If You Kept a Record of Sins - Archipelago Books

Book Description

A sly, prismatic novel that Jhumpa Lahiri says “accumulates with the quiet urgency of a snowstorm,” by Andrea Bajani, whom Michael Cunningham calls “a true original.” If You Kept a Record of Sins 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 mysterious, mythical invention. 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.

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

Lorenzo travels to Bucharest to bury his dead mother. While there, he discovers that the trauma of their separation has lasted his entire life. The incredible emotion achieved here can only be described as magical, emanating from the novel’s sober, reserved tone; from its resigned voice that neither judges nor condemns; from its nostalgic bursts of memory of a childhood both happy and sad. 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

One of Italy’s greatest writers, here in a translation that captures the ruminative beauty of Bajani’s words. 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

Writing such as this makes me happy again, and it gives me comfort, because it is itself a form of resistance.

— Antonio Tabucchi

His prose is possessed of the simple, cadenced rhythm I associate with fairy tales, as is a certain, subtle sense of the fantastic in his imagery, though the story he’s telling is very much for adults, and takes place in an all-too-real world. Bajani’s work is suffused with a certain innocence that not only belies but intensifies the pain and anomie of which he writes. There’s love, there’s wonder, as well. There is, in short, much of what makes life worth writing about.

— Michael Cunningham on Un bene al mondo

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

One of the Italian authors whose work I follow closely. His writing is ambitious and has an undeniable literary energy.

— Enrique Vila-Matas

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

— Fernando Hernández Urías, Chilango

Bajani is confirmed as a keen and sensitive traveler, one of the best Italian writers of the moment.

— Francis M. Cataluccio, Il Sole 24 Ore

Without a doubt one of the most powerful voices from the generation of authors born in the 1970s.

— Guadalupe Nettel, Revista UNAM