Adultery and Other Diversions - Softcover

With each essay, Parks begins by grounding himself and the reader in a concrete experience--a bus ride across Europe, for instance, or cleaning his daughter's room, or translating an Italian novel into English--then lets his mind loose to joyously observe, reflect, and comment on what it all means. In "Glory," for example, Parks recounts an arduous hike through the Italian Alps with his two young children and a family friend. Descriptions of the difficult terrain, his own complicated feelings about climbing a particular peak, his friend's preoccupation with the Tour de France, his children's games--all dovetail gracefully to arrive, eventually, at his real point, the nature of their endeavor:

Being an entirely mental quality, surfacing in nothing more concrete than a word, glory tends to be belittled, or viewed with some embarrassment in a world where technique and her accomplice, information, are assumed to hold sway.... And yet despite her new boots--Gore-Tex lined--and all the chocolate and mineral drinks, the creams for sores and plasters for blisters, young Stefi, I know, would never have climbed Monte Maggio on that third day had it not been for the flavour of certain words--Crest-Strider, Peak-Dancer.