Loving Roger

by Tim Parks

Tight and disturbing, Loving Roger begins with a dead body and a chilling question. Why has nice, ordinary, affectionate Anna picked up her kitchen knife and murdered the man she insists she loves?... This brief novel is a mordantly illuminating essay on the way love contains the seeds of vindictiveness and hatred.

160 pages, Paperback

Published January 3, 1989

About the author

Born in Manchester in 1954, Tim Parks grew up in London and studied at Cambridge and Harvard. In 1981 he moved to Italy where he has lived ever since, raising a family of three children. He has written fourteen novels including Europa (shortlisted for the Booker prize), Destiny, Cleaver, and most recently In Extremis.
During the nineties he wrote two, personal and highly popular accounts of his life in northern Italy, Italian Neighbours and An Italian Education. These were complemented in 2002 by A Season with Verona, a grand overview of Italian life as seen through the passion of football. Other non-fiction works include a history of the Medici bank in 15th century Florence, Medici Money and a memoir on health, illness and meditation, Teach Us to Sit Still. In 2013 Tim published his most recent non-fiction work on Italy, Italian Ways, on and off the rails from Milan to Palermo.
Aside from his own writing, Tim has translated works by Moravia, Calvino, Calasso, Machiavelli and Leopardi; his critical book, Translating Style is considered a classic in its field. He is presently working on a translation of Cesare Pavese's masterpiece, The Moon and the Bonfires.
A regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, his many essays are collected in Hell and Back, The Fighter, A Literary Tour of Italy, and Life and Work.
Over the last five years he has been publishing a series of blogs on writing, reading, translation and the like in the New York Review online. These have recently been collected in Where I am Reading From and Pen in Hand.

Reviews

[notgettingenough · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reviewed in conjunction with The Bleeding Tree https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

I want to rant and rail against the system. Loving Roger is a wonderful - let me shout that, WONDERFUL - novella which is, 25 years or so after being written, neither fish nor fowl. Not old enough to be considered for Classic status. Not young enough to be modern. It's the sort of book not read because its date is wrong.

On top of this, to add injury to insult, Tim Parks is an all rounder. Every bit of it is connected to writing. It isn't like he does spin bowling and writes novels. No. However, he just won't specialise and that's considered plain unseemly now and for some time past. One isn't allowed to be good at more than one thing. The very hint of it smacks with the suspicion that maybe one isn't very good at either. Or, in the case of Parks, more.

He's a teacher of literature. He writes novels. He writes memoir. He translates. He writes important books about translation. As far as I can tell, he's damn good at all of these. But he must suffer the fate of the all rounder and somehow escape the much higher praise he would have been awarded for any one of these, if only he could have stuck to it and only it.

Grrrrrrr. I regularly get very cross about this!

It's hard to talk about this book without giving away things that are best left discovered in the reading of. He is amazingly good at doing a female perspective, in the process making many sad-amusing digs at males. This makes me want to reference The Bleeding Tree by Cerini, of which we saw a wonderful production on Saturday night. Both start off with a killing which one might describe as a murder. In each the murderee is male. In neither does one wish to see him as a victim. From that start, Cerini and Parks go in very different directions, but nonetheless they share a point which is to talk about how it transpires that women may do these things. In the process the reader will not have the tiniest sense of sympathy for the blokes. There is nothing to be generalised here, they aren't 'people' doing these deeds, they are 'women' and the dead body in each case was up to that point a 'man'.

rest is here: https://alittleteaalittlechat.wordpre...

[Stephen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this a while ago now and more recently stumbled on Parks's website comment that this had been his 7th (and he thought, at the time, final) attempt to get published after a series of rejections. In sequence of release, it was actually his 2nd (after the Somerset Maugham-winning 'Tongues of Flame'). The dispondancy - not to say murderous intent - that Parks may have been feeling is here in spades. This is a classic Whydunnit, where we learn of a murder at the outset, then try to fathom its precipitation.

The cover was curiously homoerotic, to my eyes, although it is quickly established that this is a heterosexual pairing, with a back story leading back to the office. It felt a little like early McEwan. I can't help wondering whether Parks had been binging on 'The Concrete Garden' (1978) and Booker-nominated 'The Comfort of Strangers' (1981)... Perhaps too McEwan's first short stories, 'First Love, Last Rites' (1975) that won the SMP exactly ten years before Parks did (1976 and 1986). There are certainly gory shades of 'Ian Macabre' as he was then known in the early years.

It's night to the holy glow of day coming from 'Tongues of Flame', although a bitterer pill that I would probably only want to taste the once. I have yet to see how Parks develops as an author, but on the McEwan scale I'd place this closer to 'Rites' than 'Cement Garden' as apprentice work.

[Patricia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very intriguing! The firs sentence starts an exciting and sometimes puzzling read.

[John · Rating 1 out of 5]

STUPID, COULD HAVE BEEN TOLD IN THREE PAGES

[Cindi Haaland · Rating 2 out of 5]

seriously weird