The Way Back     by Enrico Palandri, Translated by S Hood Original title: La via del ritorno Original language: Italian Published by Serpent's Tail Publishing Ltd Pub. Date: 1994 Format: Paperback, 176 pages Dimensions: (in inches): 0.58 x 7.80 x 5.11 ISBN: 1852422467 List Price: $14.99, £8.99 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £8.99 Published by Serpent's Tail Pub. Date: 1993 Pub. Place: UK Format: Paperback, 169 pages List Price: £8.99 Not available for ordering

A moving, relevant and very European book which, as its title suggests, is about a person trying to link up moments of a past scattered by history. The past in question is that of a young man growing up in the late 1960s in a hyper-politicised Italy. It is also his past as a child brought up by a Jewish mother whose own past was violently interrupted in the —Warsaw of September 1939, as the government crumbled and the roads out of the city filled with refugees. The protagonist, an Italian doctor who lives in London, tries to understand what his identity might be through the eyes of his Scottish lover and his immigrant parents, who suffer from that spiritually deadly complaint, nostalgia.


The Way Back is a tender essay on the inner life of the New Europe, born in dreams and sired by nightmares, on our common mother, with her necessary or convenient amnesias, on an Italy ‘which is painfully mine’. Palandri is already (in 1990) writing after the fall of Communism, the definitive end of World War Two, and therefore has an overview which allows him both to join up the experience of different moments in Europe’s history and to unite this history with that of other places: on a train we see Europeans alongside Africans and Asians, all of them refugees of sorts, ‘fleeing from those years, thrown together in panic and anxious over any sort of future’.


Although a book about ordinary Italians, The Way Back is written with the sharpened and wider consciousness of the exile and has something to say to all Europeans.

‘The bar was packed with Italians...To be there, however successful they had been in fitting in, was the result of a defeat. It meant not to have found work at home, to have dreamt too much of some other place, to have problems with the law, their family, their friends, or their city, not to have loved enough the vine-coloured hills from which they came, the blue sea and the cement courtyards, not to have been able to hold on to what they had.’ p125