The Way Back

Italian novelist Palandri ( Ages Apart ) rambles evocatively in a memory piece loosely structured around a train trip. Davide, a psychiatrist whose Jewish mother immigrated to Italy from Poland, travels back to Rome from London, where he lives with his Scottish lover Julia. The Italian landscape prompts reveries, particularly about his childhood and a friend named Livio, a wealthy judge's son who invited him over and showed off a luxurious house with moquette carpets and a playroom separate from the bedroom. Davide also intensely recalls his mother, whose parents and siblings all died in Treblinka; he discovers when he has her Polish diary translated that her father parted from the 16-year-old girl with the words ``rateve sich''--save yourself. Although the translation's loyalty to Italian syntax results in a lot of run-on sentences, its thoughtful word choices capture Palandri's lyrical passages: for Davide's former girlfriend, who always misses relationships that have ended, ``every caress has carved out a regret''; she touches her current lover's arm around her neck ``like a prisoner adjusting her chain.'' Such turns of phrase are the highlights of a narrative that is more a parade of images than a cohesive story. (Apr.)