In "Italian Ways," Tim Parks Again Tries to Explain Italy MILAN - "That's very strange," Tim Parks, the polymath writer, said recently, waiting at the top of an escalator at the Porta Garibaldi train station in Milan. Your train didn't even appear on the board. A mystery train - in this case the sleek, high-speed Italo, the first private competitor to Italy's state-run railway - seemed a propitious start to a conversation with Mr. Parks about his new book, "Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo," in which he explores his adopted country through its trains, the lifeblood of a fragmented nation. W.W. Norton & Company will release the book on Monday. Confusing signs and timetables, unexpected flights of stairs, often incomprehensible announcements and impenetrable rules - tickets that need to be validated, others that don't - can make even the simplest train journey in Italy resemble the Odyssey at best, the Inferno at worst. "Italy," as Mr. Parks writes, "is not for beginners." This sense of disorientation is fundamental to the experience of the country. But Mr. Parks doesn't necessarily see it that way. "I don't know if I'm just baffled by Italy or just by life itself," he said while strolling toward Milan's main Central Station. Slim, with close-cropped gray hair and rimless glasses, Mr. Parks comes across as amiable, even as he expounds on what he sees as the terrible mood in Italy, gripped by recession and political stalemate. After more than three decades of living in Italy, raising a family with an Italian wife and teaching in Italian universities, Mr. Parks, 58, has earned the right to pessimism. Although his works are often lumped with "Under the Tuscan Sun" and others casting Italy in a more sepia-toned light, his vision is much darker. At one point in "Italian Neighbours" (1992), Mr. Parks contemplates ways to poison the neighbors" barking dogs. In "An Italian Education" (1996), he writes with unsparing candor about raising his children near Verona, where the customs are so different from his native England's - from people's views on money to the ways they relate to gynecologists and their in-laws. He also writes of how a publisher had rejected "Italian Neighbours," saying that readers wouldn't like it because it "doesn't reinforce their stereotypes of the country, whether positive or negative." Today, the marriage has ended and the children are grown. Mr. Parks's daughters are still in Italy, but his son, Michele, 28, whom we meet as a doted-on toddler in "An Italian Education," is now a scientist in London. He had been reluctant to work abroad but could not find a decent job because of Italy's high youth unemployment and patronage system. "He went for professional reasons and says he's not coming back," Mr. Parks said. It's sad that Italy can't get its act together. Mr. Parks lives in Milan, where he runs a postgraduate translation program at Istituto Universitario di Lingue Moderne. Living here saves him from the hellish predawn 100-mile commute from Verona, a Dante-esque daily journey that he writes about at the outset of "Italian Ways." In efforts to secure a commuter pass at the Verona station, he introduces two fundamental Italian archetypes: The "furbo," or clever person who bends the rules, and the "pignolo," or law-abiding stickler. When a "furbo" cuts in line, "there is a slow, simmering resentment, as if the people who have behaved properly are grimly pleased to get confirmation that good citizenship is always futile, a kind of martyrdom," Mr. Parks writes. This is an important Italian emotion: I am behaving well and suffering because of that. This "national dynamic," as Mr. Parks puts it, helps explain how former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi continues to have a public role, in spite of his legal woes and the economic decline that occurred on his watch. In "Italian Ways" Mr. Parks writes that Berlusconi's smile is a combination of "comfortable self-congratulation" and "victimhood." But there is another factor at work: "In every aspect of Italian life, one of the key characteristics to get to grips with is that this is a nation at ease with the distance between ideal and real," he writes. They are beyond what we call hypocrisy. Quite simply they do not register the contradiction between rhetoric and behavior. It's an enviable mind-set. This mix of piercing social observation and undying affection for Italy is classic Parks. He doesn't wag his finger. "It's admiration, really," he said.