Product Description

Jerry Marlow is on a coach hurtling from Milan to Strasbourg, even though he loathes coaches and everything they stand for:...all the contemporary pieties of getting people together and moving them off in one direction or another to have fun together, or to edify themselves, or to show solidarity to some underprivileged minority and everybody, as I said, being of the same mind and of one intent, every individual possessed by the spirit of the group, which is the very spirit apparently of humanity, and indeed that of Europe, come to think of it, which this group is now hurtling off to appeal.Jerry, suffice to say, is not a team player--not even when it comes to saving his own job.Together with a group of colleagues and students from the University of Milan, he's off to the European Parliament to protest new Italian laws against hiring foreigners--a cause which he opposes, appealing to an institution he's not sure should exist.So why is Jerry on the coach in the first place? Because she is there--the same she for whom Jerry left his wife and daughter and who has since broken his heart.The unnamed she in question is a beautiful French woman (of course), a hellcat in bed (it goes without saying), and an intellect of notable refinement (naturellement). She was also unfaithful, and now they scarcely speak to one another. The rest of this dark and often savagely funny novel (shortlisted for the 1997Booker Prize) consists of one great Joycean rant, a stream-of-consciousness harangue that circles obsessively around sex, the treachery of she, and Jerry's boundless misanthropy. In between we get glimpses of the bus and its motley cast of characters, including, most vividly, Vikram Griffiths, part Welsh, part Indian, with his nervous tics and his self-consciously Welsh accent and his shaggy mutt, Dafydd. As one might deduce from the title, the dream of the new, unified Europe looms behind this tale like--well, like a big, unwieldy metaphor, given expression in the form of Jerry's affair. As a meditation on the continent's future, the novel works surprisingly well, and though it initially takes some time to sort out the looping rhythms of Parks's prose, the reader's patience is repaid in spades. --Mary Park

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #352613 in Books
• Published on: 1998-09-14
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 272 pages

From Amazon.com
Jerry Marlow is on a coach hurtling from Milan to Strasbourg, even though he loathes coaches and everything they stand for:

...all the contemporary pieties of getting people together and moving them off in one direction or another to have fun together, or to edify themselves, or to show solidarity to some underprivileged minority and everybody, as I said, being of the same mind and of one intent, every individual possessed by the spirit of the group, which is the very spirit apparently of humanity, and indeed that of Europe, come to think of it, which this group is now hurtling off to appeal.

Jerry, suffice to say, is not a team player--not even when it comes to saving his own job. Together with a group of colleagues and students from the University of Milan, he's off to the European Parliament to protest new Italian laws against hiring foreigners--a cause which he opposes, appealing to an institution he's not sure should exist.

So why is Jerry on the coach in the first place? Because she is there--the same she for whom Jerry left his wife and daughter and who has since broken his heart. The unnamed she in question is a beautiful French woman (of course), a hellcat in bed (it goes without saying), and an intellect of notable refinement (naturellement). She was also unfaithful, and now they scarcely speak to one another. The rest of this dark and often savagely funny novel (shortlisted for the 1997 Booker Prize) consists of one great Joycean rant, a stream-of-consciousness harangue that circles obsessively around sex, the treachery of she, and Jerry's boundless misanthropy. In between we get glimpses of the bus and its motley cast of characters, including, most vividly, Vikram Griffiths, part Welsh, part Indian, with his nervous tics and his self-consciously Welsh accent and his shaggy mutt, Dafydd. As one might deduce from the title, the dream of the new, unified Europe looms behind this tale like--well, like a big, unwieldy metaphor, given expression in the form of Jerry's affair. As a meditation on the continent's future, the novel works surprisingly well, and though it initially takes some time to sort out the looping rhythms of Parks's prose, the reader's patience is repaid in spades. --Mary Park

