FARAWAY (245 pp.)André Dhôtel Simon & Schuster ($3.50).
"In any one country there are really several worlds," says Author André Dhôtel at the outset of this wistful, wonderfully comic tale. His young hero, Gaspard Fontarelle, is born to a resolutely matter-of-fact world, the sleepy, stodgy French resort village of Lominval. But all about Lominval, as the young boy grows up, is the dark, beckoning world of the Ardennes forest. And Gaspard himself is marked from birth as another-worldling. At his christening, thunder rumbles in the distance, and a panicked cat scratches the notary's wife....