Tim Park's Notes on Trains

Tim Parks, who has a story in the latest Paris Review and a new novel out, The Server, is apparently at work on something that sounds infinitely more interesting than either, a non-fiction project or chronicle that he described in the Quarterly Conversation in this way:

It’s a book compiled from very old notes I have collected over fifteen years, right up to the present, a book where Italy is understood through dealings with trains. Train journeys, ticketing, the way trains have changed, the history of Italian trains, and my personal and long history of commuting with Italian trains. So that could seem like a very light project. But, of course, trains are places where we meet people we don’t know, and where we see the whole social spectrum. You can’t not be aware of the immigrant situation in train stations, you can’t not be aware of first- and second-class citizens in trains. It’s really a book about my belonging in Italy, or not belonging maybe, and about all the immigrants trying to belong in the country, and this constant movement of modern capitalism to invest everything where people have credit cards and nothing where they don’t. And again it’s also very much about maps and territories, because being on a train is, very much moving into a mental space where you leave the territory behind and you start to zip back and forth between places. There was a Pope in the 1840s when there was first talk of introducing trains in Italy. And he completely banned them immediately in the Papal States, saying the problem with the train would be that people would be able to move rapidly from one place to another. They would start becoming detached from their roots, they would start to have double lives, they wouldn’t be under the control of their priests and wives. (laughs) How right he was! Your first impulse is to laugh and say, how ridiculous, but when you think about it, you realize he had a point. At least he did understand what the consequences would be and how trains are emblematic of a larger change that comes with modernity and mobility. Trains are part of that whole communication movement which is splitting us from where we are. We’re sitting here, but we’re taking a text message from back home, or we’re with a friend who is reading an e-mail on his iPhone from his lover or his wife.