DISCOVERIES

“I have been somewhere!” you can say after a mere three pages of this delicious book. Where? To Barbados! To the Combermere School for boys in a village called St. Matthias. To Mrs. Reid’s to get buttermilk. To the esplanade. And I have done some new and unusual things! Like what? Picking weevils out of rice on a Saturday night, eating flying fish, pigs’ tails and dolphin. Eating black pudding made from pig entrails and cou cou (cornmeal cooked in water in which okra has been boiled) and bakes (nothing but flour and salt and water) cooked just right. Feel it up, Austin Clarke says about cooking and touching meat and vegetables, “slice she-up,” the pumpkin and fish heads. And smell it: the bun-bun (burning), the floor scrubbed with white-head bush and blue soap, the lime juice and fresh pepper. Clarke’s exuberance has not been diminished by living in America or Toronto or at Yale or by being a professor and a diplomat. His heart resides in his childhood home. “What a culinary microcosm of Wessindian succulence is the fish head!” he yells. “Oh my God! When you survey the contents of that pot, after you have taken off the lid and open she-up, such a waft of historical and cultural goodness going blow in your face!” “Pig Tails n’ Breadfruit” is like one long Gwendolyn Brooks poem, a comfort of a book; music instead of recipes, smells instead of ingredients. In Clarke’s childhood, no self-respecting woman owned a cookbook--an admission of insufficient talent. But he is gentle with the rest of us: “If you is a working woman or a working man, and you does get nervous while cooking, soak the split peas overnight in cold water, and soak the pig tails in another bowl o’ cold water. . . . Then, lock your apartment door and go to work. The split peas and pig tails soaking safe.”

DESTINY A Novel By Tim Parks; Arcade: 248 pp., $24.95

“Is this suicide?” the middle-aged journalist asks himself in the tangled days after his grown son’s suicide. “Ignoring yourself in pain?” As if saying “I’m unhappy!” could stop the hysterical train wreck this couple has caused. The distracted father, a journalist; the unhappy, beautiful, unnoticed mother who cannot have a child and so adopts, then has a child and so punishes the first child. It is her beloved second child who kills himself. And the man (whose name, characteristic of Tim Parks’ fiction, is not revealed until “Destiny’s” final pages), the poor generic lost journalist, pockets full of papers, affairs everywhere, weak as a dust mote and afraid of his wife, cringes in the corner of family life. His wife has an affair with his best friend, and cuckoldry becomes the family’s coat of arms. But no one can leave. All this rages through his disorganized mind after he gets the phone call that his son has killed himself with a screwdriver. All he can think is that finally he and his wife will separate. In yet another compartment in his brain, he prepares for the interview of his life: an interview with Italy’s ex-Prime Minister Andreotti. Finally, he sits in Andreotti’s office. Complacent, powerful, serene, is the ex-minister: “The serene are madder than those who torment themselves,” our journalist realizes. “There is no point talking to a man whose sense of his own destiny is still serenely rock-solid.” Perhaps he feels better about himself after this revelation. I, however, am a nervous wreck. I want to get off the train, but I can’t. Parks never fails to leave his readers alone in the hotel room, neon sign blinking.

A GARDEN IN LUCCA, Finding Paradise in Tuscany By Paul Gervais; Hyperion: 310 pp., $23.95

Eighteen years ago, when Paul Gervais moved to Massa Macinaia, a small town in Lucca, Italy, Peter Mayle had not yet written the books on Provence that gave escape literature its bad and bourgeois name. Growing up in New York City 25 years ago, I used to read books about moving to the woods: Maine, Wisconsin, anywhere. These were not travel books, not movement books; they were books that inspired those of us trapped in the wrong places to pick up and move in spite of all the obvious risks. Dreamy books; books in which the romance was with a house or a piece of land or a garden, not with fickle human beings. Gervais didn’t know he could garden. He didn’t know he could build an aviary for a peacock. He didn’t know he could care about handmade pots for lemon trees, much less spend a king’s ransom for them (“The sap of acquisition flowed within,” he writes of that purchase, “and I was bursting with the kinds of smiles that double prices”). He didn’t know the flower red salvia was crass. He didn’t know he could love a house more than money. What’s best about “A Garden in Lucca” is that the seeds are planted in the beginning; the book is a slow flowering.