Italy’s Achilles heel: corruption and cronyism

Tim Parks is a seasoned, incisive observer of football, the railways, work, domestication and plenty more in his adoptive country of half a lifetime. What is, what ought to be and the machinations in the delta between provide much of his material.

In this tale of two countries in one, bright, hard-working Valeria leaves Basilicata in southern Italy to study communications and marketing at a private university in Milan — shiny subjects in a city of business a long way from home (the same distance could take her to Tunis or Belgrade). She arrives laden with bread, pastries, fruit and wine, given to her by three aunts at railway stations on her journey. Her family and her circle of friends are all from the south, but she wants her life to be in the north.

The other character whose story the book follows is James — like Parks himself, a graduate of Oxbridge and Ivy League. He teaches conversation classes, using robotic dialogues, and yearns for a better job. Fortune eventually gives him the nod. After the required bureaucratic-legal assault course, and doffing his cap pre-interview to the professor, he is rewarded — teaching translation at a university in Milan.

The route to promotion and success is made clear: find a senior academic (your barone), support his or her faction unwaveringly, and you too in time may succeed. Eight years after his entry for a translation prize amounted to nothing, James is invited to be on the jury. He questions why there is no discussion of the merits of each work and the awards are rubber-stamped verbally by every judge in turn — making the ‘required choice’ win.

Parks reads these episodes through the prism of fables: the strict academic who fails a student on an obscure footnote is seen as a ferocious dragon defending the narrow mountain path to preferment.