From Publishers Weekly
This darkly comic and inherently tragic novel by the versatile Parks (Tongues of Flame; Italian Neighbors) charts the emotional disintegration of a 45-year-old man mourning the end of an affair. In narrator Jeremiah Marlowe, Parks embodies the man of intellect in helpless thrall to his emotions. We meet Jerry on a bus traveling with a polyglot load of colleagues and nubile female students from the Milan university where he teaches to Strasbourg, where they will present a petition to the European Parliament protesting the Italian government's decision to limit the salaries and tenure of foreign professors. Although he doesn't care about his dead-end job, Jerry has come along because she will be there. His former mistress, never identified by name, is a Frenchwoman who casually betrayed Jerry after he had left his wife and teenage daughter for her. Jerry's pain, jealousy and sense of futility rise to the point of frenzy as he obsesses about his ex-mistress's cool repudiation of what he felt was the most meaningful relationship of his life. His headlong interior monologue, frantic with self-loathing and despair, is, for all its rambling rush, tightly controlled. While the book is essentially farcical, it is also profoundly sad to witness a man at the end of his tether willfully subjecting himself to the proximity of the woman who is the source of his anguish. Moreover, Jerry's agitated thoughts encapsule a brilliant meditation about the shallowness of popular culture at the end of the 20th century, made more vivid to Jerry by the bon mots of classical literature that spring to his mind at every turn of events. He mockingly compares the myths of a united Europe and of a perfect love against the realities of self-involved nations and individuals. One aspect of the dramatic denouement seems too pat, but Parks caps it with a fitting ending. Though being trapped in the head of a feverishly loquacious narrator may not be everybody's ideal of a bookish voyage, Parks's portrayal of a cerebral mind preyed upon by unbearable emotions makes a compelling story. (Oct.) FYI: Europa was shortlisted for the 1997 Booker Prize.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
"The thing that most terrified the Greeks was that they would be deceived by the Gods." So reflects protagonist Jerry Marlow near the end of this piercingly perceptive black comedy, short-listed for Britain's Booker Prize. Indeed, deception lies at the heart of this picaresque tale of sexual obsession and political absurdity. Marlow agrees to join a group of expatriate lecturers from the University of Milan on a pilgrimage to the European Parliament in Strasbourg to protest an Italian government plan seemingly designed to eliminate their jobs. Unhappy in his job anyway, Marlow notices that his ex-lover is going and, well, just maybe.... Writing from Marlow's stream-of-consciousness perspective, Parks (Juggling the Stars, LJ 2/1/93) explores more than the mind of one man. He offers a perceptive commentary on the place of passion in our lives and the despair and hope it offers as we struggle to find our way in an increasingly bland world. Serious readers will not be put off by the European perspective of the novel; its themes are truly universal. Highly recommended for academic and larger public libraries.ADavid W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, FL
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Customer Reviews

Breakdown
Of all the thousands of books I have read, this is my favourite. My own literary efforts were arrested by my certain inability to attain Tim Parks' mastery of the English language. The most beautiful prose I have ever read is contained within these pages. The style is deeply contemplative and finely detailed - reminiscent, at times, of Proust's Recherche Du Temps Perdu. The story meanders through the obsessive musings of the narrator as he allows himself to be led reluctantly on a bizarre and seemingly pointless expedition. Like Hemingway, Tim Parks possesses a distinctly expatriate view of life in continental Europe. His wry commentary on the idiosyncracies of the European Union is strikingly apt even today, as anyone who has had the dubious pleasure of living within its borders will swiftly realise.

Europa is a story of and for the introspective among us - those prone to incessant reflection and, inevitably, regret.

A painstaking, plodding read
I wanted to like this book, I really did. The seductive cover, high praise on the jacket, and the fact that this novel was "shortlisted" for the famed British Booker Prize whet my appetite. But I must say, having just put it down, that the book was one agonizing read.

The premise for the novel is hopeful - a 45 year old visiting professor at the University of Milan, against his better judgment, joins a motorcoach full of academics and students on a trip to the European Parliament, to protest perceived discrimination by Italian laws restricting their employment. Apparently many of these visiting professors took their jobs as a temporary measure, on a break from writing books or furthering their academic careers elsewhere, and then realized they wanted to keep teaching despite agreeing to term limits.

