Milan

This terse, unsparing novel can be summed up thus: after nearly a decade’s absence, the successful designer Gabriele Bilancini returns home to suburban Rome, where he wrestles with an identity crisis. His family and friends – his intimates before he moved to Milan and raced up the social ladder – feel like shameful reminders of his proletarian origins, which he keeps hidden – in ‘the way you hide a sin’ –  from the Milanese élite he is anxious to fit in with. In Milan, where he works and lives with his girlfriend Camilla, the daughter of his mentor, the celebrity designer Franco Zardi, Gabriele dresses smartly, limits lunch to ‘a salad with full protein’ and purges his speech of any signs of his unsophisticated upbringing.

When I lived in south London, my Algerian barber used to tell me that he came from Souk Ahras, ‘the home town of Augustine’. I found it strange to hear a forbidding doctor of the early church described as a local boy made good, but Catherine Conybeare shows me that I should not have done. Algerians have remembered what the Church has often overlooked: that Augustine’s thinking owes everything to his birth in 354 in what was then Roman North Africa. Although five million of his words survive, they come to us from the hands of medieval copyists who were more interested in setting out his doctrines than in recording his life. They cut up his sermons and letters, removing irrelevant or cryptic local allusions.

This slim, unsettling novel opens with Lucia trying to navigate the ‘mess’ of her daughter Amanda’s return home to their apartment near Pescara, in Italy’s Abruzzo. Pieces of torn bread, a heaped-up blanket and other strange ‘traces’ are indications of Amanda’s emotional disarray after hastily leaving Milan on the eve of lockdown. But she’d already abandoned her university studies by the time she’d been violently mugged. Lucia attempts to achieve the difficult balance of caring for, but not suffocating, her daughter, resigning herself to Amanda’s ‘unpredictable comings and goings’ while leaving her ‘something nourishing in the fridge in case she skips breakfast’. But she has already spectacularly misjudged this.

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.