SOURCE: “Honest, No Pidgin,” in Times Literary Supplement, July 19, 1996, p. 7.

In the following review, Wroe offers a positive assessment of An Italian Education.

In an illustrative anecdote early in this study of Italy and the Italians, Tim Parks recalls how the representative of a courier company in Verona once told him that a package could not be picked up from him for forty-eight hours because they were too busy. The reason they were too busy was because they were so fast. “It seems pointless arguing with such logic”, writes Parks, and so instead, in An Italian Education, he has tried to explain it.

Parks, a self-confessed “frigid Anglo-Saxon”, has lived in Italy since 1981, working as a novelist, translator and teacher. He is married to an Italian woman and they have a son and two young daughters. Seeing his children in an environment so very different from the Blackpool...