In any event, Marlow agrees to accompany the motley crew despite having no real passion for the cause. There is some unspoken belief that the trip will result in decadence and romance among the students and their older lectors, whose jobs they are all presumably fighting to retain. In fact the whole idea was hatched by a Welsh Indian named Vikram, who chases anything in a skirt, with a wink to our narrator. The reader is reminded a little of the "key party" of The Ice Storm as the riders of the bus begin to nervously sort out their roommates for the hotel.

We soon learn that Jerry is plagued with guilt, and that he is obsessed with one of the younger members of the entourage, referred to throughout the book namelessly as "she," with whom Jerry previously carried on an extended torrid affair that ended very badly. Jerry feels guilty for striking the girl, and is likewise guilty about walking out on his wife and teenage daughter after confessing of his affair. At the climax of the novel, as the group makes their pitch at Parliament, Jerry's daughter turns 18 back home without him.

Europa is told in the first person, and Jerry's account of the trip is endlessly interrupted by long, looping narrative histories of his affair, of his prior philosophical discussions with his girlfriend, and of his chauvinistic rambling with other male professors discussing conquests of their "totties" (apparently a British term for loose women). The action is never in the here and now, as the reader is taken on one digression after another. For example, a simple question posed to Jerry, when his fellow bus rider asks him what he is reading, leads to pages of self-analytical nonsense that leaves the reader numb. Parks never stays with the action long enough to engage the reader's attention, even when the plot seems to be moving toward an engrossing idea or event. I know it's stream of consciousness, and perhaps we all think like Jerry narrates, but I still like a little bit of plot and narrative structure to my novels.

There were a few memorable parts to be sure. Jerry's devastating skewering of the film Dead Poet's Society (which the party watched on monitors on the coach) forever changed the way I view that movie. And the bittersweet tale of a past dinner party involving Jerry, his wife and daughter, and a clearly disturbed Vikram and his young son left a lasting impression. Unfortunately, these lucid moments came all too infrequently in a book dominated by rambling, middle-aged angst. This would have made a better novella than a full length novel.

Wonderful book by a remarkable writer.
I read this rather lenghty book in two consecutive days, immersed in Park's looping, breathtaking, inner monologue, stream of conscience writing. This novel is about an obsessive love afair, a troubled, alienated, at times self-loathing academic with his heart not in the academic game show at all, a tale about the "other" as another reviewer succintly put it, about the complexities of life and the self, and more. A tour de force for this remarkable but underrated writer, with a writing style unlike anything you 've read recently, managing to be literary without being tedius and artificial(see m. amis, pynchon, barth et al.for that), and a striking, powerful ending. Park's musings on life and philosophy, european history and themes are never out of place or turgid, and they make very good reading material, adding a texture to the words.

Caught up in an unsatisfying marriage, a dead-end lifeless job, a failed yet once passionate and potentialy life-changing love affair, conflicting feelings and instability, Jerry the protagonist somehow agrees to take a trip to the European parliament to express his disagreement with the wage cuts on his job, which he does not particularly like, with a few fellow academics and a number of female students at his Italian university, and, of course, the french woman who is the cause (or is she just the pretext) for his recent worries. Riding on a bus through Europe and at the same time travelling intensely in his thoughts and memories, Jerry Marlow finds himself thinking more and living less in the present. While all too human interaction takes place, he stays a shadowy figure for the most part of the book for any outsiders to his consciousness. Memory mingles with outer reality, obsession takes hold of him, until they finally arrive to their destination (to his destination possibly) where the last act is played.

The mental images from the various settings of the book come back to me very vividly as I write these lines. This is a really good book and I am not going to spoil it any more for you with my mediocre analysis. I hope I made clear that this is not your average type of novel.

Do read it.