Europa

Europa by Tim Parks

Europa is a stream of consciousness novel by Tim Parks, first published in 1997. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in that year, losing out to Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things.

Jerry Marlow is a neurotic obsessive whose first-person narration describes a coach trip he and several colleagues take to Strasbourg in order to petition the European Parliament for improved working conditions for foreign university teachers working in Italy. While observing the idiosyncrasies of his colleagues, Marlow constantly revisits personal anxieties about relationships with his ex-lover, his wife, and his daughter. In a surprising tragicomic ending, Marlow realises both success and failure, all somehow entwined and impossible to separate.

Whilst Amazon says...........At the midpoint of his life, Jerry Marlow finds himself on a bus taking him from Milan to Strasbourg. Sitting slightly off-center on the long back seat, he takes stock of the wreckage strewn behind him—a failed marriage, a daughter going astray, and an affair that has left him both numb and licking every wound, self-inflicted or otherwise. Even Marlow's teaching job at the university in Milan is jeopardized by new Italian laws restricting foreigners. And ahead? What lies in wait around the next bend? There are times when the most appalling premonitions seem all too plausible, yet the pull of hope cannot be resisted.  

Fuelled by Marlow's scalpel-sharp commentary - double-edged and decidedly adult road novel with a rich international gallery of characters, and offers an explosive sometimes hilarious portrait of a man patching together his life on a continent whose rhetoric of unity is less convincing - and far less exciting - than its bizarre polyglot passions and ancient conflicts.  

 I say........... "I found this a tricky novel to read.  The densely printed narrative was indeed a stream of male consciousness which I found difficult to engage with.  'Our hero's' obsession with the fine detail of his own preoccupations and with his mental machinations failed to make any connection with me.  In the end, to be truthful, I read the novel because I had to, a set book (Booker-nominated) and once started it had to be finished."