to an alternate
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
Format:Paperback
Not one of Tim Parks's better-known novels but well worth the read, particularly if you are, or ever have been, an ex-pat. Julia, the central character, is in Verona teaching English at the university, hoping to escape from the "issues" she had in the UK (amongst other things, an unsatisfactory love affair and an unusually close relationship with her flatmate). She is unable, however, to wriggle free of her past. A large part of the narrative comprises long letters which the main characters write to each other. It doesn't quite work because, even before the age of email, most people simply didn't write such long letters, but it does make for an disturbing (but also entertaining) view inside the mind of someone teetering on the edge of a nervous breakdown. The portrayal of the ex-pat crowd is hilarious, a discontented bunch of oddballs going nowhere fast and perennially having a think about when they'll be returning to their home country but never actually resolving to do so.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
1 review
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Excellent ensemble novel
19 Mar 2000
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
This is an entertaining but deep book about a group of thirty-something English ex-patriates living and working in Italy. A very affecting book about relationships, identity, sense of place and growing up. As always, Parks does a wonderful job with voices and characterization, in economical space. Wish there were more writers like him.
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