THE WAY BACK

by Enrico Palandri ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1994

An expatriate Italian's return home prompts a Proustian recovery of time past in a novel that is a weave of memories: a first US publication for this Italian author. Narrator Davide Masini was born in Rome. His Polish/Jewish mother escaped Warsaw at age 16; her family died at Treblinka. Davide never knew his father; his mother worked as a concierge to see her son through college. He came of age during the Red Brigades' campaign of urban terrorism; at one point he reflects on the horrendous 1980 bombing of the Bologna train station. Davide emigrated to England, where he became a psychiatrist and formed a relationship (""played out on the cusp of incomprehension"") with Julia, a Scottish opera singer who will eventually leave her husband for him. All these facts are squirreled away in a text that is needlessly opaque. It begins and ends with a reunion of old friends in a Roman restaurant occasioned by Davide's return. The dinner-table conversation opens the floodgates of nostalgia for Davide -- a nostalgia that in England he tries to suppress. This tension (when to fight nostalgia? when to succumb?) forms the novel's axis -- an axis blurred by imprecise, abstract writing. There is no sharp edge to Davide's dilemma. He feels Italian, but there is no question he will return to Julia, to his career, to England. His closest childhood friend died of a heroin overdose, yet Davide emerged apparently unscathed from a generation ""decimated"" by terrorism and heroin, a mildly enigmatic man unworthy of all this attention. A pale contribution to the literature of expatriate loss and gain.

Pub Date: April 1, 1994

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: 169

Publisher: Serpent's Tail -- dist. by Consortium

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1994

Categories: FICTION