If You Kept a Record of Sins

by Andrea Bajani, Edmund White

Genres: Family Life; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Andrea Bajani's "beautiful, original, and deeply moving" (Michael Cunningham) novel, which Jhumpa Lahiri asserts "accumulates with the quiet urgency of a snowstorm."



A prismatic novel that records the indelible marks a mother leaves on her son after she abandons their home in Italy for a business she's building in Romania. Lorenzo, just a young boy when his mother leaves, recalls the incisive fragments of their life—when they would playfully wrestle each other, watch the sunrise, or test out his mother's newest scientific creation. Now a young man, Lorenzo travels to Romania for his mother's funeral and reflects on the strangeness of today's Europe, which masks itself as a beacon of Western civilization while iniquity and exploitation run rampant. With elliptical, piercing prose, Bajani tells a story of abandonment and initiation, of sentimental education and shattered illusions, of unconditional love.

Release date: March 23, 2021

Publisher: Archipelago

Print pages: 200

Sample

Afterword by Edmund White

This astonishingly powerful novel produces its unforgettable effects not through the narrator’s thoughts or analysis nor through illuminating or thematic dialogue. I suppose careless reviewers might compare it to Hemingway, but the narrator is not tight-lipped nor stoic nor particularly brave physically, nor does the style, chaste though it might be, have the Dick-and-Jane simplicity Hemingway inherited from Gertrude Stein, her simple, repetitious, adjective-starved prose.
No, this heartbreaking book of loss and sullen, lonely maturity proceeds through its own devices, especially the careful, stripped-bare presentation of key visual images, which the reader must reconstruct (effortlessly) into a straightforward story. A young mother with a son, Lorenzo, gets together with a reliable, harmless man in order to provide the boy with a father—and eventually to free herself to become an entrepreneur with a more exciting partner in business and love. This enterprise takes her for longer and longer spells to Romania, recently liberated from its dictator, which people compare to the Wild West for its free-for-all competition and make-or-break economy.
As the book begins she has just died and Lorenzo, now an adult, goes to Bucharest for the funeral and to settle her part of the manufacturing business. Lorenzo has had no physical contact with her for many, many years. Now he learns she lived out the end of her life in squalor, alone and self-destructive, betrayed by her lover and business partner, who abandoned her for a younger woman. Only chance remarks fill him in on his mother’s gradual degradation.
This novel, translated into English by Elizabeth Harris, comes to us covered with Italian prizes and the praise of such diverse writers as Antonio Tabucchi, Emmanuèl Carrére, and Michael Cunningham. Bajani, only in his mid-forties, has already written half-a-dozen works of fiction and a book-length essay, taught creative writing and worked for an Italian publishing house.
The stunning visual scenes include seeing the Bucharest skyline and the huge palace of the Parliament, The People’s Palace built but never completed by the dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu, who ruled Romania from 1967 to 1989 and was executed along with his wife after a hasty trial (the last occurrences of capital punishment in Romania). Ceauşescu lived in another palace called “The Palace of the Spring,” which was decorated in a style that might have appealed to Trump (huge gold-plated bathrooms and a Louis XV bedroom). The Parliament Palace, according to Wikipedia, is the heaviest building in the world and so large it can be seen from the moon, a Romanian chauffeur proudly claims. Lorenzo and the chauffeur tour the People’s Palace; the guide deluges them with statistics (miles of marble, tons of crystal, etc). The grandiosity and cruelty and exaltation of those Christmas days of Revolution animate this novel. The Romanians are crude—“You Italians like Romanian pussy”—but the Italians are sometimes worse—“Did you ever ask yourself why your mother didn’t come home? Did you ever ask yourself why?” Italian entrepreneurs despise the Romanian workers—“These people—we yanked them right out of the Middle Ages.”
No reader of If You Kept a Record of Sins can ever forget the scene when Lorenzo is in the country visiting Viarengo, an Italian friend of his mother: “There before us was a meadow, and in the grass, a long stretch of coffins . . . laid in the sun, one after the other, like a battalion of dead soldiers, killed god knows where. They’re all of the finest quality, he said. Same goes for the one I built for your mother, he added.” Viarengo recalls that Lorenzo’s mother liked to lie down in a coffin. “She’d say, Let’s see what dying’s like, and then she’d start laughing.” Now Lorenzo climbs into a coffin and starts laughing; it feels as if he’s playing with his mother again after all these years. Throughout the book Lorenzo addresses his dead mother as “you.”
Lorenzo’s boyhood memories are of his beloved but usually absent mother returning sporadically with souvenirs from all over the world: “They were from every country, every corner on earth, my room, trip after trip, becoming the world map of your absence.” Her weekly phone calls and monthly visits tail off; Lorenzo goes for years with only a phone call at Christmas from his mother.
Journalists say one can write better about a new city after three days rather than three months. It’s true that observations are the sharpest after a very short time. Lorenzo is no exception: “All around was Bucharest, buildings of reinforced concrete crammed together along the boulevard, and a background noise I didn’t recognize, as though even the traffic spoke a language other than my own.” No wonder Bajani’s technique of presenting strong visual images with a minimum of moralizing works so well; all of Lorenzo’s impressions are fresh.