Stories about faithfulness and infidelity, love and hate, charity and rancour, redemption and loss. Taking his lead from Schopenhauer, novelist and travel writer Tim Parks sets out to explore whether people ever actually 'experience' the world at all. Perhaps they simply inherit ideas about it, and live their lives accordingly. In other words, interpretation may be much more than a feat of critical acrobatics. It may be the only true act of consciousness anybody ever knows.
Parks reflects on the spaces where books and life intersect.
Armed with quotations from Yeats and Nietzsche, he tackles the formidable chaos of his daughters' bedroom, and wonders how old a man must grow before he starts being outdistanced by his children. He takes a trip to the European parliament with some fellow language teachers and a Penguin edition of Plato's Republic , while pondering both the nature of utopias, and the appropriateness of his train car's nickname, the 'Shag Wagon'. And he confronts the disheartening complacency of V.S. Naipaul at a literary conference, which causes him to recall his own apprenticeship in an Acton bedsit in the Eighties, pounding out novels nobody wanted to publish. These are literary essays with all the clarity and sensual detail of great fiction. The ideas never grow too abstract from the world around them.