If You Kept a Record of Sins

by Andrea Bajani, Elizabeth Harris (Translator), Edmund White (Afterword)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781939810960
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	03/23/2021
Pages:	200
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 6.40(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Andrea Bajani is an Italian novelist, journalist, and poet whose work has been translated into many languages. His novel, Ogni promessa (Every Promise), won the oldest and most prestigious Italian literary award, the Bagutta Prize. His collection of short stories, La vita non è in ordine alfabetico, won the Settembrini Prize in 2014. Se consideri le colpe (If You Kept a Record of Sins) won the Super Mondello Prize, the Brancati Prize, the Recanati Prize, and the Lo Straniero Prize. He teaches at Rice University in the Department of Classical and European studies. ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR: Elizabeth Harris's translations from Italian include Mario Rigoni Stern's Giacomo's Seasons, Giulio Mozzi's This Is the Garden, and Antonio Tabucchi's Tristano Dies, For Isabel: A Mandala, and Stories with Pictures. Her prizes include a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant, an NEA Translation Fellowship, The Italian Prose in Translation Award, and the National Translation Award for Prose.

Read an Excerpt

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.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"One measure of a novel's impact and even of its significance might be how its premise, its characters, its locations and spectacle remain in one's mind after time has passed. Andrea Bajani's truly exceptional novel — eccentric and impassioned, but also frequently oblique, startling and provocative, visits and revisits me, always leaving me slightly shaken, but also mindful of why novels are all the more an essential form in our conduct of life, and in our efforts to see life clearly. If You Kept a Record of Sins is one of those very strange and compelling novels that never relents in its vision, and forcefully insists, as one its gifts, that the reader be a part of that vision. It's remarkable." — Richard Ford
 
"When I read Se consideri le colpe I was deeply impressed: I found it at once masterful and very touching." — Emmanuel Carrère

"Andrea Bajani's haunting portrait of a mother-son relationship accumulates with the quiet urgency of a snowstorm. The impact is shattering, pure. With themes of distance and dislocation at its heart, this celebrated novel by one of Italy's most talented young writers now resonates in English thanks to Elizabeth Harris' limpid translation." —Jhumpa Lahiri

"A beautiful, original, and deeply moving work of art. It would be a gift at any time in history and is all the more so now, as the world moves through one of its darker periods." — Michael Cunningham

"If You Kept a Record of Sins is written with grace and calm control. It deals with loss, especially the loss of a mother, with a chiseled sense of truth. Each image and each moment are captured with exquisite emotional accuracy. The connection between the past and the present is dramatized with skill. The protagonist is, like the author himself, someone on whom nothing is lost." — Colm Tóibín

"One of Italy's greatest writers . . . An elegy, a requiem, a reckoning, a broken portrait of an absent mother, If You Kept a Record of Sins is a jewel of a book. You will hold it to your heart when you are done." — Andrew Sean Greer, winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Less

"Every search is a search for oneself. In Andrea Bajani's novel, the search for the lost mother reveals not only the true protagonist of the story, but a scathing portrait of Western culture and its greed and selfish lust for power. Bajani has written a wise, lyrical, beautifully stylized book that clings for long in the reader's memory. I couldn't put it down." —Alberto Manguel

"Borgesian brevity, a lesson in intensity. A book of rare beauty." —Enrique Vila-Matas

"Writing such as this makes me happy again, and it gives me comfort, because it is itself a form of resistance." —Antonio Tabucchi
 
 "What do you say to the dead, especially if the one who died is the one who bore you? This is the question Andrea Bajani wrestles with in this beautifully rendered letter from a son to his estranged mother. The story is woven together around a handful of central mysteries: who was this person, where did she go, what was left unsaid? The way is marked by a handful of enigmatic images: an egg you can climb inside, a palace you can see from the moon, a river you cross to take a photograph on the far bank, a photograph you will leave for your son, which will tell him all he needs to know." — Nick Flynn

"A short, stoic novel, of a realism reaching toward hallucination and a squalor leading to despair, a love letter and a requiem for an absent mother—Andrea Bajani's If You Kept a Record of Sins is an unforgettable book. Together with the author, we wait, enthralled, for the break of dawn, when all the lights will go out." —Mircea Cărtărescu

 "Part of a brilliant new generation of Italian writers that includes names like Paolo Giordano, Elena Ferrante, and Mirko Sabatino." — Fernando Hernández Urías

 "Bajani is confirmed as a keen and sensitive traveler, one of the best Italian writers of the moment." — Francis M. Cataluccio

Editorial Reviews

"A slim, astonishing book . . . Bajani etches an impressionistic portrait of a young man — like the foreign city outside his window — trapped in a shadow land between past and present." — Anderson Tepper, The New York Times

"[Bajani's] calm, elegant prose stands on its own, defying commentary. Bajani understands how the wounded often remain wounded, cut off from others and themselves. Such is the tragedy of the human story, which is somehow made less tragic by his remarkable ability to illuminate it for us." — Elaine Margolin, Los Angeles Review of Books

