Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo
Parks’ talents for observation don’t coalesce into a comprehensive project. Modernity, Italy’s relation to Europe, immigration, public-private corruption, byzantine pricing and routing, and resisting change are too many complex concepts to analyze from cramped compartments. Riding in trains hearing regional accents results in “slow unification of the language.” Perhaps, but then we jump off to another topic. Unlike homogeneous Italy, U.S. cities have lost “cohesion and identity”; this better describes the book. Parks believes that Italy “is a nation at ease with the distance between ideal and real. They are beyond what we call hypocrisy. Quite simply they do not register the contradiction between rhetoric and behavior. It’s an enviable mind-set.” Parks, “not native not stranger,” writes of commuting between major cities, southern Italy’s routes, station histories, buying tickets, encounters onboard. He treats this material with his tremendous novelist’s power but not curating or culling it thematically. Parks is too much of a character in this nonfiction exploration of whether Italy is a modern nation; watching sweating illegal-immigrant trinket sellers, he deems them “happy with their lot” since they are chatting. His inner monologues distract, undermining ethos from his larger vision. --Cynthia-Marie OBrien