If You Kept a Record of Sins
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- €11.99
Publisher Description
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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Striking in its minimalism, this exceptionally poignant novella is a testament to what we can learn from our most painful experiences. It’s the story of Lorenzo, a young man who never recovered after his mother, Lula, abandoned him and his stepfather when he was a child. After Lula dies, Lorenzo travels to Romania to settle her affairs, forcing him to reflect on a lifetime of trauma and loss. Without a trace of sentimentality, author Andrea Bajani writes Lorenzo’s first-person narrative as a combination diary, travelogue, and heart-wrenching letter to his dead mother. With aching specificity, it describes Lorenzo’s thoughts as he discovers details about the life his mother lived without him, and also provides insights into Romania’s turbulent history. If you love the sad yet ultimately transcendent fiction of authors like Jonathan Safran Foer, this deeply felt journey through a family’s fractured past will hook you.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A young man traces his mother's footsteps toward her tragic end in Bajani's somber and gripping tale of abandonment and exploitation (after Every Promise). Lorenzo arrives in Bucharest to handle the affairs of his recently deceased mother, Lula, who abandoned him and his stepfather years earlier. Addressed to his mother, Lorenzo's narration interweaves the tale of his own broken home with revelations about his mother's demise and insights into decades of oppression under the Ceaușescu regime. At a factory in Bucharest, Lorenzo meets Lula's former lover, Anselmi, with whom Lula had partnered on a business venture involving a gimmicky weight-loss device. In flashbacks, the reader learns Lula was shunned by her parents, an early betrayal that seems to foretell her later choices. Later, when an adulterous affair results in Lorenzo's birth, the biological father vanishes. "And so he signed his last name and left it there," Lorenzo says of that man, "like a lizard leaves its tail and scuttles off somewhere to grow it back." Here and 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.