"After years of gradually widening distance between them, a man learns some truths about his absent mother when he travels abroad to bury her and settle her business affairs...Bajani’s spare prose delivers startling imagery...as well as quiet reflection as Lorenzo addresses the departed Lula as he moves around her chosen home away from home....Bajani’s lovely, quiet novel lives at the intersection of love and misunderstanding." — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

". . . Throughout, family trauma parallels the collective trauma of an oppressed people, with no solace in the past and no real agency in the future. Bajani brings the full weight of his qualities as a poet, journalist, and professor of European Studies to bear, revealing in finely wrought prose the lasting scars of heartbreak on his characters and the body politic. This is deeply affecting." — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"When a child is slowly abandoned by a parent, who does he or she grow up to become? Bajani answers the novel’s central question by skipping back and forth in time, weaving together scenes that show us, with devastating clarity, the unraveling of a relationship between a mother and her son, a tapestry of loss woven with quiet power and flawless artistry." – Naheed Patel, Public Books

"Beautifully written, If You Kept a Record of Sins reverberates profoundly with the loneliness of its characters — haunting in the voice of Lorenzo, reaching out to a mother who is no longer — and never really was — there." — M. A. Orthofer, Complete Review

"Subtle and searing, an Italian man called Lorenzo visits the country to attend the funeral of his long-absent mother...The adept, patient style of the novel leaves lots of room for the reader to make their own appraisal of the choices of his mother, Lula, and their impact on the life of the child Lorenzo was and the adult he is now." — Declan O'Driscoll, Irish Times

"How are we remembered? Where do blame and grief meet? . . . Rather than judgement, Bajani’s method is one of lyrical indirection. From resentment to alienation, tenderness to anger, and indifference to joy, Lorenzo’s feelings are never stated outright, instead emerging sideways – from the background noise he doesn’t recognise . . . Bajani’s irresistibly spare narrative tracks our attempts to make sense of and judge one another." — Jessica Payn, the Arts Desk

"Elizabeth Harris has done incredible work in her translation, which in its continually sharp, clipped language reflects the stripped-down nature of the original. These qualities are not only relevant on a linguistic or stylistic level, but also in terms of the novel’s central characters, the hollowed-out voice of Lorenzo, a man who never describes his own emotions, as if he too wanted to be as empty as that infamous egg, an inheritance from his mother." — Brian Robert Moore, Reading in Translation

"This is a story of abandonment that lets fall revelations in delicate, tight prose the way a child might drop pennies into a creek. The ripples are deeply felt." — Bibi Deitz, Coveteur

"This is a novel of alienation – and a great one. Bajani is a master of emotional restraint and stylistic economy, his sparse Italian prose (admirably rendered, in equally sparse English, by Elizabeth Harris) amplifying the novel’s sense of estrangement . . . a book of haunting, unsettling beauty." — Costica Bradatan, the TLS

"The magic of this story lies entirely in the telling—in the delicate balancing of select, sharply depicted images within a spare, measured narrative that simmers with barely restrained emotional tension . . . Reading fiction this well-crafted is a joy." —Joseph Schrieber, Rough Ghosts


"If You Kept a Record of Sins by Andrea Bajani, translated from the Italian by Elizabeth Harris, is about a man following in the footsteps of a ghost. He’s traveled to Bucharest to bury and settle the affairs of his estranged mother, who left the family over a period of years to make a life around her business in Romania. Holding up his mother’s gradual separation beside the present, Bajani shows that grief is not a thing you move past but move through, and Harris’s translation captures the tenderness and melancholy of the journey."– Adam Levy, Transit Books

From the Publisher

★ 2020-11-27
After years of gradually widening distance between them, a man learns some truths about his absent mother when he travels abroad to bury her and settle her business affairs.

Lula, the enigmatic and estranged daughter of a conventional and well-to-do Italian family, fled Italy for Romania and the opportunity to grow a business in the “Wild West” atmosphere of the post-Ceaușescu years. Left behind with a “Dad” who was not his father—and who is also part of Lula’s collateral damage—Lula’s young son, Lorenzo, grows up with his memories of a loving and playful mother and a growing resignation to her absence. A short (and often surreal) trip to Bucharest to attend Lula’s funeral and unravel aspects of her personal and business affairs provides Lorenzo, as a young man, with subtle clues about the realities of his mother’s life in a country struggling to move forward after years of repression. Bajani’s spare prose delivers startling imagery—Lula’s business manufactures and sells a weight-loss machine that resembles a giant egg, and one of her confederates runs a business which is, essentially, a coffin farm—as well as quiet reflection as Lorenzo addresses the departed Lula as he moves around her chosen home away from home. Lorenzo finds evidence of himself along the trail of Lula’s shattered relationships and works to answer questions about their broken bond through a lens of adult, rather than childlike, understanding. Psalm 130, which lends the novel its title and is awkwardly read at Lula’s funeral, asks “If you kept a record of sins, oh Lord, who could stand before you?” a reminder that there is usually enough fault to go around.

Bajani’s lovely, quiet novel lives at the intersection of love and misunderstanding.

Kirkus Reviews